The act of eating together transforms a necessary bodily function into something far more significant, a social event. Roy Strong Feast: A History of Grand Eating.

Since April 2010 Kindle have been hosting meals in Birmingham on a monthly basis as a pleasant way for artists and industry folk to meet one another and talk informally around the dinner table. These monthly events invite diners to enjoy a menu of topical, often experimental and provocative food that is connected to Kindle’s current research and to the season in which it takes place.

Please keep an eye on our website, facebook and twitter to find out more about our next events, how to book as a diner and opportunities for collaborators.

16th – 19th August. Meals on Wheels: The Minotaur @ Forest Fringe, Edinburgh Festival

3 Bistro Square, Edinburgh, EH1 1EY

Monday 16th August: 7pm & 9pm

Wednesday 18th August 7pm & 9pm

Thursday 19th August 7pm & 9pm

Held in the back of a van, August’s meal will be an intimate dining experience that invites diners to literally taste and smell a story. Please come dine with the company members and enjoy a salacious reworking of a Greek myth and a peep into Pasiphae’s love for a bull. There will be live music and the meal will be followed by an after dinner speech on the subject of Love. Places are limited to 5 per sitting so please book in advance by sending an email with your name, number of diners and any dietary requirements you have to: minotaur@kindletheatre.co.uk.

Some audience members may find elements of the meal offensive; we do not recommend this meal for under 18s.

Saturday 3rd July. The closing meal of BE FESTIVAL, Birmingham

Kindle served up the finale meal to the brilliant BE Festival - 30th June – 3rd July

On Saturday 3rd July we served a celebratory meal at the BE Festival venue: Stans Cafe’s AE Harris. The meal was based on previous work EAT YOUR HEART OUT and designed in collaboration with Blanch & Shock.

We would like to say a big thank you to Associate artist Nina Smith and Blanch & Shock, Rita, Kate and everyone in the BE Festival team.

Tuesday 18th May: Courtship & Sex May Day Meal, Birmingham

‘…it was such an amazing evening. The food was intriguing, tasty and encouraged much debate. The music was evocative and enjoyable and the dancing was a real treat, I’d forgotten how much fun it can be dancing with complete strangers!

I thought the whole evening was so thoughtfully developed and this was clear in it’s execution, there was such a warm, relaxed and intimate atmosphere and the conversation flowed nicely between different groups. It was refreshing to have such a unique experience and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

Congratulations on a great success!’ Natalie Wilson, Diner

As a belated May day celebration the event’s theme was Courtship & Sex and diners were invited to eat and experience a theatrical menu inspired by the research. Entering into the industrial A.E Harris warehouse they were greeted by…

…the subtle smell of tobacco smoke & lavender to the sounds of love songs, followed by lubricated labial pasta, a good mouthful from a 6ft schlong and climaxed in a creamy kiss before jigging around our Human May Pole.

We would like to say a big thank you to James, Charlotte and Craig from Stan’s Cafe; to all the ‘Athenian Youths’: Eileen McCarthy, Katherine Goodenough, Kate Kavanagh, Cara Gould, Rita Neveckaite, Cassey North, Alice Pegrum, Olivia Zetterstrom-Sharp and Jo Newman, and to Tony Appleby for photographing the evening.

Click on images below to enlarge.

Wednesday 31st April: Pre Pilot April Fools Eve meal.

Dinner cooked by Kindle for the PILOT and Birmingham artists with an after dinner speech on ‘The fear of April Fools Day: The Fool vs the fooled’ or ‘Dangerous food’

On the menu was:

A hearty tomato, bean and kale stew, Bastardised potato dauphinoise, Leaves and bread.

PILOT and birmingham artists eat dinner in A.E Harris.

An Edible Performance

Eat Your Heart Out – Teaser from Kindle Theatre on Vimeo. Video: Steven Davies

EAT YOUR HEART OUT performed at A..E Harris Building 29th October – 8th November 2009

In the last remaining corner of the human world, three cooks are summoned to create a celebratory meal using only the carcass of their once great kitchen. Inspired by the Baroque era, Flemish paintings and the contemporary obsession with Armageddon, Eat Your Heart Out mixes the leftovers of disaster with the ceremony of the dining room in a performance that invites the audience to literally eat the story.

Combining live music, immersive staging and a highly original menu, Eat Your Heart Out is an edible performance conceived, devised and performed by Kindle in collaboration with artists and experts from a host of different creative fields. Set in the vast expanse of Stan’s Café’s new warehouse space in the Jewellery Quarter, the set was an apocalyptic junkyard made from Birmingham’s own rubbish and installed by designers Tony Appleby and Claire Wearn. Multimedia design company filmcafe installed a pepper’s ghost affect  Queen, illuminated the set with actor controlled lighting that included: paint pot spot lights, swinging blubs and an exploding bicycle wheel/car windscreen chandelier. Regional composer-musician Phill Ward worked with Kindle performer-musicians to create a score that reinvented the decadence of the Baroque era and the unforgettable menu was conceived and delivered by food designers Blanch & Shock.

“Recalling the orgiastic ritual of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen, and taking its stylistic cues from the vivid carnality of a Caravaggio, Kindle Theatre’s work in progress is a brilliant, interactively staged slab of grotesque…” Read more of Latest 7 review here

“One of the most fantastic stage sets I’ve ever seen” Brighton Argus on EAT YOUR HEART OUT

A Studio version of EAT YOUR HEART OUT was premièred at BITE SIZE Festival, Warwick Arts Centre on 6th March. Click on images to enlarge:

Kindle Theatre – Eat Your Heart Out Studio. BITE SIZE from chris and keir on Vimeo. Video: Keir Williams.

Installation extracts of EAT YOUR HEART OUT have been performed at:

Birmingham, PILOT nights @ A.E Harris Building,  Thursday 2nd July 2009, 7.30pm (www.pilotnights.co.uk)

Brighton, COACHWERKS, Friday 4th and Saturday 5th September 2009, 7.30pm & 8.30pm.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT Birmingham was supported by Arts Council England and the Sir Barry Jackson Trust. Development has been supported by PILOT, China plate theatre and COACHWERKS.

images by Steven Davies, Claire Wearn (Installation) and Alicja Rogalska (BITE SIZE)

Click on the thumnails to see images of the R&D in December 2008. We worked for two weeks in a warehouse space in Digbeth and then invited guests to a final dinner. We roasted six pheasants in metal fire bins, boiled red cabbage in buckets, and fried devilled kidneys on hot coals. We served the feast in a yurt (a delight after the freezing cold warehouse) withlive music and singing

In May 2009, Kindle Theatre collaborated with filmcafe, Tony Appleby and the digital planetarium at Birmingham’s Thinktank, Millenium Point to showcase the first scene from The Balham Ladies Amateur Astronomy Club, a neo-traditional play set between 1835 and 2009, in which three women struggle for Enlightenment and emancipation in the man-made world of the sciences. Using innovative fulldome content shot by Steve Davies of filmcafe, and Kindle’s playful, intimate style of audience interaction, the invited guests were hushed into the planetarium to attend the inaugural meeting of the Balham Ladies Amateur Astronomy Club. With the night sky opening up on the dome above them, they witness a demonstration of meteor showers disintegrating into confusion, exasperation and sublime terror.  What is truth?

“I thoroughly enjoyed, as ever with Kindle performances, the sense of event, of occasion and of a complete experience; the show began the moment we all began accumulating at the bottom of the elevator, long before we arrived in the Planetarium. What I took away with me from the event was certainly a sense of the potential that space offers and the potential impact the interplay of those two media – film and theatre – might offer an audience in that space.” Audience Member

Keep an eye out for the next stage…

Visit www.filmcafe.co.uk to watch a showreel of the event, and let us know if you’d like Balham to come to you!

The Ride Home was commissioned by South Birmingham PCT

Our third project was In My Father’s House, which we made in four Church of England churches in the West Midlands before touring to Edinburgh (August 2007), Warwick Arts Centre (May 2008) and Battersea Arts Centre (July 2008). We very much saw the rituals of the church and the habits of its inhabitants as a form of theatre, and so we took our theatre and merged it with theirs. We were fascinated by churches, as buildings with a very specific function that were more accessible to us than official rehearsal spaces.

Exploring “four women’s relationship to the spiritual Father, biological father, lover and son”, In My Father’s House was our take on the Eucharistic service, in which the women worshipped the plum, a metaphor for the body, with its skin (skin), flesh (body) and pit (soul), and also symbolised faithfulness and independence. The audience were welcomed into the ladies daily service: celebrating life and preparing for death.

“Like a dream state…the magic of absolute ritual” Audience member, BAC

“There is a totality to Kindle Theatre’s performance. They have created a piece of theatre in which they immerse their audience” Stage MUST SEE

“David Lynch meets the Wickerman meets the Women’s Institute” The Birmingham Post

‘Underland’ was a site specific performance specially comissioned by World Heritage Site Clearwell Caves, Forest of Dean and made in collaboration with Pentabus Theatre. An adaptation of the myth of Persephone, the performance featured original musical compositions and incorporated folklore from the Forest of Dean area. We met poachers and miners and a man who believed that the world will end in 2012 due to the Mayan calendar, and who showed us the laylines through the forest. Each performance took over a hundred audience members through the caves as the story of this fateful marriage unfolded.

“The atmospheric thrills were visceral and unexpected at every turn as we descended further underground – a lesson in pomegranate-winemaking from an alcove here, a maiden zinging a harp on a rock in a blue-lit water-filled cavern there…” – Owen Adams, guardian.co.uk

The months leading up to the ceremony saw the arrival of X Nation to Birmingham, infiltrating trains, buses, trams, centenary square, snow hill station and the bull ring. The culminating out door parade was made up of over 80 of the X Nation participants including wrestlers, singers, a samba band, Bollywood dancers, dohl drummers, performers, cheerleaders and a magician.

Kindle would like to thank all the participants involved and Orit Azaz for her mentoring.

www.festival-xtremebuilding.org.uk

In 2006, Kindle collaborated with eight Midlands-based artists on a combined-art project that celebrated the history of Chance Bro’s Glassworks, Smethwick, Birmingham. The installation/performance was built on the sixth floor of the disused glass factory and was our adaptation of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Great Exhibition had been held in the original Crystal Palace which Chance Bro’s had glazed, and in it were housed Britain’s proudest inventions in a showcase of the Industrial Revolution. In our version, the characters themselves were the exhibits, alongside the artists’ commissioned works, in a bittersweet salute to the industrial powerhouse that was Birmingham, from the graveyard of one of its forgotten buildings.

“The glasshouse is not conventional theatre” Ciaran Ryan, BBC

Collaborating artists:

Iris Bertz – Willow Sculpture

Geoff Broadway – Light Installation

Steve Davies – Film

Keir Williams – TV/Film/Sound

Annie Mahtani – Electro-acoustic composition

Lynette Clee – Photography

Kimberly Trusty – Poetry

Jerome Harrington – Glass Book Display