FEAST FORUM
A performance feast play, workshop series
and sculptural installation
Feast Forum – The Sculptural audio installation
Sculptural two-channel audio installation, time loop 15-45 mins, scripts, workshops and interviews took place in 2017, 2018, and 2019 (2021).
Track 1 : Features a reading of the play, Feast Forum as performed and created at the Zutphen Penitentiary in 2019, the process of which is described below.
Track 2: Features excerpts of conversations and interviews with detainees, guards and prison administrators at PI Zutphen, an anonymous guard at PI Vught, Femke Kaulingsfrek social researcher, Richard Korver Lawyer and advocate for Victim’s Rights, Young in Prison NGO formerdirector Jaap van der Spek, and a ‘Young in Prison’ Consultant.
The feast table and its forum have played a central role throughout Transversal Scepters. In multiple workshops, different people working on, or living within the justice system were gathered at the table from regular citizens, to detained people, guards and prison administrators in order to discuss and imagine alternative choices for justice beyond prisons. The audience is welcome to gather round the table and hear their voices while they are having a shared dinner of symbolic foods that represent elements of justice and associations of healing.
Audience members can also read the script in either Dutch or English and the accompanying recipes that the participants chose that reminded them of home, of freedom of choice.
The table was conceived by Juliacks. The ceramics and audio score was made by Juliacks. The table was fabricated by Chloe Rozy Sapelkine.
ADAPTED INTO PLAYS
READ AND PERFORMED COLLECTIVELY AMIDST A GASTRONOMIC FEAST LADEN WITH NARRATIVE AND HISTORIC SYMBOLS.
The Spring of 2019 began a series of workshop and performance feasts leading toward the creation of a play at the Zutphen prison. The first workshop was based in design thinking, where participants— mainly detained people and a few workers (guards, administrators, spiritual counsel) imagined both ways to improve the prison system as well as think of justice beyond confinement.
The second workshop was a fiction workshop where participants created characters, and imagined different scenarios.
The two workshops combined in the realisation of the fictional play below.
See documentation of first workshops in the Zutphen Prison in the Netherlands here: http://www.taak.me/activity/juliacks-menu-transversal-scepters-feast-forum-a-dinner-play/
(in Dutch please view with Chrome browers for Translation if necessary)
Feast Forum – The play
Set in the future, in the year 2419, in the Netherlands, where there has been a peaceful revolution and former detainees of prisons are now leaders of the house of representatives. These leaders are in a legislative session and discuss the options of various consequences for how people responsible for crimes should be sentenced after being found guilty, around a table laden with many options.
This play was written with input from a series of workshops about the future of justice : one with ‘everyday’ citizens in Amsterdam, and two with detainees and staff from a Dutch prison in Zutphen in the spring of 2019. Participants anonymously and voluntarily contributed their perspective to this project and were informed about how their input would be communicated to other groups in the justice system, and the public.
