Richard Gough’s residency at UW will
in some ways act as an extension of
that consuming passion. During the fall semester, Gough will teach two Interdisciplinary Studies in the Arts courses—one seminar and one workshop—both of which are cross-listed with Art and Theatre & Drama. The seminar course, titled “Performance, Food, and Cookery,” will explore the myriad of performative facets of food production, consumption, and rituals. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains in “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium,”

“Food, and all that is associated with it, is already larger than life. It is already charged with meaning and affect. It is already performative and theatrical. An art of the concrete, food, like performance, is alive, fugitive and sensory.”

Because of the culturally loaded, interdisciplinary and multisensory nature of the topic, the course will involve hands-on experiences such as site-specific research and food-event participation (and perhaps even a field trip to the Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum) in conjunction with traditional lectures, class discussions, presentations and films. Students will examine topics ranging from food as a model for theatre to table manners and cookery books, all while developing their own research projects.

In addition to his “Performance, Food and Cookery” seminar, Gough will be instructing the interdisciplinary “Workshop On Performance.” In this studio class, students will have the opportunity to learn the experimental techniques for “devising” performances that Gough and his colleagues have been developing over the last 20+ years. This course will move away from the traditional idea of performance beginning with a playwright’s script and will instead encourage the performers themselves to create their own solo and ensemble works. As an interdisciplinary course, workshop exercises will incorporate a number of arts disciplines, with particular inspiration drawn from the relationship between photography and the performer. According to Gough,

“I particularly wish to focus this work on the theme of Performance and Photography. I have been developing a programme of work, which begins from Richard Avendon’s notion that all portraiture is performance and works with photographs as texts and as proposals for action, working very much on issues to do with time, memory and reconstruction.”

Students in both of these courses will have the opportunity to generate material for and perform in The Last Supper #4—the latest installment of Gough’s Last Supper series—a “food performance or edible installation” which will be specially devised with the participating UW students. Public performances will run November 19-22 and will feature “timed entries” in which small audience groups receive individual tours through an experiential performance space.

For more information, call the Arts Institute at 608.263.4086.

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