La poule enchantée

Ingredients: Matthieu Doze, Simon Hecquet, Sabine Prokhoris
A few products of nature (?): rice, bergamots, shrimp, salt, strawberries, chickens, rhubarb, mussels, etc.
A few products of art (?): movies, books, music, etc.
A few hybrid creatures (?): truly baroque animals, a still, ginger
A few contemporary concerns
You

A culinary performance at the CCNRB by Sabine Prokhoris, psychoanalyst and author of Le Sexe Prescrit: La Différence Sexuelle en Question, featuring Matthieu Doze and Simon Hecquet.

"This performance, based on an idea by Sabine Prokhoris, was conceived and produced jointly by Matthieu Doze, Simon Hecquet, and Sabine Prokhoris. It is a culinary performance: not merely in the sense that cooking takes place during the performance, but in the sense that the performance itself, as it was conceived, is the result of what might be called a culinary operation. Namely, what could have been (or should have been?) a lecture on the processes of transformation, on the issue of sharing, issues of gender and identity-a lecture intended to stimulate the audience's thinking-with the audience responsible for interpreting and "digesting" what is presented to them in this form-has, through a subversion-and thus a reinvention-of the traditional lecture format (questions, hypotheses, proposals-all presented, preferably in an appealing and "seasoned" manner, to an audience invited to listen and reflect from there)-into a series of actions that, through the experience of cooking, bring into play the ingredients of the potential lecture.

Culinary performance also in the sense that “real” cuisine is, in turn, “cooked”—or “reimagined”—that is, combined with ingredients other than food in the literal sense, with the aim of achieving desired yet unpredictable effects.

The starting point is as follows: the kitchen—a term that in French refers both to the activity and to the place where it takes place—is a process-oriented space, governed by a relatively complex set of rules governing transformations. In any case, this is what interests us most in staging this performance. The resulting products (the dishes) will be viewed as more or less stimulating effects of this series of transformations—effects (rather than finished results) that, in turn, serve as starting points for other effects: effects of digestion (or indigestion) in every sense of the term, effects of the bonds formed among the participants in the shared meal, and potential effects leading to the invention of other cuisines. Mysteries demystified—except, however, for the elusive nature of the effects of this “magic,” a magic so commonplace and within everyone’s reach. Anyone can cook, because everyone dreams. For dreaming—our nightly activity, whether near or far from us—is the very psychological experience, perplexing in more ways than one, of the processes of transformation, translation, combination, and invention-reinvention through associative recycling : the recycling of memory traces—including the most fleeting and ephemeral ones—triggered by the recycling of “diurnal remnants,” those residual fragments of impressions or events from the past day, which the dreamer will use as materials—fresh ingredients—for his dream cuisine. In short, dreaming—or the art of using up leftovers… Our guiding principle for this culinary performance is, as we’ve come to understand, this: the culinary space is a dreamlike space; or, conversely, the dreamlike process is the reason for cooking. A convoluted reason…

These remarks shed light on how the performance—which was collectively created (cooked up)—unfolded.

Taken together, this means that we weren’t so much three “head” chefs as, in a way, the primary ingredients of the performance. For a collective action is, above all, a form of cooking: the choice—whether fortunate or not—of one combination or another, and some kind of liquid (a recipe to be invented for each configuration) to “thicken the sauce.”

The performance—preceded by a preparation period open to the public—writes and implements, throughout its duration, a recipe—in other words, a score—that both the performers and the audience will be called upon to interpret. This is done using various ingredients proposed by the recipe—score, which it combines according to a logic of pairings and associations. These ingredients are: the performers, various foods by which they will be identified, gestures to prepare them, film clips, excerpts from texts, and pieces of music. Each moment of the recipe/score thus presents a challenge that the audience must identify (just as one tries to identify what gives a dish its flavor). At the same time that a moment emerges—thanks to this “kitchen,” this interplay of combinations—a question arises, and a path unfolds, giving rise to the next moment, that is, a new question. The lecture as a “kitchen,” then, or the “kitchen” as a (disguised) lecture.

At the same time, “real” cooking—that is, the preparation of a dish—takes place. But in order for the dish to be cooked, don’t we have to engage in similar processes? Combining and pairing ingredients—not haphazardly—in order to create something that delights, whets the appetite and curiosity, and even makes you want to cook again? The preparation of the meal will therefore function, within the performance, as a kind of discourse—a performed discourse—that will tell us about what is happening throughout the performance. But this nonverbal discourse, this material narrative, will speak to us as a dream does: figuratively, and thus in a way that is both entirely visible and displaced, translational—through images and actions that are very logically articulated. A pluralistic logic, however; an open logic.

The Enchanted Hen, then. That is to say, asleep, ready to dream: ready to let the magic of cooking take effect. The performance begins by stating this, using one of the first ingredients it will employ. A performance that ends with a movie screening—cooked cinema, of course—: the dream is on the big screen. The performance will have been a shared dream. Just as, in its own way, a lecture is… Another kind of exercise, we’re told. But what could be more porous, more hybrid, more “paella-like” than what we call “genre”? We will then savor, in a state of wakefulness—a wakefulness that is the dream/performance continued by other means—the “nocturnal leftovers,” during a party where we will eat the performance (not the performers… but the “real” dish); the performance will continue as we cook up various musical ingredients.”

Simon Hecquet & Sabine Prokhoris