ABSTRACT
While this is not the space for a discussion of the ascription of the terminology ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ in the contexts of painting and performance, there is a parallel to be drawn here, in acknowledging the connection between the traditional nude in painting as a representation of the (female) body that succeeds in fixing that body’s boundaries, thus containing its potential obscenity (see, for example, Lynda Nead’s 1992 discussion of this point in The Female Nude) and the equally prevalent tradition of the ‘still life’ – the very title of which suggests capture through suspended animation and which, by convention, tends to include fruit, vegetables and game. Once staged, containment is difficult. The living, moving, naked body on stage provokes a response which draws attention to the propensity of the spectator to read the sign-system as significant and inclusive. The gaze can be directed/contained only so far – both in terms of the practitioner and the spectator, who attempts perhaps to ‘see’ in the context of the assumption of an ‘expected response’, but is drawn irresistibly into transgression and possibly even puerility. Similarly, staged food cannot masquerade as the ‘ideal’ object of the still life. Rather, like the naked body, it provokes a response that, in the first instance, is uncontrolled/ uncontrollable because the food is both real and performed, echoing Barthes’s notion of the ultra-incarnate actor (1954: 27-8). It is, to use Rowell’s term, inaccessible only because the audience choose to respect the conventions of the theatre space, and, even then, the access point is shifted through potential seepage, as
mentioned above. This notion of seepage characterises the abject state of the body, as described in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), and it is the liminal capability of food as a key generator of abjection that has resulted in its frequent annexation within the work of performance artists seeking to make the (orificial) body explicit, to use a term attributable to Rebecca Schneider (1997). While this essay will mention Bobby Baker and Karen Finley, as subjects of the most ‘foodie’ performance analysis to date (Epstein, 1996; Baldwyn, 1996), its focus is upon the visibility and incarnation of food itself, rather than its function as a tool in foregrounding stage bodies that ‘will not hesitate to come up close, close enough to be in danger of life’ (Cixous, 1995: 134). Food’s own life-cycle, from freshness to decay, imbues it with a unique energy. The Poohvian struggle for words might, in this context, be related to the unspeakable potentialities of food. This is expressed vividly in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Edible Woman, whose central character finds herself at the mercy of her own body, becoming obsessed with the imagined biology of an ever-increasing array of foods. She searches desperately for items she feels able to stomach, as rice pudding is transformed by her eyes into a collection of small ‘cocoons with miniature living creatures inside’ (1969: 203), while sponge cake ‘felt spongy and cellular against her tongue, like the bursting of a thousand tiny lungs’ (ibid.: 207). In Food, the Body and the Self, Deborah Lupton describes the manner in which food ‘intrudes into the “clean” purity of rational thought because of its organic nature’ (1996: 3). In drama, dining scenes proliferate, bringing communities of characters together in convincing opportunities for social interchange (and their almost inevitable disruption). As a ritualised event, the meal-time is a significant resource for the theatremaker. However, feeding scenes are notable for their sparsity. A wariness of food’s disruptive potential has meant that it has been ‘disappeared’ through containment, tokenism, even banishment. In Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, a production note asserts that the preparation and cooking of the array of dishes are mimed, indeed ‘it must be understood that at no point is food ever used’ as ‘to cook and serve the food is of course just not practical’ (1960: 10). Marcy Epstein’s recent article ‘Consuming Performances: Eating Acts and Feminist Embodiment’ considers the ways in which a number of American women performance artists have reclaimed ‘something forbidden to women onstage: something to eat’ (1996: 20). Clearly women do have a different relationship with food in Western culture, and this is one which is imposed upon them, in direct relation to their ascription as most abject, most dangerous and thus most in need of containment. Indeed, as far as I am aware, all significant manifestations of food in
performance art have been created by women. However, I am not aware of a theatre in which the women are forbidden something to eat, while the men indulge themselves. When this kind of gorging is permitted within stage representation, it is contained via careful contextualisation, its abject nature harnessed to communicate meaning. And, though perhaps to different extents, and certainly in respect of socio-historical gender to specific expectations, both sexes are implicated. This is evident in the examples given below. Beyond tea-sipping, illusory nibbling and the chasing of cold peas around a plate to make the dining scene more ‘realistic’, food and its consumption on stage tend to designate a lapse in upright citizenship, an exposé of the deadly sin of gluttony. It is Stanley bringing home his ‘red-stained package from the butchers’ that Tennessee Williams chooses to give his audience its first impression of the character in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947: 4); and later in the play, at Blanche’s birthday supper, Stanley ignores the social chit-chat of the party, interested only in the food. After he ‘reaches way over the table to spear his fork in the remaining pork chop which he eats with his fingers’ Stella chides: ‘Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a pig of himself to think of anything else’ before telling him to go and wash his ‘disgustingly greasy’ face and hands (Williams, 1947: 65). The subversive potential of food is also packaged carefully and used under controlled conditions in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Oscar Wilde serves up afternoon tea in excess of social propriety as a device to physicalise the squabbles between Cecily and Gwendolyn, by making the gifts of food and drink unpalatable to the ‘ladylike’ sensibilities of the guest. Cecily brutalises the event she is hosting by sheer quantity, amassing sweetness in order to induce sickness:
Gwendolyn: You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.
