I recently met a woman named Kimie Eisele from Tucson, Arizona. She was one of a dozen or so folks who had gathered in the mountain town of Prescott, Arizona, to talk about forming a regional foodways alliance, inspired, very loosely, by the work we’ve been doing since 1999 at the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Of late, a number of similarly inclined efforts have arisen, including a Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance, based out of Chicago, and an Indiana Foodways Alliance, now offering culinary tourism by way of pie trails.
But I digress. During the meeting, which was designed to draw people who approach food from a multitude of perspectives, Kimie talked of how she addressed food through modern dance. She talked about the way her troupe, NEW Articulations, uses stories gathered through the Community Food Bank of Tucson to create collaborative performances that “connect us to each other, our environment, and our everyday lives.”
Her approach is singular. But I was reminded of a similar danceable food moment, staged back in December. Each year during Connections: Food, the annual benefit dinner for Ballet Memphis, director Dorothy Gunther Pugh and her dancers invite a few chefs to cook and a few dancers to dance.
In years past that meant “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” with dessert. Beautiful but somewhat predictable. This year, Pugh tapped choreographer Trey McIntyre and asked him to, taking into account the love of barbecue hereabouts, work with a cache of songs about pork, to develop a dance around, say, chitlins.
McIntyre chose the song “Chitlins” by Huey Piano Smith, a New Orleans artists who, along with female impersonator Bobby Marchand and a backup band called the Clowns, also recoded “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”
Smith’s tribute to pig intestines is a calypso romp of a song wherein backup singers chant “gimme gimme chitlins.” As interpreted by McIntyre and the Ballet Memphis folks, those same pig parts inspired a bacchanal of dance, one that was very carnal, vaguely offal-istic and, yes, beautiful.
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