Banquet For Pantagruel

Banquet For Pantagruel, Leigha Mason
A Performance and Film Event

With live soundscape by Emil Bognar-Nasdor and a special performance by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

The triumphant nature of every banquet renders it not only a fit conclusion but also a framework for a number of essential events. The body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriches and grows at the world’s expense…Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself.
Mikhail Bakhtin

Banquet For Pantagruel is a transformative environment, which simultaneously seduces and repulses. It revolves around a banquet table vanitas with a new video projected above. Emil Bognar-Nasdor of Dawn of Humans performs a live soundscape to accompany the banquet.

The performance moves through contexts ranging from a peaceful evening sky to the inside of a diseased person’s lungs, in an interrogation of the intersections between social and physical revulsion and the spaces in which they play.

Leigha Mason grounds this visual and spatial displacement by using the performance as a site of production, filming throughout and live-streaming her footage on a projector-screen-pinata, which hangs over the banquet awaiting the climax.

In a contemporary condition where bodies are so casually mutable, why should the politics of every day life be different? If we can recognize any system as constructed so too is it changeable.
-Leigha Mason

Sunday Sessions is a weekly presentation of performance, moving images, dance, music, and discursive programs. Its mission is to embrace live arts as an integral aspect of contemporary practice and ask how art forms, which unfold in the here and now, produce specific ways of thinking and useful means to engage with the broader world. Every Sunday different artists, curators, thinkers and a range of other cultural agents are invited to share their latest projects and ideas with the MoMA PS1 audience.