By Domingo Ferrandis
We barely got on two feet
We began to migrate through the savannah
[...] We are a species on a journey
We have no belongings, but luggage
[...] We are alive because we are in motion
we are never still
We are transhumant, we are
Parents, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants
[...] I'm not from here, but neither are you
From nowhere at all and from everywhere a little
Movement -Jorge Drexler-
Can you write a play about a cupcake? …
Yes, obviously yes. Not only a scenic piece, it gives for a series of 8, with subplots and choral stories.
The cupcake effect is a pretext to bring the stories of the characters to the present. Food makes us feel, makes us remember, makes us connect, it's a fact.
The cupcake is the plot line to tell you a story based on a true story that occurred in the 20th century and that led some people to leave their homes.
A cupcake is a time machine through which the public travels to the past and returns to the present.
Can you imagine traveling to a specific moment in the lives of the characters by smelling and tasting the favorite dishes of their childhoods?
A story that begins with a cupcake that takes us to a place, a time, and a fact. The flavors and aromas given off by the food will trigger the plot, a storm of reactions in the brains of the protagonists will take the public on a trip to those days they remember.
Cuisine and theater hook us with emotions, and from them, our memories and thoughts. Emotive and autobiographical memory and identity, food and olfactory/gustatory maps.
Kitchen and the autobiographical umbilical cord. If we wrote our biography, we would realize that food is always there, as props for an emotional scene. Who hasn't uploaded a post to Instagram or Facebook or shared a meal on WhatsApp? Why? not because of the food, but because of the emotions experienced while enjoying it.
Have you ever wondered why there are smells and tastes that transport you back in time? What is the link between emotional memory and food? How is our culinary memory built and what relationship does this have with identity? That is the Proustian effect; «an association that our brain makes automatically when we perceive certain sensations through the evocative taste (smell/taste) that immediately transports you to a particular moment in your life».
The Persistence of Memory. Salvador Dalí · Spain, 1931
Proust's cupcake or Proustian effect is a human memory phenomenon where a specific food awakens an involuntary memory that is unintentionally evoked after experiencing random stimuli.
The novel By Swann's Way, is the first part of the series of seven "In Search of Lost Time (1913 and 1927)" written by Marcel Proust. In the novel, the protagonist, one day, overwhelmed with sadness, tastes a Commerce madeleine dipped in tea and is suddenly transported back to his childhood summers in Combray, a small town in northwestern France. In more detail, he went back to Sunday mornings when his uncle would give him a sip of his own morning tea or tisane.
Its aromatic/gustatory memory is actually a recollection «recollection of feelings of care and familiarity experienced in childhood, rather than with the taste itself». Proust manages to convey in great detail not only what is perceived, but also what is remembered, autobiographical memory «the repeated and constant links between perception, feelings and memory». Pixar adapted Proust's Madeleine episode for the animated film Ratatouille, in which the eponymous stewed vegetable dish immediately transports a cynical food critic to the dinner table at his childhood home.
What do we investigate? The perception-identity-memory-emotion connection
The human movement that has transformed European countries into a melting pot of human languages, traits, and colours. And that has turned our markets into a fair of nations, to supply a population that does not detach itself from the food of its childhood, as a way of not losing its identity and its bond with its roots.
When we remember childhood foods, we associate them with homemade food, tasty and prepared with love, what is known today as Comfort food «food that provides nostalgic or sentimental value». However, it has nothing to do with that, but with the emotions, the events experienced, and with whom we experience them. An experiment with childhood foods and how emotional memory works confirms this.
In another experiment conducted by psychologist Rachel Herz of Brown University, people were given three types of -triggers- «visual in the form of a film», «a short sound» and «a scent», and asked what memory autobiographical stories had associated with them. Memories triggered by scent were judged to be more emotional and evocative, but not vivid or especially accurate. By uniting theater and food, we marry the empathy of the present and the emotional recollection of the past.
Why are we able to remember our childhood by tasting a cupcake? Neurogastronomy tries to answer this question, and understand the connection between emotions, emotional and autobiographical memory, taste and smell. Apparently, the key is in the network of apatites, institutes, survival, pleasure, and emotions. Brain regions in orchestration such as the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, neocortex and intestine facilitate this beautiful symphony of yesterday's images through today's sensations.
Perhaps it is not so important if we remember the smell and taste of that cupcake as happened to Marcel Proust's character, but rather what that memory implies in the (re)construction of something lived with intensity, and which is part of a important piece of my personal history, and how we constitute our personal narratives based on these links. After all, as the philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard says; “Memory has two functions: one factual and the other to create and maintain emotional links with the past”. That is to say «the act of remembering and bringing back information» and of collecting «arouse the emotional components of the past».
In the end, we are not so much what we eat, but what we remember that we ate, says the British philosopher Julian Baggini. In sum; «flashbacks to moments lived, with whom, when, what happened, why, etc.,»
But food not only has markers of personal and autobiographical experience, but also the social, cultural, and customs of a community. An example is the immigrants and how on their arrival at a new home in another country, they bring their food to their community. The movement of people brings the movement of food. The tomato, for example, did not arrive spontaneously in Spain, it was cultivated by the Mexicas, who named it xïctomatl «fruit with a navel» hence tomato. There is a map of the distinctive smells and flavors of cities, where we could intuit the majority population of that neighborhood.
All in all, Cuisine and Theater is the union between the autobiographical memory of the testimonies/actors revived by food for life and the transformation of these stories into a fictional narrative. The emotional/episodic evocation through food will be the theatrical plot to stage the stories that exist behind the movement of people. The Proustian effect of intimate dining is the ideal pretext for the Culinary project to create a buffet of history, a play around the table.
If we could contribute with theater and cuisine to deal with the movement of people, we would advance in the understanding of particular situations. We could understand the origin of many of the situations that led a person to leave his home and the people he loves. We could generate plots and pleasant sensations through theater and food to help process difficult situations from the past, empathizing with fiction and tasting the dishes of life that the characters embody.
To achieve this, we will introduce the public on a journey of sensations, with the intention of connecting with its most primitive, emotional, and memorable parts, we will have a restaurant as a stage, where characters and the public will not collide with the fourth wall, where the props will be malleable and edible by characters and the audience. And where the plot, conflicts, and outcomes will arise spontaneously in the course of the evening.
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