“This article examines how food can be used to access the zombie in performance as a means to reconfigure the eating body.”
– explains Dr Jenny Lawson of Leeds University,UK, describing her data-gathering project Eating Minds which was undertaken in 2014 in Stockton UK.
“The personal zombie-food-fantasies disclosed in Eating Minds were evocative of private or guilty eating habits, and enabled the performers to push personal, physical and cultural boundaries with food and eating. Through timed ‘zombie-gorges’, the performers consumed chicken skin, cartilage and unusual food combinations such as steak mince and peanut butter, bit into whole oranges, ate while crouching on hands and knees, severed meat pies and dived head first into bowls of jelly and custard.”
The project was complimented by a zombie-performance-eating sequence entitled : ‘Dining with Undeath’
– in which
“[…] the performing-body has been used to enter ‘into composition with’ fantasy zombie affects through the real context of eating: ‘what is real is the becoming itself ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 262).”
See: ‘Eating Minds: fantasizing undead, becoming zombie in performance’ in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Volume 34, 2014 – Issue 3: Zombies & Performance