Fringe Reev-you: La Bonne Cuisine

Today I checked out the much-talked about, if not quite understood, “La Bonne Cuisine.” I had little idea what to expect. The Pazzia contemporary performing collective has advertised their show as many things from “an…existential response to classical music,” and a “highly expressive cabaret,” to “an eclectic potluck inspired by Leonard Bernstein.” The program notes also told me that “piazza is a collaborative initiative…[that] favours a vivid, physical understanding of music in place of the cognitive agenda often associated with the concert hall.” Hmmm…, thought I. That’s a lot of clauses for a summer’s day.

So, what is this show about, you ask? Well, it’s a series of vignettes, tableaus, songs, and sound-pieces that all centre around food. When the house opens, a vignette is already in place. The cast of four, dressed in absurdist cabaret/circus attire, circle around a spectacular small set. Centered around an old upright piano, the set consists of an elaborate (and campy) kitchen arrangement (think Home-Cooking-Show meets Cirque du Soleil). Actors busily chop tomato, basil and onion in a quasi-rhythmic cadence.

Then the show begins. Some of the vignettes and songs are kinda neat. I loved the “Salsa” number - essentially a percussion piece that use the chopping knives as instruments (yes, they make salsa. Yes, they then serve it to the audience). Some of the other pieces - “Watermelon Soup” springs to mind - are regrettably alienating. But thankfully, just when the show would get uncomfortably inaccessible, the performers would step out and offer us food. This token breakage-of-fourth-wall was enough to salvage an otherwise isolating audience-experience.

This show is a concept-piece. The program notes are complicated and border-line bewildering, making lofty claims to push performance-theory to new reaches. A lot of the concepts the piece aims to explore do not come across. Attempting to explore the relationship of the body and live music-food with the immediacy food - or something like that - is a concept I don’t really understand even on paper, and I’d rather be shown this concept than have it be told to me in a heavily didactic playbill.

A director friend once told me as I was about to embark on my first stage-directing experience: “you cannot put ideas on a stage. You can only put bodies on a stage.” How utterly true. I think a lot will have to be flushed out from this piece before it becomes palatable to a live audience. But there are some really neat things at play here. Just the smells alone of the food being prepared - the fresh cilantro, the onion, the fried eggs - push the sensory experience of live performance to new levels. And knowing I might get to taste that food made the sensory experience all the more rich.

I think this this collective should keep working together. They should keep sawing away at this piece, they should take all the criticism they can and make lemonade with it. They are all wonderfully courageous performers. This show needs a lot of work, but it could go a long way.