Eating Miss Julie: A Tasteful Account of Degustation and Performance

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1 Scopus citations

Abstract

In an accounting of the role of taste in performance, I analyze the impact of multiple aspects of taste within the development of a series of edible performances of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Buchner’s Woyzeck, culminating in an edible mashup of the two theatrical texts as part of the Prague Quadrennial Makers event (PQ Makers) in June 2015. I first pursue an account of the role of sensory, aesthetic, critical and economic dimensions of taste in a genealogy of these three edible performances. I chart our recipes’ development, beginning with an initial translation from intelligible to sensible material (text into recipe into edible object), through artistic and critical expressions and performances of taste (recipe into bodies, performances, and critiques), into scholarly and economic models of taste and connoisseurship (recipe as artifact of scholarly labor and evidence of aesthetic judgment) and finally into another mode of public consumption (within the convivial and commensal frame of PQ Makers itself). Against and alongside this accounting of and for the roles of taste within our own performance, I contrast this food-based performance with several additional approaches to the staging of taste within the twenty-four events of PQ Makers. Along the way I highlight the ways in which PQ Makers exposed tensions between competing and overlapping concepts of taste as discernment, taste as distinction, taste as presence and taste as performative act.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)35-43
Number of pages9
JournalPerformance Research
Volume22
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 3 2017

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Visual Arts and Performing Arts

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