Partnering with Agnes & Hoss Design Studio, 63rd Street Farm, Rollin Greens and a local brewer, The Catamounts will use the ABC award to expand their popular FEED events-- integrating performance with locally-sourced food and artisanal drink.
FEED started as the brainchild of Lauren Shepard, Associate Artistic Director of The Catamounts.
“Food and performance once went hand in hand,” Shepard says. “A banquet of old involved music, and stories accompanied dinner. To some degree, this is still true, but we live in an age of microwave TV dinners, and it’s easy to forget the art of dining, the art of cooking, the art of listening, the art of live theatre.
“FEED is not dinner theater. It's not 'dinner, then theater' with a separate performance of a story acted out on stage. Rather it's all one story, one in which the food and drink are also performers, with relevant bits of information to share and emotions to evoke. It's a cohesive narrative."
This concept has been “creatively inspiring” to Amanda Berg Wilson, Co-founder and Artistic Director of The Catamounts. “"For one of the FEED events, we selected a story about a woman revisiting the struggles of her past by reading her old diaries. Chef Zachary Wilkinson suggested we do a salmon course to accompany the reading. Because salmon swim upstream to their birthplace to spawn, and that struck him as a parallel to the author's struggle. It’s completely outside of my realm of thinking, and I LOVE that."
“FEED brings together such varied disciplines in a refreshing and invigorating way,” says audience member Jeremy Make. “Dance, music, theater, food, performance art, they all combine to make for a night that's at once delightful and challenging.”
FEED has been so successful, in fact, that they sell out weeks in advance. “The ABC funding will allow us to add more seatings and incorporate the FEED ethos into the traditional plays we stage, offering community meals after our full-length performances,” Berg Wilson says.
“We’ll also be adding more local partners [like an interior designer to create sophisticated environments], and investing in some costly items like chairs and tables so that we can really build FEED’s future.”
While the FEED events have taken place on farms, at grange halls, in the back of breweries, ultimately The Catamounts plan to open up their own venue: a performance space with a specialty tap room-- aiming for an opening in Fall, 2015.
