At Mazí Mas we are absolutely delighted to confirm our three-month residency at Ovalhouse starting from 17th March! Ovalhouse is known for fostering ambitious, innovative and political theatre, and is also home to We are London, a youth-led arts project that bridges the gap between young Londoners from new communities, especially refugees and asylum-seekers, and young Londoners from more established communities. Mazí Mas tries to do the same through food, so Ovalhouse seemed like a natural home for us.
In Ovalhouse’s new Spring Season catalogue they talk about the theme ‘Public/Private’, ending it with this line: ‘Join us publicly, privately, or somewhere in between to figure out where ‘you’ ends and ‘we’ begins.’ We are delighted to be sharing our three month residency with Ovalhouse theatre, and to be bringing the private joys of our chefs in creating their home cooked meals to the shared community experience at the theatre. Stay tuned for further details, menus and updates!
One of the directors of Ovalhouse, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, and our Director Nikandre Kopcke share their thoughts on the intersections between their work and vision.
What is it that makes food and its preparation so important?
RAH ‘Growing up, I spent a lot of time in a tiny Greek village (where my parents still live). Food wasn’t just an interest, or even an obsession – it was a way of life; steaming Spanakoipites stuffed with freshly-gathered wild greens, golden olive oil that looked and tasted like treasure, chewy honey as thick as toffee and chunks of lamb, charred on the wood fire and sprinkled with oregano. Every mouthful was savored, exclaimed over, discussed, critiqued and eventually, fondly remembered with the nostalgia of a lost love.
‘The pleasure of eating together is one of the few universals and in our largely individualistic world, we’re increasingly using the shared experience of eating to fight the isolation of the internet age’
NK ‘Making food is the most basic requirement of human existence, and most of this takes place in the home, in the private sphere, and is carried out, unpaid, by women. When it moves to the public sphere, it perversely – but perhaps unsurprisingly – is mostly done by men, who are called ‘chefs’ and get money and kudos for their work. From a feminist perspective, I think making and sharing food in the public realm is a really powerful way of starting conversations about gendered power relations, especially because it is so accessible. Everyone has to eat, and most people love eating. Food is also a window into lives, cultures and countries that are different, and even distant, from our own. I may never make it to Afghanistan, but having an Afghani meal affords some small and yet quite intimate understanding of what life is like there. I believe that having this kind of experience makes it more difficult to traffic in xenophobic stereotypes; when things are familiar to us we are less able to demonise them.’
How does what you do create a sense of community, and what sustains that?
NK ‘Community’ is a slippery word – it can mean so much and so little. What is special about Mazí Mas is that it brings together different kinds of people, people who wouldn’t ordinarily come into contact with each other. Our chefs are all from different countries and speak different languages, but are united as part of Mazí Mas and find community and kinship in each other and the team. What I find really special is that the spaces we create are a site of social mixing – rich and poor; young and old; all races, religions and nationalities; people who have just arrived in the country and people whose families have been here for generations. That’s rare in London, which is increasingly polarised socioeconomically, and also increasingly spatially segregated. Food is a great leveller, and so lends itself to creating inclusive, democratic spaces.’
RAH ‘What and how we eat has come to be synonymous with who we are and the shared experience of eating together is now an essential part of how we understand and define our place in the world. When I think of it like that, food and theatre don’t seem so different. A society is shaped by the stories it tells to and about itself, and theatres are where we come to do that; to collectively tell our stories and reach a shared understanding of ourselves and our world. They’re a place to make contact with others, to share something, find common ground and feel less alone. Perhaps the shared experiences of theatre and food are two halves of the same whole; the instinct to find our place within a group, to nurture ourselves by feeding body and soul, to share how we understand the world. And perhaps, if we want to change that world, theatre and food are a pretty good place to start.’
The residency begins from the 17th March. Bookings can be made through the Ovalhouse website