The Meal

Food as an experience. The feast as a process and a spectacle.
Two men at a table and a pot boiling.
Their speech fragmental and orchestrated into duets.
From the simple conversation and agreement / disagreement to the song

Το Γεύμα/The Meal

In recent years, a “dialogue” has started between archaeology and theatre on concepts which both disciplines are interested in, like the body, the space, the memory, and the narration. The result of the above “dialogue” was the creation of a 'hybrid' discipline which uses theatrical methods to examine archaeological material and archaeological methods to approach the art of theatre. It is worth taking into consideration the work by M. Pearson and M. Shanks through the Brit Goth (see Pearson M. and Shanks M., Theatre / Archaeology, Routledge, London 2001). Two paradigms from Greece include the performance “Kalaureia”, created by members of our team, that took place in the temple of Poseidon, Poros within the borders of the excavation which was conducted by the Swedish Institute and a similar project that we began on September 2010 in the excavation of the University of Crete on the island of Gavdos.

     All the above belong to a strange series of spectacles organized at archaeological sites in Greece, from the Delphic Festivals of 1927 to the lighting ceremonies of the Olympic flame and the feasts of the dictatorship at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. How do we experience history today? What is our relationship with the archaeological sites and how do they fit into the landscape, urban and non-urban? What are the limits of the language chosen by archaeologists to communicate information to the public?

On this basis we are working on a performance to be presented in September 2011 at the excavation held by the University of Southampton and the Archaeological Service at the tell site of Koutroulou, at Neo Monastiri, Fthiotida. Our main axis of work are food as an experience and how this is revealed by the archaeological finds and the links between music and spoken word, using the distinctive musical tradition of Neo Monastiri.

The aim of this blog is to open our work to anyone interested and to communicate our material in the hope it will become an opportunity for discussion that will eventually contribute to the final performance. We invite you to take archaeological texts and images which we are usually prevented from altering and change them creatively, producing new images, new texts, new ideas.