The Courage to Create: Food, Alchemy, Objects and

Abstract

The major conference gathering/festival organized in January 1994 in Cardiff was one of the Points of Contact conferences and was a significant departure from simply bringing theatre and performance into contact with other disciplines. The title was ‘Points of Contact: Performance, Food, and Cookery’. The series began with one on theatre and anthropology. Then one on nature and culture and on politics and ideology, shamanism and ritual. But sometime in 1992 or 1993, Richard Gough began to think of organizing a major gathering to bring scholars, food historians, restaurateurs, performance artists, theatremakers and food artists together in a festival. It was bigger than a conference because it was a whole programme of performance works, very much inspired by some of the discussions he’d had with Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett on his trips to New York. And it was an extraordinary gathering, truly, in terms of the range of presentations that were garnered.