ABSTRACT
Tamar Raban is an Israeli performance creator, whose Dinner Dress-Tales about Dora forms the second part of her autobiographical performance trilogy. The food in Dinner Dress and its consumption is not a symbolic or ritualized accessory, but the very matter of the theatrical event, conveying it's phenomenological, and political imports. The author's reading of the singular performance theatre piece is concerned with two complementary aspects of it: first, the work's semioticity. Second, it looks into Raban's relationship with 'Dora', her mother, and the way this is communicated and shared through food, the performance of dining, and anecdotal recollections in the third person. The main act is that of Raban feeding the spectators with her self-revelatory, autobiographical anecdotes regarding 'Dora'. At the end of the work Raban retreats back through the hole to the intimate space under the dress/table from which she had emerged earlier.
