BANQUET II Will Open in London From Shanghai Collaboration

BANQUET II brings two years of collaboration with thirteen migrant domestic workers in Shanghai to the London stage. Directed by Riccardo Wu and Shuangting Chen, the participatory performance explores how knowledge and care travel between people whose lives are lived far apart.

Thirteen rural-to-urban migrant women in Shanghai are hosting a banquet in London without being physically present. Their invitation travels 10,000 kilometres through recorded testimonies and workshop documentation, reaching performers who welcome audiences to a shared table. Combining live performance with multimedia, BANQUET II asks how a gathering can take place when its hosts remain elsewhere.

The production grows out of two years of fieldwork and ongoing collaboration with the women. Their experiences of paid domestic work in Shanghai and decades of unpaid domestic work at home ground its exploration of social reproduction, the everyday labour through which people are fed, cared for and able to carry on. The women bring to the dialectics of domestic labour through their own lived precarious conditions, alongside their own aspirations and ways of making a liveable future together.

Making wontons becomes a way for this knowledge to move between bodies. Spectators work alongside performers, learning gestures whose subtleties emerge through the absent women workers' everyday practice. A fold changes as someone tries it; a familiar movement brings back a memory of another kitchen. The performance develops through these exchanges, allowing conversation and discovery to shape its rhythm. Everyone present contributes to how the banquet unfolds.

The women's labour also prompts the artists to consider their own work of negotiating with the relationships with others and making an alternative collaboration possible. Preparing the space and attending to participants become part of the production's enquiry into care. What responsibilities come with receiving another person's knowledge? How is that knowledge changed by the circumstances in which it is shared?

The distance between Shanghai and London runs through these questions, alongside differences in working conditions and the initial unfamiliarity between those seated together. Cooking creates a practical basis for reciprocity, while keeping those differences in view.

Get UK Regional Emails & Offers

Get the latest news, discounts & more