Craving a unique dining experience? Try food theatre

Sri Vamsi during a performance of Come Eat With Me.
Sri Vamsi during a performance of Come Eat With Me.

Summary

From communal potlucks to immersive dining experiences, these performances invite reflection on societal issues through the lens of food

Theatre practitioners in India are using food in their performances to challenge existing oppressive structural injustices, such as casteism and patriarchy. In these food theatre pieces, playwrights weave together personal narratives and political messaging interspersed or bookended with a shared communal meal. These include performances such as Come Eat With Me, Garam Roti and New India Lodge. A unifying theme is they break the fourth wall and invite members of the audience to share their lived experiences. Each performance is unique as the audience brings their own flavour and perspective to the show.

Come Eat With Me

In Come Eat With Me award-winning Bengaluru-based Dalit theatre artist Sri Vamsi Matta explores the relationship between caste and food over a shared meal. In this 110-minute performance piece, Vamsi with his rich, deep baritone narrates oral histories and personal anecdotes about the food he grew up eating, along with academic writing about caste.

Explaining this approach, he says, “The mainstream discussion about Dalit food is largely about bodies brutalised by pain and hunger. In Sanskrit, the word Dalit translates to broken people. Through my performances, I want to bridge solidarities and bring wholeness. I want to share how Dalit food can also be about joy and the everyday victories in the face of injustice."

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The performance concludes with a communal potluck featuring Vamsi’s mother’s comforting chicken curry as the centerpiece while audience members share their own experiences about casteism and gender discrimination in relation to cuisine.

Garam Roti

Similarly, in the multilingual solo performance Garam Roti, Durga Venkatesan explores the complexities of being a woman. Venkatesan, who divides her time between Delhi and Bengaluru, essays two roles. She takes turns playing herself and her alter ego Lakshmi, a sassy and sentient audio player. The solo performance, which oscillates between funny and serious, touches topics such as how women’s contribution in the kitchen is overlooked in the calculation of the country’s GDP.

Durga Venkatesan essaying two roles in Garam Roti.
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Durga Venkatesan essaying two roles in Garam Roti.

The play culminates with a sound installation of recordings of people from different socio-economic strata as they relay their gendered relationship with cooking, while Venkatesan goes through the repetitive and arduous task of rolling rotis.

On the way out, she encourages audience members to help themselves to a garam roti served with accompaniments of pickle, sugar and ghee just like her grandmother did. There is also an experiential corner for audience members to take turns rolling out rotis, while discussing their experiences of gender discrimination.

New India Lodge

New India Lodge is an immersive theatrical dining experience that takes place in a restored heritage building which acts as a guest house for travellers in a newly post-independent India. The play has several soliloquies interspersed with a five-course meal of regional specialities spanning across India that sets the stage for social commentary.

After a brief introduction, the play starts with a feud between a bickering Bohri businessman and his Hindu partner from Surat squabbling about the relationship between religious rules and food. Subsequently, the audience is introduced to the jolly Malayali Molly who gently unwraps layers of patriarchal conditioning and antiquated gender roles, along with a pothichoru (a Kerala-style meal wrapped in a banana leaf) on a grand dining table. It is the main course that's served to the attendees. The play wraps up with an important social message about the need for social reform and a vision for a new India. Different courses—including an appetiser of Gujarati surti locho (a chaat with steamed gram flour and chutneys) and dessert of Punjabi shagna da kheer—are served to the audience between the five acts as the play progresses.

The character of Malayali Molly with a newspaper in New India Lodge.
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The character of Malayali Molly with a newspaper in New India Lodge.

New India Lodge, produced by the Mumbai and Bengaluru-based paChaak Productions, has been written by famed filmmaker Shubhra Chatterji and directed by Divya Rani. The director has noticed that several people, especially older audience members, turn teary eye towards the end.

This is not uncommon. I teared up during Vamsi’s play, Come Eat With Me. After Garam Roti, I spoke to a fellow audience member who shed a tear during the performance. She was a clinical therapist who shared how hearing stories of women being oppressed in the kitchen acted as a salve for her own healing from gender discrimination.

To make the performances inclusive, Venkatesan offers discounted prices for students. On the other hand, Vamsi consciously chooses spaces, like a friend’s home or public arts spots, accessible to people of all castes and class. While there’s food being served on the table, it also leaves the viewer with much needed food for thought.

The artists are on Instagram; to stay updated on their next shows follow @srivamsimatta,@duggie.v and @pachaak_ed.

Deepthi Bavirisetty is a marketer and a keen watcher of food and culture trends in Bengaluru.

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