Transformative Taste-Encounters: Contemplations on life, death and relational bodies at the (culinary) artist’s table

This article considers the potential and significance of taste as a transformative part of the theatrical and culinary experience. The cross-pollination between food and performance in restaurants and contemporary theatre is explored through an analysis of Reckless Sleepers’ The Last Supper, Leo Burtin’s The Midnight Soup and restaurateur and chef, Simon Rogan’s ‘Tasting Menu’ served in his Michelin-starred restaurant L’Enclume. Drawing on Michel Serres’ philosophy of taste (2008) and theories of the body and eating from Elspeth Probyn (2000), I examine how the performances of taste in these three dining events were constructed as relational encounters that invited intimate and active engagement with food and bodies. I offer a reading of taste in these instances as both cathartic and anxiety inducing, and consider the different ways that the taste experiences afforded contemplation on the relationship between life, death and eating. I identify the culinary aesthetic strategies of distaste, agency, catachresis and synaesthesia that were in play across the theatrical and culinary-performative contexts discussed. I argue that these strategies can contribute to a discourse of a beyond of taste by revealing the interconnectedness of taste, and enabling the perceived nebulousness and seeming impossibility of taste to become manifest in new ways.