The Dinner Party: Part I & II

The performance piece with V. Patel was inspired by our shared fascination for cultural fusion. During our pop-up exhibition "Traditional Hybrid," we thought that the idea of serving tea at our exhibition was rather stereotypical. It is almost expected of domesticated women in both our European and Asian cultures to be attentive hosts. Whether or not this is a bad or good thing, we are unsure of, which is why I wanted to bring forth Derrida's idea of questioning the Western way of thinking.

According to Derrida, Western thinkers like to perceive life through its polarities (i.e: good vs. evil, black and white, etc). To continue the dialogue found in Derrida's idea, Patel and I wanted to create a performance piece that displays the in-between of these polarities because it can be seen as a metaphor for cultural fusion. Please see the following screenplay:

 THE DINNER PARTY - PART ONE

          TWO EUROPEAN-ASIAN WOMEN with black clothing walk in to a
          gray background.

          The TWO WOMEN sit cross-legged as they prepare the layout of
          the plates on the floor.

          ONE WOMAN pours rice in the middle of their workspace.

          TWO WOMEN then align rice along the design of the plate.
          This continues until each of the plates are finished. The
          TWO WOMEN have to finish at the same time.

          When both plates are finished, the TWO WOMEN move the
          finished plates off frame. 

THE DINNER PARTY - PART TWO

          Plates are being dropped (with the rice) and broken.

          Alternatively, plates are being dropped (without the rice)
          and broken.

In Part I of our script, Patel and I will be performing on screen as neither the host or guest, in a situation that is neither enjoyable like a dinner party or laborious like a sweatshop. These actions will hopefully act as an allegory for the cultural betweenness we both live through, on an everyday basis. In order to avoid culturally-influenced visuals, Patel and I had worn all-black costumes with our hair tied back. The actions in which we performed shows that "The Dinner Party" is neither something to be enjoyed like a social gathering, or dreaded like a workplace for the performers.

In Part II of our script, Patel and I are smashing the plates which we worked with in order to reinforce the idea that the plates were not the priority. Instead, we want to make sure that it is the act behind the performance piece that upholds the attention of the viewers, especially when our performance artists are placed in a situation full of in-betweeness.

I decided to ask A. Lamlum and J. Dixon from second year BA (Hons) Digital Film and Screen Arts to be our camera operators; that way Patel and I could focus entirely on the performance piece. Filming took place in B27 on the 9th of April, where we could set up a grey backdrop. Grey was an appropriate colour as there are so many shades of it between the black/white tonal spectrum, which is just a visual demonstration of not belonging to any polarity that Derrida talks about. Technically speaking it was also visually appropriate to use grey as the plates were white while our costumes were black.

We used two Canon EOS DSLRs to record the visual aspects, whilst using the H4N Zoom to record our audio for Part II. We were able to collect a good amount of footage and cutaways during our two takes. In total we wrapped up after 1.5 hours of set up and 30 minutes of shooting.

In post-process, I edited everything together using Final Cut Pro 7. You can view "The Dinner Party: Part I & II" here: