2009-03-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

What: The Cooking Show

When: Fri. and Sat. April 24, 25: 7pm and 9pm shows

Where: Temescal Arts Center, Oakland, CA 48th and Telegraph, 8 blocks north on Telegraph of
MacArthur BART, www.temescalartscenter.org

How Much: $10, no one turned away for lack of funds, audience limited to 20 people per show

Who: choreography: Margaret Cromwell music direction/composition: Ben Finley

Reservations: email number of tickets, date and time of show, and name to thecookingshowoakland@gmail.com
Please pick up tickets fifteen minutes prior to showtime--and please note, we are cash only.

Last minute questions: call Margaret at (510) 213-9113

Who and What

2009-03-06T15:01:00.000-08:00

Choreography: Margaret Cromwell with the dancers
Music Composition/Direction: Ben Finley
Dancers: Margaret Cromwell, Janet Das, Amy Lewis, Nadia Oka
Musicians: Ben Finley, Zach Parkes, Micah McClain, Zack Christiansen
Costume Design/Construction: Elizabeth Baum
Video: Brett Marty
Video Sound: Ben Finley
PR photography: Michael Meyer

The Cooking Show: an explanation

2009-03-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

On April 24th and 25th, 2009, Margaret Cromwell and Ben Finley present a culinary and kinetic event that merges dance and live music with vegetable soup. Their genre-bending brainchild, “The Cooking Show,” thrives on the unexpected combination of vegetable soup with theater and the pairing of modern dance with music ranging from jazz to funk. Taking place at the intimate Temescal Arts Center with a 7pm and a 9pm showing each night, “The Cooking Show” capitalizes on the smallness of the venue to provide an evening of both visual and gustatory theater.

With “The Cooking Show,” Cromwell and Finley simultaneously engage, entertain, and eventually feed their audience. The vegetables are chopped, sautéed, boiled, and seasoned on stage by the dancers throughout the 40-minute performance, and finally served to the audience at their fruition as a vegan, organic vegetable soup. While the soup is cooking, various dance vignettes take place that parallel the soup’s progress. The music is live and performed by “The Cooking Show’s” own “Paprika Sneakas.”

Cromwell’s choreography is marked by an unusual blend of awkwardness, humor and poignancy. She draws inspiration from the body’s unique assemblage of mobility and inflexibility. The body’s limitations become like rules in a game, and her movement originates from working towards the most unexpected and expressive possibilities. She uses her idiosyncratic vocabulary in pursuit of images that are simultaneously bizarre, communicative, and mysterious.

Finley’s music fluctuates from backbeat groovy to oddly pensive, and from nostalgic simplicity to tunes bordering on the surreal. It continuously evolves to never end up where you expect it too—each section adding a new twist and turn along it’s predestined path. His harmonies sometimes find themselves lining up in an image of beauty and order, only to tumble back down into dissonance and funk.

By the end of the show, all will be well with the world—the soup will be done, the flavors will have yielded up their individual identities and merged, and hopefully Finley and Cromwell will have found their own sense of balance. Dancers and cooks Amy Lewis, Janet Das, and Nadia Oka will join Cromwell onstage. Ben Finley, Zach Parkes, Micah McClain, and Zack Christianson will perform the music.

Reservations are strongly recommended, as audience capacity at each show is about 20.