One of the biggest challenges facing the immersive theatre community is how siloed companies are within their regional homes. So it was unsurprising, and somewhat fitting, that a Buffalo resident keyed me into the work of Torn Space Theater, a company that creates site specific, immersive spectacles at a repurposed industrial site called Silo City.
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Feast, their current show, continues an evidently annual, long-running look into a fictitious society created by the company as they gather and celebrate various life cycle events. In this case, the program informed us that the society experienced two deaths and is expecting two births.
The piece begins with the audience being led through a green space in front of the eponymous Silos encountering many of the characters featured in the piece. There is a strong man, Burden, confined to a drainage ditch, a sexualized imp climbing a structure, a team of workers tending a cow, and a pregnant woman (belly fully exposed) performing a ritual cleansing with sage. Eventually, the sojourn is concluded when the audience comes across a clearing, with a seating structure built around a tree and a field. Once seated, the ritual commences, with the foolish “King of the Feast” demanding that ceremonial surrogates (including “Birth,” “Pain,” and the aforementioned Burden) be brought for his pleasure while we eat a custom menu of local delicacies. As the surrogates enter the space, they stay present after their part in the ritual, building an increasingly complex tableaux of humanity amidst the nature in front of the post industrial wasteland. And as quickly as it began, all of the performers thank us and walk down a path away as the piece concludes.
To be blunt about Feast, it could be boiled down as follows… Immersive, Pagan, Matthew Barney Dinner Theatre… And I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. As you journey towards the performance space, the interactions are clearly set up to be spiritual archetypes, so from early on, you are instantly aware that “character” is not a construct that you need to care about in this piece. So rather than focus on story, it becomes a matter of ritual one could construe as pagan mid summer feasts praising the forthcoming bounty. All in all, the aesthetic feels in a similar vein to a poor man’s version of Matthew Barney’s poetic visuals, reminiscent of the middle section of River of Fundament, with people or objects standing in for large, weighty ideas. The level of interactivity varied from passive spectatorship up to being led to the fore to milk a cow, no one was ever forced, and the interactions with the audience were dealt with in a gentle, caring manner. As for the dinner theatre, this was quite literally a feast for some audience members, with a local restaurant providing a five course tasting menu with courses corresponding to the various rituals performed. All of these elements combined to form a mesmerizing melange which I couldn’t look away from. At the end, I just embraced the fact that I just witnessed a post-apocalyptic mass, and left with awareness, but no new spiritual insights.
Understanding the landscape of immersive work across the nation and world is a remarkably challenging thing, and that a company like Torn Space Theater has been making site specific spectacles for a decade now and is relatively unknown to many outside of Buffalo (and certainly the No Proscenium community) frustrates me greatly. Well, they have made an impression on me and will remain on my radar for the foreseeable future, and hopefully now they will be on yours.
Feast continues its run August 16–18 at Silo City; 87 Childs Street at American Elevator, Buffalo, NY. Tickets are $30 — $100.
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