Food, sex, desire in a dance/theater piece that sizzles
The relationship of food and food production to sex and desire has been extensively and derisively explored in such books and as Tom Jones; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; and, more recently, Fast Food Nation. Sarah Sanford works in the same vein in Appetite, her directorial debut, which opened Thursday at the Wolf Building, on 12th Street just south of Callowhill Street.
The relationship of food and food production to sex and desire has been extensively and derisively explored in such books and as
Tom Jones
;
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
; and, more recently,
Fast Food Nation
. Sarah Sanford works in the same vein in
Appetite
, her directorial debut, which opened Thursday at the Wolf Building, on 12th Street just south of Callowhill Street.
Sanford - a member of Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theater Company - offers a dance/theater piece that sizzles like oil on a hot skillet in the cold industrial space called the Wolf Downstairs, which Gillian Gallow has amusingly turned into a minimalist abattoir-cum-restaurant.
I feared Appetite would be a diatribe against carnivores. But while it does weigh in abstractly on the horrors of agri-business, the side it takes is more about the way we eat and the displacement of one desire by another. When food is available, sex is off the table, and vice versa.
In several meaty but easy-to-digest courses, Linnea Swan, Adam Lazarus, and Claire Calnan of Toronto's Exchange Rate Collective perform Kate Alton's highly physical choreography - lusty wrestling, antic food fights with pita bread flying like Frisbees, and crude displays of bodily functions.
Calnan and Swan dance a bovine/human duet to sounds of livestock bellowing, their hooves clattering (sound designed by Robert Perrault).
A clowning dance among coworkers in the slaughterhouse's locker room turns into a sexploitation tango á trois. As Swan catches Lazarus' scent while he hangs up his bloodstained work duds, her desire for him builds. But he yields to her only momentarily, going off with Calnan when she beckons.
Swan wields a mouth-watering fish head at Lazarus as he competes in an eating contest. But it's no aphrodisiac - he sickens and swoons, morphing into a penned animal. Calnan languishes on his back, suggesting bestiality, but the beast within is appetite.
As a sexy hooker in a slinky black sheath displaying herself in another kind of meat market, Swan exercises her gluteal muscles, even spanking herself brutally. Calnan, in frumpy red chiffon (costumes also by Gallow) mimics Swan's dance. The two are wickedly funny as they warp sensuality and seduction.
The loose narrative begins with Lazarus à table - Swan is the teeth-clenched, wine-reciting waitress - confessing he is no longer sexually interested in Calnan. It ends with their attraction reigniting.
Sanford's program notes for this eternal chain of multiple desires offer a menu of Primi, Secondi, and Carne (represented by the funders' list). But don't expect dessert. Appetite ends in an adult distillation of Gooey, Chewy, Rumble, Plop, Steve Alton's treatise on digestion for kids - Swan's song delivers the scoop on how everything turns out at the end.