'Reflection on Digestion: A Performance Dinner' is a participatory performance in the form of a dinner and lecture, which explores the science, processes and image of digestion through food and language.
The event, on the feast day of St. Erasmus, the patron saint of guts, consists of six chapters, four of which are gastronomic dishes prepared from offal originating in the digestive system, and are served alongside the reading/presentation of a text collaged from a variety of sources on the subject of the specific organs of digestion, the process of digestion itself, and embodied knowledge. The event explores our 'visceral knowledge', which as David Hillman describes in Shakespeare's Entrails, is 'knowledge experienced in as well as knowledge of the interior of the body.'
The event embodies an experiential approach to the transmission of information by placing the participant diners and particularly their senses and their interior body at the centre of the creation of meaning and understanding. By reflecting on the direct experience of eating alongside the aural presentation of historical and contemporary narratives of digestion, participants and host, literally and metaphorically ruminate on the processes of ingestion, digestion, and subjectivity, and on embodied ways of knowing.
The event took place on Sunday 2 June 2013, from 7pm until 10pm, and was produced by Spork as part of the Spork Food Monthly.
