Spring Gathering

To celebrate the (long-awaited) arrival of Viennese Spring, we organised a Spring-themed Salon. As always, performances had to involve at least two of the senses, with a mixture of food based contributions and performances. We opened the event with a sensory experiment, where all the guests were served wine with a backdrop of live improvised guitar music (performed by Ned Stranger) and asked whether the taste changed with the mood of the music. Then we dived into a fantastic series of performances:

The Rite of String: a human sculpture crafted by fine artist Anya Vero, using members of the audience, a ball of red string and Stravinsky’s dramatic masterpiece the Rite of Spring as a soundtrack. Participants had the unusual sensation of both consuming the art and forming part of it.

Spring Food Paintings: participants were arranged into groups, each member picking a different “role” at random - including smearer, dropper, scraper, dabber - and given various food-based paints and hard ingredients to create food paintings on the theme of ‘Spring’. The result: five beautiful pieces of art that everyone could devour, first with their eyes, then with their mouths (and hunks of bread)...

Cherry-Spitting Contest: Stephan Sutor combined the visuals of watching competitive sport with the sound of cherry stone hitting (or missing) a metal bowl and the taste/sensation of chewing through the flesh of the cherry itself. The result of a two-team contest was a tense finish that went down to the final spit but left everyone ultimately as winners. 

Sea Salt Soundscape: Maria Mondelos transported everyone to the coast and crafted a meditation that had everyone crawling across the floor on hands and feet to taste from a pile of sea salt, against a backdrop of sea breeze and the sound of waves.

Spring in Peru: Sofia Sabiduria and Caroline Zimm brought the magic of Peruvian cuisine and culture to us with a serving of “Causa Limeña”, a Peruvian spring entree made from potato, lemon, mayonnaise and avocado, with traditional Peruvian outfits and a talk about its origins.