POLINA PORRAS SIVOLOBOVA

​

These photos are mostly from moments behind stage, during rehearsal, in rest or as family

Photo credit: personal archive and Floor Grootenhuis

 

A Meal - reflections from inside the theater 

by Polina Porras Sivolobova 

​

The spotlights reflect on the silver metal lids, glass jars in fitted braided nets hang from the black theater ceiling, there are 32 of them scattered around the main stage. I enjoy walking around them, silently, especially in the most dense area towards the back. It’s like an enchanted tea forest and we, David, Denisa, Mailtlin and Akane are like floating hermits. Syd and Caro spell out the ingredients of the tea: piña, canela, pineapple, cinnamon, panela, sugar cane…

 

During the first runs of the show I used to think that we were taking too long to go through all the teas, giving one to each audience member as they entered, I felt a kind of unease for making them "wait." But after a few shows I embraced a different sense of time, where time had no linearity but it expanded and contracted - I was learning to hold space. Each time I would hang the tea on the neck of an audience member, I would invite them to think of someone or something to honor during our gathering that night. We would look into each others’ eyes and I would say to myself "welcome to this three-hour journey." 

 

We would pass into a new threshold after the tea ceremony-toast, with an ominous sound we all rotated, gaining speed until the cloud-like creatures and the hermit-like characters would change, now all wearing a long white dress and holding a giant white puzzle piece…then back to tense-stillness - the parade. This scene ends with a series of recorded voices. I really liked how my voice sounded. “can you hear…the beans climbing up to the corn?.” Every time, behind the curtain, I watched every single of the seventeen parades that were performed in the course of three weeks. 

 

From the tea ceremony to my next appearance, I had enough time to slowly change into my next costume, help Mar with their costume, check on the banana leaf, move a couple of carts, watch most of the dinner tables being set up, as I listened for the right cue for David to go get the steamers with tamales and chimakis. By then the audience had been divided into two groups and the "loops" had started on both floors of the theater. 

 

During the "loops” I spoke in Russian, Spanish and English about grandmas making tamales and Piroshkis as I held long chopsticks and tongs. Then a scene with Syd “the girls.” Where two girls facing each other played to cook as they mentioned the ingredients of the tamales and the chimakis. The ingredients were accompanied by a red bird. The audience giggled and smiled during this scene. A stark shift into playfulness after the previous scene “meat-lady," a scene that came up during the dinner conversation every single time. 

 

The “meat lady” scene was done by Denisa. With red hair standing in an almost perfect vertical position, she would take raw pieces of red-meat and forcibly wash them with imaginary water as she sang a lullaby before hanging them in a clothesline. I only saw this scene during rehearsal, but I could hear the heavy beating on the floor and Denisa’s sweet voice singing in Czech. 

 

David, Peggy and I stood still behind the door until I would hear my cue to enter the stage. A faint shell sound from Derek's head piece being lifted by Denisa. With time Denisa became so quiet with the lifting that there was almost no-more sea-shell-sound and I had to rely on an embodied sense of time.  

 

Between the “loops” there was a “battle” scene in the lower theater which I only saw in rehearsal same as all the creatures happening there: Peach boy, the Horse, Can-creature, Three Sisters, Veggie Lady, Bone-Lady and Ice-Creature and the often mentioned “Masa’s dance.” 

 

At the end of “loops” was a scene called “compression” which I also never saw, but could easily imagine: 68 people being compressed into the lobby space as Derek’s thin silhouette wearing a gas mask, overlapped with a video with a small girl in a field of white flowers.

 

The audience had spent ninety minutes of inhabiting different worlds, eating tamales, chimakis, aburis and arepas and when the world seemed to come to an end in that compressed scene…the doors from the main theater would once again open and the audience would find themselves in awe with yet another unexpected, totally transformed space.

Eight rectangular wooden tables with benches on the sides, on them a complete dinner set with handmade ceramic bowls, coconut bowls, tatume bowls with noodles, soy and sesame sauces and two-hot pots on gas stoves. In the middle of the theater a round table made up of giant puzzle pieces. 

 

The audience would also see us, the performers in sculptural garments of pointy edges and egg-like head pieces finished with encaustic.Then the veggie, dance, Shabu-shabu dance, the dinner, the conversation, the rain sticks, the spoons, the papaya dance (mochi or reverse shabu-shabu dance), the mochi, the final offering (washing of the spoon) and the last dance with vases. 

 

What I have just described is "A Meal" a multi-sensory live performance: part-ritual, part, celebration, part-installation and part- dinner. A work by artistic duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya. Commissioned by HERE and co-produced by LEIMAY. It ran from September 11 to the 29, 2024 at HERE Arts in New York City. I was part of it, along with the LEIMAY ensemble, other guest artists and an amazing and talented team.