Clout Theatre to Bring FEAST to Battersea Arts Centre This February

Award-winning physical theatre company Clout Theatre presents their acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe show, FEAST, an absurd inquest into food from the hunter gatherer to the Instagrammer. Devised by the company and directed by Mine Cerci, the show runs 2-6 February at the Battersea Arts Centre. Press Night: 2 February 9pm.

Fresh from their acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Clout Theatre deliver a history course on food from foraging to #foodporn served in three chapters: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner. From primitive struggle, through the baroque excess to technological perversion, how has our relationship with nourishment changed throughout history? This wordless and grotesque show employs physical theatre, clowning and multimedia to delve into the evolution of humanity, exposing consumerism's excesses and extremes. With cascades of milk, raw steaks, live feed webcams and plenty of soil FEAST is garnished with abundant anarchy and more than a hint of cannibalism.

Drawing on research and influences that vary from 'feeder porn' to Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, the films of Peter Greenaway to Turkish communist hunger strikes, this is Clout's most extreme piece, taking an abstract yet cutting knife to modern barbarism and our dislocated relationship with food.

Director Mine Cerci said: "This is a show that indulges in needless excess. That is what humans do. We are interested in how we build our own prison, whether that is environmental destruction through over farming, health obsession or obesity. Through our work we push reality to its grotesque physical extreme. In the case of food wastage and human perversion, these are already so extreme in life that we have had to push far to distort the mirror."

Clout Theatre's past shows include the Total Theatre Award nominated The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity (2013) and How a Man Crumbled (2012). The company live and work in London and Istanbul, and with members from Scotland, Russia, France and Turkey, they make bold theatre for an international audience. Their shows blend absurdist humour, violence, mess, and visual poetry, and deal with the sublime and ridiculous in equal measure.

The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity will also be staged in London this February (17-21) as part of The Vault Festival. This absurdist piece follows three characters in a post-suicide support group stranded in a purgatorial afterlife. Ignoring the symptoms of their own deaths, the characters wander through a plastic wasteland of tea drinking and domestic disputes that lasts thousands of years.

Clout Theatre's work is informed by their training at École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and their mixed backgrounds varying from professional figure skating to the political sciences, Russian naturalistic acting to butoh.

Director Mine Cerci lives and works in Istanbul, she has an academic background having gained a Masters in Theatre Studies at La Sorbonne recently translated Jacques Lecoq's Le Corps Poetique into Turkish for the first time.

For more information, visit www.clout-theatre.com.

IF YOU GO:

FEAST

Running Time: 1 hr | Suitable for ages 14+

Directed by Mine Cerci

Devised by Mine Cerci, George Ramsay, Sacha Plaige, Jennifer Swingler

Set & Costume Design by Naomi Kuyck-Cohen

Lighting, Sound and Video Design by Erik Perera Produced by Helen Goodman

Cast: Adrian Charles, Sacha Plaige and Jennifer Swingler

At Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London SW11 5TN

2 - 6 February 9pm

£12 (£9 concs) | www.bac.org.uk | 020 7223 2223

Need more UK Regional Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...