UCLA

This dissertation, "Acting Edible: The Taste of Performance on a Damaged Planet," examines the intersection of food studies and performance, addressing urgent environmental concerns. I use terroir, a popularized yet historical French word often translated to the taste of place, to analyze the contradictions, anxieties, and aesthetics of contemporary performances that utilize food, from transnational performance art to global entertainment venues. Following theater and performance studies scholars who position food as a performance medium, the dissertation focuses on performance and media that activate the senses, digestion, and eating through edible matter. Braiding new materialist and feminist science and technology studies with performance studies, Chapter 1 introduces terroir as a framework for capitalist and anthropocentric articulations of performance. The terroir of particular foodstuffs is rehearsed throughout the dissertation to facilitate analysis of social relations produced through production and consumption, alongside critical ecological interventions that attend to urgencies in climate violences. I turn to vital matters that offer new scales of analysis for alimentary performance: microbes, microplastics, and a broader revisit to the remains of performance. Chapter 2, Microbes, positions microbes as key figures in contemporary displays of food performance, reconfiguring theatricality in the Probiotic Turn and complicating multispecies and feminist science and technology studies claim for play with nonhuman partners. Chapter 3, Microplastics, wades through the emergent anxieties about microplastics in food and the methodological failures of seeking microplastics in performance as a defining matter of 21st-century immersive performance and entertainment. The framework opens up in Chapter 4, Theatrical Remains, to theorize the convergence of scientific research space and theatrical and tourist space in sites such as Biosphere 2, Disneyworld, and other future-thinking research sites. Ultimately, by examining performance through the microscopic components of food, a new scale of analysis is introduced in conceptualizing the ecological violence and possibility of performance.