Australia has always had a love for cooking shows including, Ready Steady Cook, The Great Australian Bake Off, Masterchef and Jamie's Kitchen. The latter, hosted by chef Jamie Oliver, eventually led to Oliver's 30 Minute Meals, where a healthy, instagram worthy meal could be prepared in 30 minutes. As part of the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival, theatre company Stage Mom (Alberto Di Troia and Hannah Fallowfield) have taken this idea and brought it to the stage with their show, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Cooking For.
A live art culinary event held in an inner north Melbourne home, the evening consists of a Fringe Festival artist cooking one of Oliver's 30 Minute Meals live in front of an audience. "It's interesting how easily cooking translates into a performance setting. Cooking is already highly performative and we're simply pointing it out!" Di Troia and Fallowfield tell me. "The show is an intimate and site-specific experience for audiences, with some very tasty treats and surprising participatory elements that we promise aren't at all scary! We have a number of extraordinary Fringe Artists being taken out of their comfort zone and will hopefully have everyone seeing Jamie Oliver in a completely different light."
Freya McGrath is letting dance take over her mind, body and soul during the Melbourne Fringe Festival. For 24 hours, McGrath will dance non-stop, only being able to have a break when an audience member volunteers themselves to dance in her place. Until someone taps in, she cannot eat, sleep or rest. The 24 Hour Dance Project is an immersive, participatory dance experience for performer and audiences, and the culmination of a long term project that McGrath has been working on.
"The origin of this idea was a fairly simple one. Last year, I took a subject at university which covered performance artwork and endurance work. We focussed on artists like Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, and my friends and I marvelled at the level of commitment and ideology of these artists," she explains. "It prompted me to think about whether I was capable of creating an endurance work - if so, what would I be willing to push my mental and physical limits for? The answer I came to, at first jokingly, was dance."
