Food and Theatre on the World Stage

Dorothy Chansky, Ann Folino White, Dorothy Chansky, Ann Folino White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317618010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical work from China, Japan, India, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, the United States, Chile, Argentina, and Zimbabwe, addressing work from classical, popular, and contemporary theatre practices. The investigation of uses of food across media and artistic genres is a burgeoning area of scholarly investigation, yet regarding representation and symbolism, literature and film have received more attention than theatre, while performance studies scholars have taken the lead in examining the performative aspects of food events. This collection looks across dramatic genres, historical periods, and cultural contexts, and at food in all of its socio-political, material complexity to examine the particular problems and potentials of invoking and using food in live theatre. The volume considers food as a transhistorical, global phenomenon across theatre genres, addressing the explosion of food studies at the end of the twentieth century that has shown how food is a crucial aspect of cultural identity.

Part I
Dramatizing Gluttony and Famine

1 When You are What You Eat

Ruzzante and Historical Metabolism

Will Daddario and Joanne Zerdy

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, political theorist Jane Bennett argues for a renewed recognition of the vibrancy and influential nature of visible and unseen things, forces, and assemblages of organic and inorganic matter. An awareness of and attention to these things, she contends, may lead to a more just society. In a chapter entitled “Edible Matter,” Bennett turns her attention to food and analyzes, primarily through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau, how food (vegetables, meat, coffee, tea, fruit) directly shapes human bodies and dispositions. She explains her method:

I will treat food as conative bodies vying alongside and within an other complex body (a person’s “own” body) … Food will appear as actant inside and alongside intention-forming, morality-(dis)obeying, language-using, reflexivity-wielding, and culture-making human beings, and as an inducer-producer of salient, public effects. (39)

Food, for Bennett, is not passive stuff to be cooked, swallowed, and forgotten. Instead, as actant, food functions as a vital part of our everyday networks, sustaining individual lives and producing socioeconomic and cultural relationships. Bennett raises the status of food by situating it alongside the bodies it feeds, thereby highlighting the collaboration between that which is eaten and those who do the eating.

Drawing inspiration from Bennett’s interdisciplinary methodology that positions food as a node connecting individual bodies, discourses, social processes, and nonhuman things, we scrutinize performance texts by sixteenth-century Paduan actor Ruzzante (a.k.a. Angelo Beolco).¹ By examining the social, economic, and agricultural dimensions of sixteenth-century Padua and the surrounding Veneto, we discern the crucial role of food and hunger in Ruzzante’s plays. Understanding food as an actant whose force appears both in the act of eating and in the hunger that results from its absence, we map the currents of that force through his theatre practice. In this practice, food directs the audience’s attention, drives Ruzzante’s humor, and tunes our attention to, on the one hand, the environmental politics of his day, and, on the other hand, the material and symbolic significance of everyday items such as bread. Two plays in particular, Prima Oratione (First Oration, 1521) and Dialogo Facetissimo (Witty Dialogue, 1528), demonstrate the extent to which food molds Ruzzante into a “morality-(dis)obeying, language-using, reflexivity-wielding” political performer.

The adjective “political” signifies a network of relationships mediated by laws, agricultural practices, modes of artistic expression, and numerous quotidian acts of survival. Although many of Ruzzante’s plays refer to eating or fasting and include specific foodstuffs, we resist the urge to offer a comprehensive view of this performer’s body of work and choose instead to concentrate on fragments from the two aforementioned plays. Such a narrow focus allows us to delve deeply into the multiple dimensions of the political network that encompasses Ruzzante.² Within that network the Paduan performer jokes about food by utilizing tasteless humor to sugar-coat (initially at least) his critiques of the discipline imposed on impoverished bodies.

Ultimately, this analysis of Ruzzante presents a case study of historical metabolism. We use this phrase to denote the labors and transformations that take place when re-animating historical subjects, such as Ruzzante and his world. Historical metabolism includes processes of breaking down, discerning validity and relevance, and then converting information from or about the past into a narrative for present and future consumption. This multifaceted methodology exercises historical consciousness and poses questions about its future use and its connections to other scholarly labors.

COLLABORATIVE ACTANTS: RUZZANTE AND FOOD

As Renaissance Venetian scholar Ronnie Ferguson points out, Ruzzante’s virtuosity as a writer and performer earned him the adjectives “Famoso” (“famous”), “famosissimo” (“extremely famous”), and “nominatissimo” (“extremely well-known”).³ To earn those titles, Ruzzante plied his trade in Venice, Padua, and Ferrera for the benefit of Venetian nobles, erudite dilettantes (most notably his patron, Alvise Cornaro), and various dukes (such as the Duke of Este). He crafted humorous dialogues to perform at private dinners, weddings, or celebrations. In addition to those types of performances, Ruzzante wrote monologues and gave speeches to cardinals of the Church and politicians who served in the upper strata of the Venetian government. Some of his works were improvised, but many were written down, such as his numerous five-act plays that closely resemble the works of Machiavelli and that take their themes from the literature of Boccaccio. Living in a time prior to the establishment of permanent theatre buildings, Ruzzante unfurled his stages in private homes and Venetian gardens, as well as in Paduan villas. Ruzzante inspired performers living near to his own time, such as Andrea Calmo, who went on to create characters now legible as stock commedia types.⁴ In the present day, the Nobel laureate and political playwright Dario Fo pledges his allegiance to Ruzzante, thus helping to preserve the name of this sixteenth-century Paduan for contemporary audiences.⁵

Prima Oratione is ripe for investigating the complex network of environmental, corporeal, and sociopolitical relationships within Ruzzante’s dramatic works. The term “oration” in the title carries with it a double meaning. Public orations, i.e. spoken addresses adhering to classical rules of rhetoric, were common during Ruzzante’s time. This particular address given by Ruzzante to Cardinal Marco Cornaro demonstrates the playwright’s familiarity with this form. At the same time, “oration” denotes a type of prayer. Since Ruzzante offers his address to a cardinal, it is not a stretch to call this piece a profane prayer, one at odds with the typical religious orations offered by a Church official.⁶ Ruzzante performed the solo piece in his Paduan dialect in 1521 at a country villa owned by Caterina Cornaro near Asolo in the Veneto. Speaking primarily to an audience of one, Ruzzante addressed Cardinal Cornaro. The ostensible intention of the piece was to congratulate Cornaro on his appointment as spiritual leader of the Paduan territory and to boast of Padua’s bounties. The oration frames Ruzzante, ostensibly elected by village elders because of his eloquence, as a spokesman for Padua and Paduans. While this monologue offers a series of compelling images and clever wordplay, we address three aspects of it: namely, the extensive listing of foods available in Padua, the mock history lesson of Padua’s etymological connections to bread, and the proposed revisions to church laws regarding harvesting and fasting. As we scrutinize food’s role as actant within these sections, we ask how it shapes Ruzzante’s theatrical practice and directs his commentary to the cardinal.

Early in his address to the cardinal, Ruzzante’s pride in his homeland bubbles up within his detailed description of the territory’s nourishing abundance of flora and fauna. Among the kinds of food that Ruzzante lists are legumes (fava beans, garbanzo beans, the “wild” chickpea, lentils, peas), grains (sorghum, spelt, rye, oats), nuts (walnuts), vegetables (cabbage, lettuce, radicchio, garlic, leek, cucumber, radish, carrot, parsnip), and fruits (several varieties of apples and pears) (Oratione 1188).⁷ Ruzzante draws attention to agricultural variety and to the physical surroundings of the Cardinal in situ. This is a place where wine jumps out of glasses,⁸ where food and drink are animate and animate those who consume them.

This lush Edenic description highlights abundance: there is more than enough for everyone and everything to survive. If we follow the line of thought offered by historian Roy Porter in his preface to Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams, we understand the multifaceted significance of food. Porter asserts that in early modern Europe food represented “the ambiguous cycles of existence, and the interdependence of all things sublunary” (8). This interdependence aligns with the forces at work in Bennett’s congregations of things; food is a dynamic hub where activities, biological processes, and social relations coalesce. Porter’s invocation of the sublunary, or terrestrial, is germane to this section of Prima Oratione, which centers on Paduan lands and, by extension, the Veneto. Curiously, although we can infer the kinds of agricultural labors required to manifest Padua’s abundance that support the “cycles of existence” to which Porter refers, Ruzzante does not yet make the working bodies an explicit part of this landscape. His list of foods connotes the fertility of the soil that constitutes this land caught between sea and mountains; food appears to exist and drive the world without human intervention.

Ruzzante concludes this section, according to Ferguson, by noting “that this part of the world is Paradise on earth, and better than the Paradise on high in that there is food to eat” (26–27). This distinction between an earthly and a heavenly Paradise emphasizes the material realities of those living and working on terra firma. Addressing one of God’s servants on earth, Ruzzante presents himself as a keen observer of and spokesperson for fleshly matters. As he turns the cardinal’s attention to the importance of Padua, he contemplates both the secular and spiritual connotations of bread.

Bread acts as a provocative illustration of Ruzzante’s relationship with food. Porter reminds us that bread functioned as “a cultural object in impoverished societies, the culminating point and instrument, real and symbolic, of existence itself” (17). Significantly, the oration’s central section revolves around bread. First, Ruzzante names different kinds of bread available in Padua: biscotti, leavened bread (pane levitato), focaccia, donut-shaped bread (ciambelle), and something called friars’ or brothers’ bread (pane de frati) (Oratione 1189).⁹ His naming of multiple kinds of bread, like his earlier food inventory, whets the cardinal’s appetite. The Paduan follows up this list with an oratorical exploration of bread’s connection with his birthplace:

Respectable Mister Cardinal, do you know why they call it Pavan? They say Pavan because it sounds like “Go to the bread” [“Va’ al pane”]. Without bread you can’t live, and whoever wants to live, go to the bread; and he who wants bread, go to the Pavan. … It would be bad if there was no bread, and worse if there was no Pavan.

(Oratione 1192)

In directly linking Padua to bread (Pavan = Va’ al pane), Ruzzante makes a case for the critical necessity of Padua as an agricultural center. Crops raised there did not just feed those in and around Padua; they traveled across the countryside and the Venice Lagoon to feed the Venetians. According to historian Peter Musgrave, the Veronese, the territory that extended to the west of Padua, consisted of an incredibly varied landscape with:

heavy and wet soils of the Grandi Valli in the far south-east contrasting with the much lighter soils of the west. The plains were above all the land of great estates and of cereal production—wheat, rye, maize and rice—albeit a cereal cultivation mingled, as elsewhere, with vine and olive production. (12)

This mixed terrain enabled the cultivation of a wide assortment of crops, such as those named by Ruzzante, for human and livestock consumption. This patchwork of foodstuffs was also important to the sustainability of agriculture here as not only did it ensure harvests throughout the year (different growing seasons for different crops) but its composite nature reduced the chance of a complete loss of crops from diseases and insects that targeted specific plants.

In addition to Padua’s role as a breadbasket for Veneto consumption, we should also view Ruzzante’s forecast that it would be “worse if there was no Pavan” as an implicit commentary on the Venetian conquest of mainland Padua. In 1508, leaders of France, the Holy Roman Empire, Mantua, Ferrara, the Papacy, and Spain formed the League of Cambrai to combat decades of Venetian expansion across the European mainland. Although the League staged a crushing defeat of Venetian forces near Bergamo (west of Padua) in May 1509, Venice regrouped and recaptured Padua six weeks later. As historian Linda L. Carroll recounts:

Venice moved swiftly to stifle the uprising and punish the rebels, whose number included many in the university community and clerics loyal to the Pope. Large numbers of Paduans were arrested and imprisoned there or in Venice, including Giovanni Jacopo and Melchiorre Beolco, and a number of members of the Beolco circle. (5)

Knowing that Padua played such a pivotal role in the battle between the Venetian Republic and the League of Cambrai helps us appreciate the stakes of Ruzzante’s seemingly glib warning about life without Padua. He draws on bread’s instrumental role in sustaining life to foreground the importance of Padua as a contested political battleground. The loss of Padua would mark a symbolic death for Venetian sovereignty; the end of bread would result in the literal loss of life for thousands.

Besides the governmental flows of power latent in Ruzzante’s equation of Padua to bread, his deployment of bread brings into focus regulations of bread making and distribution. These rules, intended to safeguard Venetian and Paduan subjects, governed mundane activities; the laws evidence a tug of war over this fundamental foodstuff. Regulated by governments since ancient Rome, officials in the sixteenth century continued to set prices for bread and, at times, purchased grain in order to control its distribution (Rebora 3). Those who attempted to cheat the system for their own benefit, “those who hoarded or ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Culinary Theatres
• PART I Dramatizing Gluttony and Famine
• PART II Staging Nationalism and Culture via Cuisine
• PART III Food Labor and Consuming Symbols
• PART IV Food Activism Onstage
• PART V Food on the Other Side of the Footlights
• Contributors
• Index