'Theatre Is A Communion For Me'

Roysten Abel brings his work The Kitchen to Sydney Festival this coming January.

The show consists of 12 drummers, two main characters, live cooking and absolutely no talking. These elements come together to create a meditative atmosphere where the audience can explore cooking, in all senses of the word.

The cooking of food, and taste, are the obvious senses to start with. Abel explains his theory of cooking: “The whole theme is cooking that happens at different plains, so we explore all kinds of cooking. The actual cooking is one part of it. After meditation you are normally given something sweet, so naturally, it is important for us to cook something sweet. It is also a tradition in the temples of Kerala, and in all temples, when you go in for a prayer you offer something to the gods and the gods offer you something in return, and it is often a sweet cooked within the temple.”

The drums add the audible sense to cooking. They have taken almost two years to perfect it. “I’m not a musician myself; it takes time for me to figure it out. You’re going in with an ephemeral idea. You really don’t know what it is, you don’t know how cooking can be interpreted through music, you’re going and trying to figure it out. It’s a very intuitive journey.”

"I don’t want to sound esoteric, but we all come into this world to forge some kind of growth...The growth of the spirit is most important; that’s where the cooking happens.”

Next, you add the performance space and an audience. Abel goes on to say it could be a metaphor for a temple. “There are so many connotations for cooking in a communion space. Theatre is a communion for me, and for the audience to partake in the action that happens on stage... then the tangible part can just add to the experience.” Abel also draws inspiration from everyday living. While touring with other shows in previous years, he recounts stories of moving kitchens that would be used to cook for a travelling cast and crew of more than 50 people.

Travelling and life as a journey is where the next metaphor fits in for cooking; that through the process of living, we cook or cultivate ourselves so that we can be palatable to those around us. “Well, I don’t want to sound esoteric, but we all come into this world to forge some kind of growth. The growth is not physical growth and the biological growth that happens automatically. The growth of the spirit is most important; that’s where the cooking happens.”

Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi has had a great influence over Abel and over this particular work. Abel describes one Rumi poem that follows the plight of a chickpea avoiding being turned into hummus in Chickpea To Cook. “You will be hummus, for people to palate you. That’s the whole journey of the human being. If you look at the whole trajectory, it’s a very mundane trajectory; everybody does it. Other than this work you create for yourself, there is this journey for the sweet in my life, which is cooking.”

So what are we meant to leave with from The Kitchen? “A good taste. It will have to be a unique experience; taste not with your tongue but in every sense of the word.”