The Waldorf Project – Chapter Three/FUTURO at Here East. Photo: Lee Arucci.
A friend of a friend once staged a performance event that, like Macaulay Culkin’s Velvet Underground cover band, paid homage to an artist by stealing their idea, and adding pizza. Perhaps I’m only remembering this because of the remarkable episode, earlier this month, which saw WikiLeaks accuse Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman of being a warlock because his brother was once invited to a ‘Spirit Cooking’ dinner at Marina Abramović’s place, but anyway my friend of a friend’s tribute was to ‘The Artist is Present’. Which is to say that she invited audience members to sit across from her and share pizza, intensely, rather than simply stare and cry.
If I was to pull a similar move my first idea might be to attempt a millennial take on Martha Rosler’s famous video work from 1975, ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen‘. I would call it ‘Semiotics of the Supper Club’, and in it I would try to reflect and subvert (to not really quote Rosler) the securely understood signs of affluent strangers breaking bread together in a contrived setting – in the hope of identifying an alternative choreography that is a little more ingenuous, a little less exclusionary.
I know that supper clubs are both of these things because I run one myself, on my houseboat ffs. We do our best to make it not so but inevitably the whole operation ends up looking like the most metropolitan-elite-liberal thing in the world, and that’s fine, so long as we don’t pretend that it’s not that. I mention all this because I think it’s the semiotics of the supper club, above all, that are at stake in an assessment of Chapter Three/FUTURO by Sean Rogg’s Waldorf Project, ‘an immersive experience on a grand stage in which art is consumed through all the senses’ – with a particular emphasis on taste, and food. And as with more conventional supper clubs, I think a great deal depends on whether we can be confident the cooks know what it is they do; its privileges; its complacencies.
There is, of course, a rich tradition of food in performance, from reflections on the politics of the kitchen (Bobby Baker) and global consumption (Matthew Herbert) to the more smeary, sensory work of, say, Carolee Schneemann. Chapter Three/FUTURO situates itself squarely in the latter camp, seeking to arrive at an otherworldly, transformative place by delivering fairly conventional scenarios (by the standards of the genre) in a uniquely intense and durational and taste-led way.
The audience meets outside one of those alarming post-Olympic buildings in Hackney Wick, having been asked to dress entirely in black. We’re led, individually and in small groups, through a series of zones which swallow us up in blacked-out soundscapes (in a manner that recalls Sarah Jane Norman’s Stone Tape Theory at last year’s Spill Festival) each culminating in one of seven courses – which is to say, someone puts something in our mouths. We begin in a glossy, Tetris game-like bar, where we’re encouraged to bite balloons that discharge bloody ink into the light fixtures, which we then drink the contents of, fast enough to feel quite pissed. Then we’re dragged past a sort of phosphorescent table dance situation, where we have hot custard tipped into our mouths, then led through a pitch-dark maze, on our knees, then wrapped together in polythene, through which we’re groped and sprayed with more lemony booze, then marched back to the bar where we roll a black non-Newtonian fluid around in our palms, before it’s dribbled all over our faces and clothes, and then we’re gagged and tied together, and led elsewhere, and so on. Each course has a name like ‘Decontamination’ and ‘Succumb’ and even its own code – ‘Rebirth’ is 7.2! – but I only discovered that after the event.
Leading us and feeding us were four completely heroic performers who somehow made the increasingly baroque scenarios plausible and visceral. It’s worth mentioning that they were all 1, women, 2, East Asian and 3, beautiful, which meant I was initially racked with alarm that I’d walked into somebody’s Orientalist BDSM fantasy, but then I gradually decided that the aesthetic of the thing was so consistently sexy-futurist-video-game that this could be thought of as perhaps an ironic part of that. It would be disingenuous to say that I really experienced everything ironically, though, because the cumulative effect was absorbing. Half an hour in, I wondered if the blood-light-drink had been laced with a little acid, because the shadows were making me hallucinate. One and a half hours in, lying back on a bed of sandpaper pads, I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t totally into it when a performer rubbed ice that tasted like battery acid around my mouth, and vaped smoke in the eyes, and slipped fingerfuls of creamy jelly into my mouth. Two hours in, the orgy of cornflour paste proved too much for a man standing next to me, who stormed off, in disgust or because he was a plant.
More interesting than this well-produced, impressively large-scale and tirelessly sustained foreground, though, was how it shepherded the audience in the background, metamorphosing us into a high-concept caricature of a group of supper club guests – a parody, that is, of a group of relative strangers aiming to perform the best versions of themselves in an idealised version of a dinner party, at which the food is restaurant standard and every interaction is bright with novelty.
Here, the semiotics were twisted into ridiculous but also somehow more truthful shapes: as we sat together before we went in, we were openly giggly and apprehensive. Suddenly we were thrust together into new pairs and groups, observing each other fail to look worldly as we chewed balloons and wiped custard from our faces. Then our heads butted strangers’ asses as we negotiated a maze in the dark. Then we became almost competitive about the extent to which we were getting spattered with non-Newtonian fluid. We sniggered together in groups, as our hosts’ backs were turned, then lay together, post-coitally, at the end (7.7 – Communion) our hands on each other’s hearts. And as we shared wine, once the lights had come up, I had the most heightened, profound sense I’ve recently experienced that while it’s lovely to hang out with strangers after sharing something intense, there’s fuck all chance I’ll see any of these people again. Find you on Facebook!
In other words, by (or despite) aiming for the ‘dark unknown’, Rogg has actually created a thrilling burlesque of the experience of collective dining in the endgame of late capitalism – the press night took place on the day after the US election – which fittingly costs £79 a head. (My Semiotics of the Supper Club would be more affordable, but maybe less truthful because of that.) That’s about the same as a Guest Series night at Lyle’s, Shoreditch’s most acclaimed restaurant. As we sat together at the end, Rogg’s chef appeared, and bragged about the 18 different ingredients that went into the sort of soya risotto truffle that had made the girl in front of me gag, impressively. To my mouth, it all tasted like shit, and samey shit at that: all the liquids tasted like alcoholic lemon barley water, and all the solids like salty paste. If Rogg wants the Waldorf Project to be truly transporting, he might need to refocus on the original point of the thing, namely flavour. Until then, if you can afford it, it’s still a great use of an eating out budget.
