CITY Issue 52

Supper Time Ever spoon-fed a complete stranger or shared a bowl of soup with a talking head? You will at a performance of artist-cum-chef Richard Gough’s Last Supper. By Katelyn Belyus THE ROOM IS DARK, WITH A SPOTLIGHT TRAINED on a well-dressed table swathed in creamy linens and delicate silver. The air is heavy with expectation. People mill about as if at a dinner party, but this party has a twist: The hostess greets guests not by the entranceway but from the table, where her dress melts into the linens. Here, she is no longer a woman, but rather a tree of cotton and silk growing from the table, legs rooted. Her voice is warm. As she asks guests to enjoy the evening, waiters busily remove the covers from the dishes to reveal … a cluster of talking heads. “They were jolly, they told jokes, and it wasn’t macabre,” insists Richard Gough, the man behind all this—at first glance—madness. “We had a trio of soup with the talking heads, which sort of broke the ice.” Coming from Gough, a man intent on twisting perceptions and shattering the rules of etiquette, the chatty heads seem quite tame. For 30 years, Gough has dedicated himself to the full spectrum of performance art. The artistic director of the Centre for Performance Research and a professor at the University of Wales, he is witty, arresting, and fiercely passionate: “I try to create poetry on the stage and in people’s lives so they look at the unfamiliar to become familiar.” And as those joke-telling heads-on-a-platter might suggest, Gough’s work thrives when he mashes food with performance and asks the audience to distinguish between the two. But don’t be fooled—this is not your grandma’s dinner theater. “Someone once told me they distrusted food that was served in the theater,” he tells me. “I said, that’s good, because I distrust theater that’s served in a restaurant.” No matter in which city or on which continent Gough’s Last Supper is performed, there’s a communal sharing of each audience member’s culture of dining and theater. “Cooking, whether through fire, flame, or knife, is the transformation of raw material, food, into something that is edible and delightful,” he explains. “There’s a connection between what goes on in the kitchen and what goes on in the theater studio. The kitchen interests me more than the restaurant; the rehearsal studio more so than the theater.” As he explores the notion of one’s “final meal,” Gough guides his audience on a theatrical journey akin to the Apostles’ experience with Christ. This excursion aims to strike a revelation with the audience, one that depends on the audience’s empathy for the circumstances, people, and mannerisms that surround a last supper. Like all good journeys, the destination is not nearly as important as the journey itself. While a group of a hundred attending Last Supper wait to dine, cell phones begin to frantically ring. A young diner may receive the text of her favorite line from Hymn 92: “For the love which from our birth over and around us lies.” She has a vague memory of scribbling that line when prompted by a form she filled out before entering the room. What was a memory is now contextualized, real. Later in the evening, she may be asked to spoon-feed the businessman standing to her right. This is all Gough’s orchestration. “That’s the sort of intimacy that I’m talking about,” he says. “That’s a very touching moment, to feed someone by the spoon.” In this way, the audience traverses unfamiliar terrain ripe with mystery, glamour, food, and frenzy, accessing it through the familiar Christian icon, and using it to reevaluate a world where both dining and religion have become cultural constructs. Yet the Last Supper pieces resonate because the audience already has a connection with food and dining. Gough can do weird, unexpected things because he grounds them in familiarity, and they’re willing to trust him. “It’s almost like a fairground ride that you go in on your own, and you experience all these sights, smells, and tastes.” In the same performance, half of the audience visited an on-stage bar, while the other half went to a nursery. The nursery had comforting smells of milk and baby oil, but, “something very disturbing was happening: milk was being spilt and the floor was trembling.” Pairing familiar things in an unfamiliar setting, he asks the audience to confront the divide between the two. Gough’s body of work stretches far beyond that of food and performance. He has a strong background in photography and Object Theater. He is planning a series of projects in Chicago called Still Lives, inspired by painting. “What I’m thinking is a project where actors or performers would construct a still life and then animate it.” He has been invited to Maine early next year to work on a performance banquet. As for his Last Suppers, they are merely the beginning. “I actually think issues to do with food and identity are going to be a really big subject in the next 10 to 15 years. So many cultures are defined by what they eat. There’s much more that has yet to be really discovered about the politics of food.” A venue in Shanghai for Last Supper is currently on hold; he’s also keen on North Africa and Australia. “I would love to do a solo show that is halfway between a lecture and an anti-celebrity chef, where things go wrong, things get burned, and a Richard Gough during lesson will be learned. It would be a sort of spoof.” a performance of his Sounds like a talking head worth listening to. Last Supper. CITY 55

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CITY Issue 52 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Fit The Amused Bouche Fast Food Must Haves Hot Wheels Idol Handlers Design Public Affairs Pluck of the Draw Novel Ideas Monster's Belle Not Guilty The Understudies The Hunger Elastique Where to Buy It Socials Icon

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