Rain Check

First impressions should never be trusted. Perhaps, neither should the second. Considering the matter at hand, the supposed objectivity and hubris during an encounter with the familiar are placed under the scanner in this performance by N▲N▼. Focusing on the primacy of food as a medium, How To Eat Cheesecake proposes eating practices that are pluralistic, intersectional, and modes of enquiry into how we attach meaning to the world

How to Eat Cheesecake will not tell you how to hold a spoon, how to slice through the cheesecake, how to gently slide it onto your tongue, only to shut your mouth over it and let it crumble. How to Eat Cheesecake is a deliberate effort to create new images and associations with the common denominator that is the cheesecake. Yet, it resists the urge to showcase solidarity with the project of cultural diversity, forsaking the need to find a seat at the existing table.

Alluding to the (at the least) double marginalisation of N▲N▼’s self as a black, migrant, femme, lesbian, classical musician, and performer through styles of veridiction found in texts by Goodman, hooks, Dolan, and Lorde, the performance and research conducted alongside it examines the constipated discourse found in the theoretical equivalents of Feminist Studies, Decolonial Theory, Queer Studies, and even Marxism.

Movement as a defiant and deliberate political gesture. Image-making as a defiant and deliberate political gesture. Meaning-making as a defiant and deliberate political gesture. Narratology as a defiant and deliberate political gesture. Eating, a deliberate gesture.

How to Eat Cheesecake highlights the social and cultural overtones of the eating process that expect the audience to ignore the abject - eating practices that have been expelled for the sake of smooth discourse. WHY you eat it, HOW you eat it, and what did your way of eating, expel?

How to Eat Cheesecake is about distrust towards general knowledge and about choices which are often, not one’s own. Triangled within the act of eating, lesbianism and the cultural valence of a cheesecake, the story revolves around the experience of exploring this “B.C.E.” cultural object which has firmly installed itself into the neo-liberal list of must-haves wherein N▲N▼ highlights the difference between emancipatory politics and un-named inarticulated performatives which brings to light ambiguous forms of consumption and pass on the offer of being legible.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Drama bar Lisboa, 75B Rua Damasceno Monteiro, Lisboa, Portugal