Formation 2005 Purpose Avant-pop theatre Artistic director(s) Carmen C. Wong | Type Theatre group Location Washington, D.C. | |
banished? productions is an avant-pop performance company based in Washington, D.C., that combines mass media with audience immersion in productions that play with text and form to explore the boundaries of theater and performance art. The company is perhaps best known for its Futurist performance piece A Tactile Dinner.
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History
banished? productions was founded in 2005 by a group of artists in Washington, D.C. Led by Carmen C. Wong, their first production was a one-night staged reading of Adam de la Halle's Greenwood Follies & Other Old French Plays, funded with a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. With help from a grant by the Embassy of Spain in Washington, they were then able to stage their first full production, Desire Caught by the Tail, a surreal and rarely produced play by Pablo Picasso, as part of the inaugural Capital Fringe Festival in 2006.
Other critically acclaimed works include a production of Charles Mee's post-modern play bobrauschenbergamerica and a co-production premier of My Comic Valentine, a dramatization of 1950s romance comics. banished? productions has contributed art installations to local venues and has produced an original audio walk about DC's Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods called Walk with Me.
A Tactile Dinner
The company is perhaps best known for its original multi-media food immersion play A Tactile Dinner, which debuted at the Capital Fringe Festival in 2009. This tongue-in-cheek dinner theater was inspired by The Futurist Cookbook, written in 1932 by the founder of the Italian Futurism art movement Filippo Marinetti. Patrons were "exposed to a banquet of both the palate and the mind", Futurist meals that included "aerofood infused with irony, cast-selected dinner jackets, and an iconoclastic rant against the evils of pasta". In 2011 their Tactile Dinner Car combined Futurist gastronomy with the resurgence of urban food truck culture. In this "crazy sociological experiment playing by its own rules" that is "best enjoyed with an adventurous palate and a thorough appreciation for the ridiculous", theatergoers and bystanders ordered surreal concoctions from a futurist food car reminiscent of designs by Buckminster Fuller