Ian Abbott previews Mamoru Iriguchi’s Eaten

Mamoru Gets Eaten…By A Narrator, Dance Base, November 25, 2016

Mamoru Iriguchi as Lionel in Eaten (photo: Ian Abbott)

Ian Abbott saw Mamoru Iriguchi’s Eaten as a sharing in November last year. He has since added to his preview in advance of Iriguchi’s performance of Eaten at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

What I offer here is an outsider’s inside perspective on Mamoru Iriguchi’s continued research and development of Eaten, his work for families. Eaten explores what eating and being eaten mean in nature as well as on our tables; its particular focus is on the offering of one’s body (wholly or partially) for consumption by others.

Continuing to work with long-term collaborators Nikki Tomlinson and Selina Papoutseli, Iriguchi’s Eaten is a series of observations and reflections on the wider context, culture and debate around what we eat. Until now Iriguchi has taken on multiple roles that include the eater, the eaten and many others in between. However, with Tomlinson and Papoutseli he is looking to introduce an additional presence of narrator to see how it might shift the dynamic and reading of the work.

Narrators usually adopt one of two roles: the omniscient and the limited. In the former, the narrator does not participate in the story but knowing everything that has ever happened or will happen views it from outside, supplying comments and evaluations often directly to the audience with such techniques as flashback and anticipation to convey understanding and to heighten any necessary tension. In the latter, the narrator is a protagonist embedded inside the story and is thus restricted to interactions that do not transcend the chronology of the work; we can’t know anything of which the narrator is unaware.

Iriguchi often presents solo work that challenge ideas of duality. In 4D Cinema he played with time, bent perceptions of what is live and what is recorded whilst playing versions of himself and Marlene Dietrich. In Eaten he is again skewering two-ness through his choice of language, illustrative examples and performance persona. There is a charm and a total believability when in the first half of the 25-minute sharing he plays Lionel (the Mamoru-eating lion) and Mamoru (Lionel’s main course). With a slight shift of vocal range and anatomical straightening the oscillation between the two roles is clear and what we get is a philosophically and morally complex conversation delivered in simple and precise detail about who should eat and/or be eaten.

After a delightful section where the joy of unbridled movement takes over as Mamoru teaches Lionel to waltz, there is a short section that exemplifies the relationship between narrator and other:

Mamoru:        “I feel strange Lionel, I’m melting”
Lionel:             “We’re melting together”

With stillness in play and Lionel pushing raspberries out through his lips like an almighty poop, we see emerging from Lionel’s bottom a black morph-suited Professor Poo of Pooniversity. Eaten’s idea of melting between time, bodies, and first and third persons has an absurd and workable logic that constantly reveals itself like a matryoshka doll. Our identities are not fixed, our food is not fixed, our life is not fixed: why should our narration and performances be fixed?

At this moment Tomlinson (previously acting as a temporary, seated narrator in the first half) steps into the dormant Lionel costume; it is now the turn of Professor Poo to drive the narrative forward in the second half as Lionel/narrator takes a fixed position, barely moving for the remainder of the sharing. Professor Poo asks children and grown-ups what we should and shouldn’t eat whilst delivering the telling line: “You aren’t just what you eat; you are what you eat eats.”

Eaten posits different beliefs and it is left open for the audience to interpret what is right for them. The narrator lightly frames the landscape so Mamoru/Lionel/Professor Poo is able to riff between the bowels of logic and absurdism.

With Tomlinson, Papoutseli and Iriguchi there are already three narrative stomachs that Eaten has to pass through before anything emerges on stage. It’s clear that as a solo performer Iriguchi doesn’t like to make work alone and the presence of Tomlinson and Papoutseli over the past decade in the studio has created a structure of challenge, nurture and support which ensures there’s no mixing up of the I, your and you with who’s who and who’s poo.

As post-truth politics and fake news cycles continue to grow, the melting narrative of Eaten can help us ask from whom do we want to receive our food narrative: a poo, a lion, the media or the government? There are plenty of unreliable narrators in the global food narrative, but what Iriguchi is offering for consumption through Eaten is a considered, open and downright hilarious perspective on the impact of food and human choices on our planet.