Author Archives: Abigail Dawson

Force Fed Till Sick

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The aim of ‘Feeder’ was to be a task based performance where 3 feeders would feed 3 gainers for a durational time of 2 hours. This is precisely what happened on Wednesday 11th December at 7:30pm – though I shall not forget to mention we were stopped at 1 hour 40 minutes for ethical reasons.

photo      (Staging of Performance. Taken by Abigail Dawson: 11.12.13)

Even though the outcome of the task was so unpredictable we all knew how much of a challenge it was going to be. What a challenge it was. The 3 gainers were fed calorific food such as cheesy pasta, cake, chicken korma and lasagne. It took approximately 1 hour until the first gainer vomited – me. From a gainer’s point of view, the task appeared relatively easy at the beginning for the first 20 minutes. The food was fairly warm and enjoyable, no struggle eating the forkfuls just yet. All the different foods were being mixed, and at first this seemed like a brilliant idea as each food was a different taste and you weren’t going to get bored of it. Then as time went on those foods were being mixed inside the stomach, and with the mix of acidic orange juice and full fat Pepsi, the stomach started to churn and consequently there was a battle with our bodies to keep that food inside the stomach. It was no longer an easy task, and the food no longer appeared appetising to us. The forks filled with food would stay in front of our 3 faces until we were able to eat it. Because the forks were kept in front of us, there was a feeling of pressure and need to eat, like we had to finish everything we were given, something that I was taught when younger otherwise I was not allowed to leave the table. There was complete silence other than the sound of us eating and the noise of the feeders clattering the serving spoons, serving up more food. When we did feel sick there was no real way of communicating with our feeder, maybe a look of plead, but we couldn’t talk. The feeders had all the control, while we were tied to our chairs so we didn’t even have the use of our arms. The feeders had to be so in control that they could tell when we were going to be sick, maybe by the look on our faces, they then went to get a sick bag and placed it in front of us – just like the fork – until we were sick. Unfortunately for me, this happened and I vomited. My feeder then proceeded to serve more food on to a plate and carry on feeding me – which is why our performance was stopped. Now it must be noted that all 3 of us gainers could has refused to eat, the fork would have just stayed there in front of us, but we were able to keep our mouths shut. The pressure we felt, especially in front of an audience kept us eating, we were in no mind set to think of our own safety and when to stop, so someone else had to do it for us. Something we were all grateful for. Normally you’d think that “the act of swallowing is voluntary” (Fisher and Bender 1979, p. 93), however under such pressure in a public performance it feels like that power is taken away from you and you have no choice but to swallow what is in your mouth, whether you feel like it is going to make you vomit or not.

Here are two video blogs I made on the day of ‘Feeder’ to show how I was feeling, one before the performance and one after:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4D3JyKpzAc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgCgpuiiUUk

(Abigail Dawson, 2013)

This performance was so much more than showing the feeder/gainer relationship though. It was very personal to each of us, and how we all view food and our bodies. For a 20 year old woman living in a western society in the twenty first century, there is a pressure to keep our bodies looking good. We all love eating food, but we make sure we eat the right things so we don’t put weight on. This feeder fetish to us appears very confusing, a lifestyle none of us can relate to as we don’t personally believe that the bigger we get in size the sexier and more comfortable we feel. I certainly don’t believe that anyone that large could be happy with themselves, especially if they are at a size where they are immobile.  Through this lifestyle, they appear to learn that if they are to be loved (the gainers) – and this is what they seek for the most in life – they must eat/be fed. Their daily life is not about nutrition and keeping their body healthy, as they certainly do not eat the right foods. As stated in The Value of Food, “some foods are not essential for the functioning of the body but we do enjoy eating them” (Fisher and Bender 1979, p. 31), this fetish is about pleasure and gratification so the only foods that are consumed are those which satisfy.

“Rituals…help people deal with difficult transitions, ambivalent relationships, hierarchies, and desires that trouble, exceed, or violate the norms of daily life” (Schechner 2002, p. 52)

Looking back to earlier readings and blog posts, we kept to the notion of rituals. The act of eating is a daily ritual, something we do since we are born. We put this ritual to play in performance, it “gives people a chance to temporarily experience the taboo, the excessive, and the risky” (Schechner 2002, p. 52) as a group we were able to experience the fetish momentarily, not sexually, but what it would be like to put in the roles in the feeder relationship. Feeding and being fed is ritual linked to a parent and child relationship – one that is created from a very early age. The feeder and gainer take these roles on. It was our aim to explore this daily ritual – eating – delve into our own eating habbits, our personal relationship to food, and how it changes for those involved in such a fetish.

Work Cited

Abigail Dawson (2013) Vlog 1 (before) [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4D3JyKpzAc [Accessed 13 December 2013]

Abigail Dawson (2013) Vlog 2 (after) [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgCgpuiiUUk [Accessed 13 December 2013]

Fisher, P. and Bender, A. (1979) The Value of Food (3rd Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press

Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: an Introduction (2nd Ed.), London and New York: Routledge

Experimenting with Final Ideas

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Carrying on from our previous experiment with food, we found ourselves very interested in the idea of the feeder fetish, and we wish to root our final performance around this concept. We all watched the documentary ‘Fat Girls and Feeders’ (2003), it explores the sub-culture of ‘feeders’ who get sexual gratification from feeding large women (the gainer), and encouraging them to gain weight to an extent where they become immobile and put their own lives at risk. It is thought that the stomach is seen as another ‘sexual organ’ and the bigger it got the sexier it appears. The feeders would document the obese women’s weight gain, and it was clear that the bigger they became, the more desperate they were for personal contact. The main aim for the feeder is to get them as big as possible, and for the gainer is to keep them happy.  For the couple “the experience of easting is intertwined with their experience of close human contact with the provider of the food-the bodily warmth, the touch of the other’s flesh, their smell, the sounds they make- and the emotions and sensations aroused by this experience”, while they found it sensual and sexual, their key focus was all about “enjoying filling the stomach” and watching it grow to an unsafe size (Lupton 1996, p. 7).

We found this feeder fetish lifestyle very strange, as none of us personally found it pleasurable. In the type of society we live in today it is all about being skinny and looking good and in doing so you need to keep count of the calories and eat the right food. We live in a society where “limiting one’s food intake is an effective way of both demonstrating self-discipline and of working towards the idealized slim, long-living, youthful body that is so valued in western societies” (Lupton 1996, p. 155). Whereas in this fetish lifestyle the feeder would feed the woman large quantities of calorific food, which would consequently make them gain a dangerous amount of weight over a long period of time, self-discipline and control for the consumer does not exist . I relate food with something that is meant to be seen as pleasurable, it is something social if you go out for a meal, something you enjoy, but where are the boundaries between pleasure and pain here? An average portion of food may be something enjoyable to consume, but what happens when that portion doubles or triples in size? It is no longer satisfying but instead becomes demanding on your body, pushing its limits. Because we as a group do not find this a sexual fetish, we were interested in how being fed would feel for us personally, and also what it would physiologically be like to be the feeder. We were interested by the fact that it was the feeder in the relationship that cooked and prepared all of the food, the control is in their hands, and the gainer would just eat it.

We had the opportunity to do our own individual experiments with the class so I took chance to not only experience being fed but also how someone would feel feeding me. I bought a packet of sweets, a packet of monster munch and a packet of chocolate fingers. Obviously I could not give the feeder complete control of what food they had as I had to buy it previously for the experiment, however I decided to blindfold myself so there would be some mystery out of the options I gave them. I did this experiment various times lasting only five minutes as it would be a one on one session with me and another member of the class. When entering the space I mentioned to each person that they could choose what items of food they wanted to feed me and that they had complete control over the quantity that was chosen. I left a feedback sheet in the room for each person to write down how they felt when feeding me; these are some of the responses:

“Felt like a mum feeding a kid – would be good to use different tastes, smells and temperatures”

“Nervous, a bit weird not going to lie. Could never do it as a sexual thing”

“Hungry and in control of everything, especially with the lack of sight”

photo

(Taken by Tiffany Thompson: 22. 11. 13)

I found that many people felt like they were a mother feeding a kid, as this is a relationship we have all experienced as a child. For me, personally, it was very strange being fed, especially the lack of control that I had.

For our final performance three of us will be the ‘feeders’ and the other three the ‘consumers’, they will be chosen at random by picking straws – something we have already done and can have documented in the video shown below. The feeders will be paired up with a consumer, and through a durational time of two hours, they will feed the consumer food. This food will be pre-bought and prepared before the performance; it will be presented luxuriously on a table in front of both feeder and consumer. It is important we show the “preparation, presentation, and consumption and its full range of sensory pleasures” so we will have a video projected in the background of the food being bought and prepared (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2007, p. 85). The idea is to explore our own personal relationship with food and the fetish. What happens if we were put into the feeder/consumer relationship? Our performance aims to push the boundaries of our bodies, and expose to the audience the act of eating – which is usually something private. It will be unpredictable, exciting and at the same time terrifying. I have no doubt that our performance will be anything but easy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdqz0-Dl2IA

(LaurenWithTheDramaTattoo, 2013)


Works cited

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2007) ‘Making sense of food in performance: the table and the stage’ in Senses in Performance, ed. Sally Banes and Andre Lepecki, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 71-91

LaurenWithTheDramaTattoo (2013) Feeder Contemporary Experimental: Drawing Straws [Online Video] Available from http://youtu.be/mdqz0-Dl2IA [Accessed 9 December 2013].

Lupton,Deborah (1996) Food, the body and the self. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

 

Completing a task.

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An aspect of contemporary experimental performance that we found particularly interesting is carrying out a task, predominantly impossible tasks. In Melati Suryodarmo’s ‘Exergie Butter Dance’, which is attached below, she dances for twenty minutes in high heels and a black tight dress on top of a platform made out of butter bars.

(Kunstbanken Hedmark Kunstenter 2013)

Suryodarmo stands on the butter and dances to the music of Indonesian drums. She dances and falls frequently, hitting the floor hard, when on the verge of standing back up she slips and falls back in the butter. When the time was up, she stood up and instead of carrying on dancing she stepped off the platform. Here she is simply performing and completing a task in front of an audience. Even though she does not possess a dancer physique she still pushes her body, with great confidence, in attempting such an impossible task. The idea of having a task and straightforwardly performing it was something we found very intriguing.

Such work influenced our own performance piece, where we first experimented with the task of putting jigsaws together. We started off with a 1000 piece jigsaw so we could all work together in the challenge to complete it. Something which we first imagined to be fairly easy turned out to be practically impossible. We gave ourselves two hours to complete the task, and in that time span not even half of the jigsaw was put together. Each of us would get frustrated when we could not find pieces to fit together, it took some people a good ten minutes before they found two pieces that fit. With this initial performance idea, we wanted to have our hands tied together in front of us, so it would hinder us and hold back complete use of our hands. The audience would see us challenging ourselves in such a simple task. However what may have looked simple actually turned out to be too impossible for us to think about carry on experimenting with, we got too aggravated with the puzzle and each other when we had the full ability of our hands never mind if we had them tied together.

Since taking part in the earlier experimental performance in class mentioned in a previous blog post, Marina Abramović has been a great influence in our early work; a vast amount of her performances were concerned with exploring the limits of the human body. Specifically her own. In an article on Abramović, Maureen Turim states that “She methodically sets out to perform an act that has clear parameters and goals” (2003, p. 105), Abramović always sets out to do a task and knows what she is aiming for in the performance.  We also wanted our performance to have these ‘clear parameters’. Another experiment was carried out in our group. Each of us was interested in taste buds and the different foods which we liked and disliked. This was something we could play around with, what was appealing was that there were certain foods which some of us could not stomach or even think about eating.  The challenge here is what would happen if we were made to eat those certain items of food? We wanted to push our bodies physically, and if that meant we would vomit then that would be one of the consequences. In experimenting with this we each brought an item of food which we liked and one which we did not, and they were all put on a table. We knew what each other did not like so we brought a small audience in who had completely no idea. They were to choose an item and give it to a person of their choice to eat it. We each received a fork full of sardines, something which none of us could stomach. Because we were given it, we had no choice but to eat it, causing gagging, eyes watering and even hyperventilation when it came to my turn. When we got given food which we in fact did like such as marshmallows and apples, our reactions were completely different as it was easy to eat unlike the sardines which I struggled to even put them in my mouth. The small audience found our different reactions fascinating to watch, and also the great power they felt in choosing the food. In exploring this idea, we wondered what would happen if you gave people food that they did like but in a large quantity, would our reactions be different and would the food become too sickly to stomach?  This is something we aim to carry on exploring in future experiments.

Below are the photos of the two experiments we took part in:

1383817_10152038481832915_667238247_n Eating

(Taken by Kirsty Jakins: 29.10.13) (Taken by Lauren Watson: 6:11.13)

Work Cited

Kunstbanken Hedmark Kunstenter (2013) Melati Suryodarno “Exergie – Butter Dance” [Online Video] Available from http://vimeo.com/46277791 [Accessed 9 November 2013]

Turim, M. (2003) Marina Abramović’s Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psyche in Installation Art, Camera Obscura, 18 (54) 98-117.

How do we define performance?

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In contemporary theatre we often here the question ‘what constitutes a performance?’ and ‘how must we define it?’

Erving Goffman, cited in Performance Studies: an Introduction, defines performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way of the other participants” (Schechner 2002, p. 29). A performance can be a variety of things, such as playing a sport, putting on a show, simply carrying out a daily routine or ritual, and even having sex can be categorised as a performance. It is essentially something you aim to succeed in, an action to be carried out in front of an audience. It may be durational or last for only a short period of time. Many performance theorists argue that everyday life is performance as “at present, there is hardly any human activity that is not a performance for someone somewhere” (Schechner 2002, p. 40), whether it may be someone getting dressed or making their journey to work. These everyday routines can be classed as ‘restored behaviour’ because they are actions which will have being repeated more than once during your life time, as a result performances that consist of actions within a daily routine may be more interesting to an audience as they recognise them as their everyday life .  What is interesting is that though all of it is considered artistic what may be performance to one person could perhaps not be thought as performance to another.

In relation to this, in class we undertook an experiment that when it was first described to us what we were to take part in, generally most of us did not think it could be branded as performance. We first talked about Marina Abramovic’s performance The Artist is Present, where every day for three months, she sat for seven and a half hours on a chair, staring into the eyes of audience members who sat opposite her staring back. Below is a video of this performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62

(MiticoMazz 2012)

Throughout the process she was present and completely focused on the person sat opposite her. Being so motionless made her as a performer more vulnerable to the audience, there was no barrier between them, just herself.  For Abramovic it was a strong form of communication, it was able to bring up emotions that might not have been unexplored or supressed in the audience members and also Abramovic herself. To investigate this theory, we undertook an experiment that closely resembled her performance. We were told to take a chair and sit opposite someone, creating two rows in the middle of the room. We were then told that for 10 minutes we had to stare back at the person opposite us, emotionless. Those 10 minutes, for me personally, dragged for what appeared to be a very long time. I had cleared my mind of anything so I was completely present and I just stared back completely still. Once the time was up we were told to stay where we were, to everyone’s dismay, and that this experiment was going to last for another hour and a half. No time was given to absorb the shock; instead we had to focus back on the person opposite us. If those first 10 minutes felt like hours, the next hour and a half felt like a life time. Being able to completely focus yourself on one person for a short amount of time was not too hard, but as the time goes on your mind starts to wander, there appears to be a limit of how long you can keep it blank. You start to run things through your head such as shopping lists or something that you are worried about. The person sat opposite me was very successful in this experiment, they did not move or fidget once, and because of such deep concentration there became a very powerful atmosphere between us. I on the other hand found it very difficult, focusing so hard caused my eyes to tear up and strain. It became physically painful and tiring to keep them open. On a few occasions I felt myself fall to sleep as I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

For me, this may not have worked as well as Marina Abramovic’s because there were many of us in the same room undertaking the same experiment. Or maybe it was because we hadn’t prepared ourselves for something so intense. What at first glance appeared to be such a simple and motionless task was actually unbelievably physically and emotionally challenging. Such results will come in use when thinking about what other tasks we could experiment with.

Works cited

MiticoMazz (2012) Marina Abramovic e Ulay – MoMA 2010 [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62 [Accessed 9 November 2013]

Schechner, R (2002) Performance Studies: an Introduction (2nd Ed.), London and New York: Routledge