🥓Savouring the Flavours

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Other Second Wave Digital Theatre > Savouring the Flavours

During the first lockdowns and home isolation orders in 2020, online shopping and delivery surged in popularity – particularly for food. Grocery stores created their own website and app online shops, and third-party delivery services (Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, Instacart) became critical services. This was viewed, at the time, as related to restaurant closures – the desire to have a nice meal was high even though the unique spatial experience was gone. Surprisingly, some theatre companies got in on the food delivery experience.

For some theatre makers, the transition from in-person performance to food delivery made sense. , started a home meal kit service (cheekily named Nordo’s Room Service) that included items to, essentially, create your own performance while you also prepared your food. ‘Alongside their “Christmas of the Corn” experience delivered to homes, the immersive holiday box includes a radio play and interactive elements that go along with it. Think: sugar cookie decorating, ornament making and gameboard playing’.

The Christmas seasons in 2020 and 2021 seemed to particularly inspire combinations of digital performance, food preparation, and community-building for theatre makers. Both Know Theatre in Cincinnati (US) and Creation Theatre (UK) released Christmas shows featuring streaming video and collectively enjoyed food. Andrew Hungerford described their digital production of Feast by Megan Gogerty, a re-telling of medieval classic Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel’s mother, a monster who eats humans.

It's intended to be performed at a banquet where the audience has just finished eating. ... She's throwing a dinner party, and we were going to do it in one of the big ale houses in Cincinnati. But, of course, that was no longer possible. So, Megan, who is a friend of the theatre, did some rewrites on it to turn it into a streaming specific show, where the character Agata commandeers your screen to connect with you, and we filmed it in the actor’s home because she had just moved into a disused church. … we did the thing where, if people ordered enough in advance, we would mail them something that they would open through the course of the show. … It was cookies. ... So, after they have eaten the cookies, later in the show, they're instructed to reach into the box and pull something else out. ... that allowed us to do some visual effects and things in post that were interesting. … like because her magic is overwhelming the broadcast stream, like the colours separate, or there’s static, or there's jitters.

While the streamed video performance itself fits into Cinematic and Remix Theatre forms, the show’s semi-interactive sensory experience requires the audience to participate in the feasting event with the performer – though she is pre-recorded, her power pulls the audience into the narrative and, as she consumes their attention, they consume her confectionary offering. The combination of senses is not required to watch the video, but it does enhance the magic of the story.

Michael Deacon described a reshaping of their A Christmas Carol to partner with a local high-end restaurant called Hawksmoor:

Because we were still in the pandemic, they were doing these things called ‘Hawksmoor at Home’. It was like a home cooking kit: you get all the ingredients to make this amazing meal at home. And because it was near on Christmas, we were providing an experience that was sort of an add-on to go with it. It was adapted from Gary Jones’s Christmas Carol, which I think was a big production we did back in maybe 2017 or 2018 – and he directed this digital version. It was like short little videos to accompany each course, or to be played in between each course of your meal. It was meant to be a nice treat rather than this whole hour of entertainment that you're going to sit in front of the computer and watch. … And it was delightful because Christmas Carol is divided into 5 staves, in sort of chapters. It was filmed in five little 8-to-10-min chunks, and you would be told when to play each of those little chunks that followed the gaps and the structuring of the original Charles Dickens.

The integration of cooking a holiday meal with short ‘staves’ of story – as noted, similar to the serialised publication of Dickens’ original writing – allows for a sense of community not only in the process of cooking, nor only in the process of watching, but in the collective experience of having a new holiday tradition based on prior traditions.