FOOD = NEED FESTIVAL, WIA Projects, Davenport-Perth Community & Health Centre, Toronto
Artists and Community Members gathered to make and eat bread while sharing bread stories about immigration, home, place and family.
photos: Leena Raudvee
Outspoken Word Festival, Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, Newfoundland
Artists and citizens of St. John’s gathered for bread making workshops and telling stories about kitchens, mothers, foster care, and sex. The week long durational performances evolved into a makeshift soup kitchen and dancing workshop when NUESTRA SENORA DEL PAN taught the storytellers how to “work the cloth” as a further exchange of “singing for their supper”.
photos: Michelle Bush
curated by Aiyanna Maracle/Tagny Duff, Mois de la Performance, Powerhouse La Centrale, Montreal, Que
Dragu’s month long durational performances celebrated the peasant with daily bread making and public feeding in a high tech urban landscape while exploring notions of generosity, charity and equality. The final evening performance combined bread, flags, prostitution and Leonard Cohen while venturing from the gallery to the romantic rain-slicked streets of Montreal.
photos: Sandra Lynn Belanger and from collection of Marie-Andree Rho
All day bread making workshop and storytelling combining elements of blessings, mothers, sensuality, and independence.
Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, BC
First in a series of cross-Canada performance events whereby the public was asked to bake and bring a homemade pie to the gallery along with a Pie Story. After circle storytelling session and X’s and O’s group choreography led by NUESTRA SENORA DEL PAN with live music by local musicians, the pies were cut, served, eaten and exchanged.
photos: Merle Addison
HISTORY of NUESTRA SENORA DEL PAN
Nuestra Senora del Pan executes durational performance pieces employing time, yeast, sugar, flour, water, oil, fire and sweat. Nuestra Senora del Pan celebrates the peasant and the domestic.
Peasant life is under attack all over the world. Fishing villages and Farmland are under constant attack by real estate developers and urban sprawl. Since the industrial revolution, local peasants moved to urban centres while peasant immigrants and refugees travelled to cities in far away countries. In recent times, multi-corporations obliterate peasant life without actually moving the peasants themselves – witness the at-home computer data entry workers in Wales and the illegal immigrant seamstresses in Mexico or Saskatchewan.
RISING is bread making performed in front of videotape of my former fishing village of Finn Slough in Richmond, BC situated on the south arm of the Fraser River. For me, the ritual of making bread is a celebration of peasant life. Bread takes time. Bread never comes out the same way twice. Bread requires you to be at home. Bread fails if you rush it. Bread sometimes fails for no reason at all – it is mysterious.
Bread making is ultimately a subversive act.