Eating and Feeding Made Strange

In this essay, I linger in the entangled relationship of feeding and eating made strange, disturbing, and transformative, through the composition of three event scores to be performed within the site of a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). Inspired by scores of Fluxus artists that place a frame around the ordinary as extraordinary, I situate each score around an apparently involuntary and neutral bodily act, and I have arranged them along the established narrative plot of feeding and eating: Produce food from one’s body to feed another, swallow food, and move food along the digestive system toward its story’s end. By composing scores to be performed within the ICU as a theatrical space, I am attempting to defamiliarize feeding and eating and to invite new mythic narratives to emerge. This creative experiment is a step in asking: What are the social systems that produce orders of feeding and eating as fact? What are the dominant narratives of feeding and eating, and how do these narratives limit perceptions of humanity? Finally, how might performance complicate notions of intensive care?