- Venue
- Battersea Arts Centre (BAC)
- Location
Shown as part of Brunel University's MA Contemporary Performance Making Showcase Festival
Like millions of women across the UK, Ellen Duckenfield has an unhealthy obsession with food. However, her obsession does not stem from a modern concern with organic produce, weight gain or calorie counting. Duckenfield realises that food – and eating- is one of the things every human needs to do everyday (the other being sleep). Food is the ever-present witness to the drama of our lives and is therefore a perfectly ripe subject for a piece of performance.
In The Ideal Recipe Duckenfield follows a specially made instructional recipe booklet, preparing real ingredients in her makeshift on-stage kitchen whilst telling autobiographical tales through food: how food has moved throughout the defining moments of her life, acting as the familiar backdrop to family gatherings, political protests, personal disasters and deaths. Duckenfield's stories of her own life-in-food serve as clear reminder that the preparation and consumption of this seemingly benign substance is more than a necessary daily duty or domestic act: On page two, Duckenfield mirthfully squeezes lemons for ‘Lemon Drizzle Cake' whilst recounting a bitter story of sibling rivalry. Its not clear whether the sister ate the cake, and if so survived. On page 8, Duckenfield proclaims herself ‘Queen of Dips', confessing she never fails to impress at parties with her home made Guacamole. In short, food in The Ideal Recipe acts variously, both politically and psychologically, as retreat, reminder, gift, fashion statement, revenge and even competition. It follows that each one of us has a story to tell both with and through food and The Ideal Recipe prompts us to recall these childhood vegetable aversions or adult dinner party traumas.
There is a disturbing objectification of the food that Duckenfield shares the stage with. For example, each carrot is lovingly chopped in a diagonal twenty first century style, not, you must believe, in a passé seventies straight chop. Then later on, the artist illustrates her complex extended family with vegetables and then proceeds to callously chop the items, including the red onion – her step sister – roughly in half. Something inside of all of us tightens at this point: Duckenfield can and will do harm to the food she charmingly personifies, as such it is all the more disturbing to see the TV monitor close ups of her chopping, slicing and boiling the items in question.
Every so often Duckenfield steps out of the kitchen to enact structural and narrative asides, recalling the life of her alter ego – a glamorous and would be deadly assassin- into a small voice recorder. These interior monologues are important, they represent the artist's urge to escape her womanly domestic food-hell, a desire many can and will sympathise with. But moreover, in contrast to the kitchen scenes, the dialogue in these soliloquys appears raw, un-rehearsed and spontaneous. Duckenfield herself appears surprised with what unfolds in her imagined adventures. The audience get the sense that she is genuinely yearning and practising for another life, her fantasies unravelling before both her, and our, eyes.
The performance of The Ideal Recipe and its on stage set up clearly mimes the contemporary trend for on-screen cooking programmes such as Ready Steady Cook and Saturday Kitchen. In addition, the TV equipment on the counter top, the adjacent video camera and discarded cartons recall a rare behind-the-scenes look at what these messy TV studios might look like beyond the frame. It is also important to note that Duckenfield uses the domestic interior – particularly the kitchen – as site for the work. In doing so she references overtly feminist work of the 1970's in which women artists (in particular Martha Rosler with her ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen', 1975) made this typically ‘female' space political and deeply problematic.
However, the ultimate achievement of The Ideal Recipe is successfully transforming food into much more than simple nostalgia trigger. Duckenfield manages to perform food as physical or body-to-body memory; cooked and consumed as a loaded and tangible gift moving from one person to another, thus creating a network and community of its own. At the end of the performance the artist ensures the audience are complicit in this particular food gift economy. Leaving the stage she invites everyone to dine out on her wares, to eat the fruits of her labour. However, faced with Duckenfield's ‘gift' of food we are left, mid bite of Guacamole, wondering what, or who, is passing between us. What elements of Duckenfield's life, her family, have we consumed?
For more information on the artist Ellen Duckenfield see http://ellenduckenfield.com/
For more information Brunel University's showcase go to http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/sa/artnews
