Essay by Stephen Greco:

For centuries we've gazed upon sumptuous feasts depicted in tempera and oil. We've analyzed allegories and symbols. Now -- after decades of pushing beyond the white cube in the visual arts and dismantling conventions of the dance and theater stage -- we find ourselves, in immersive, site-specific, performance-installation works like Feast, able to sail beyond classical modes of attention into something…larger, both new and ancient.

Freud thought the human being boundlessly stimulable- acknowledging not only that body and mind are made of the same substance but that the hungers of each are so similar: pleasure being closer to enlightenment than religious and political authority traditionally allows. Our bodies remember (or at least,
thankfully, enjoy!) being whole, though, and this may help us respond fully to Feast, which is about a concept that unites body and mind -- eros -- and is designed to be felt as much as thought about.

Neither dance nor theater but incorporating elements of both, Feast might best be described simply as a show, in both the "spectacle" and "exhibition" senses of the word. Drawing on Plato's Symposium, in which philosophers discuss the nature of love and wisdom during a lively dinner party, Feast seeks to surround and seduce -- to incite in viewers an awareness of themselves as erotonauts, as it were, in time and space.
A prop echoes the shape and substance of the very building containing it, a former stable. A mask references the shape of a feedbag once used for the horses housed within. A collar resonates with the shape of finery from some bygone era; a cuff hints at splendor yet to come. All Feast desires of its viewers is their company -- though a certain existential conviviality associated with Allan Kaprow's happenings, the empty gallery of Yves Klein's Le Vide, James Turrell's meeting spaces, Trisha Brown's dances on roof tops and sides of buildings, Lucio Fontana's "spatializing" cut canvasses, Gordon Matta Clark's cut houses, the room works of Kurt Schwitters's MERZbau, and the constructions and installations of Vito Acconci will make the party even warmer.

So drink in! Here's Aristophanes describing humankind's long-lost unity as coupled entities. Here's Alkibiades entering late, drunk, wanting to displace Agathon on Socrates's couch. Here's Diotima recounting the birth of Love, child of Poverty and Resource. As the feast progresses, look where you will. May your desire follow your look, and may that way of looking linger afterward (even if you also find it necessary to pull your copy of Plato's 2,300-year-old dialog off the shelf, once you get home).

--Stephen Greco