ABSTRACT
ON OCCASIONS SPANNING more than a decade in Adelaide, Brighton, Bristol, Canberra, Cardiff, Ljubljana, London, Nottingham, Salisbury, Sâo Paulo, Sydney, Utrecht and Wellington (NZ) audiences have watched a white, middle-aged, middle-class English woman – born in the south of England to a Protestant family and now living in North London – demonstrate a series of a dozen actions that take place in her own home. ‘They responded to it as a kind of extraordinary cultural event. But, what seems to happen in these shows is that there is something about them which touches people’ (personal communication, 26 November 1999). The hub of the action is Baker’s kitchen, and she makes every effort to evoke its particularities within the space she has been allocated for her performance: be this a small marquee (Cardiff), or a show home on a new housing development (Canberra), or a chic celebrity kitchen (Sydney). As a globetrotting artist, Baker takes ‘her indoors’ with her to a diversity of other places, remaining tied to the metaphorical kitchen sink with an elastic binding of anecdotes, photographs, mugs and spatulas. She sources these as a form of gently ironic seduction that operates on the level of her willingness to expose her experience in all its domestic detail. In each place Baker performs, her strategy is to create a temporary and powerfully unstable transformation through the energies of a fundamentally theatrical discourse: conscious of its own conventions and potentialities, celebrating the active presence of its audience, and accessing the
heightened potential of blurring the borders between performance, theatricality and autobiography. Baker points out that her co-director, Polona Baloh Brown (Pol), is Slovene and that this ‘adds a great deal in that she has a more objective view of British culture (laughter)’ and so ‘we can expand on that’ in making the work and translating it for its various audiences. One of the issues Baker and Brown have discussed at length is:
The Protestant ethic behind British culture, the sort of control and meanness, almost, of the lack of delight or expressiveness in enjoying things. Yes, the tightness of it all. That’s the one thing we’ve observed a great deal. She particularly harps on about the eccentricity, which bugs me [laughter]. I like to think I’m deeply normal.
