Project Plait at portico restaurant, we are invited to take our seats and feed Naomi – the dancer and creator of this unique dance and food extravaganza.
The dance performance is also a six-course meal prepared by chef Nixon Low, a collaboration where contemporary dance announces food courses and smell appeals to the audience instincts to interact with the dancer Naomi Tan.
There is no fourth wall in this dance performance, the audience is seating on the outskirts of a room where the dance takes place, a centre stage we have Naomi Tan dancing through different dishes.
Important to the success of this performance is its timing. The audience is carefully looked after by portico’s staff, allowing everyone to finish one course of adventurous and delicious food with spare time to engage in conversation with the neighboring table as well as with the rest of the dinners.
The audience reactions to the choreography are super interesting to watch because clearly there are some people in this room who have never come across contemporary dance, however, shy at first, everyone understands the direct relationship between food and choreography. Naomi introduces the seven deadly sins or as she puts it the cardinal sins one at the time.
Cleverly, they are presented dissimilarly each time, and so the performance crafts a unique experience of each sin at the time. A solo performance introduces and sometimes reflects on the nature of the dishes and the sins; the co-relations between costume design and lust, for instance, are evident.
Project Plait: Cardinal Sins is replete with clues to what we can expect next.
Cardinal Sins is a very successful dance–food adventurous performance. Across two hours you are invited to learn and reflect on the cardinal sins through the liberation of the 5 human senses.
Sight awakens your appetite for both food and dance, whilst sound cushions your experience comfortably and contextualizes the choreography. Taste is firstly awakened, when the audience passes around the tables a truffle, we smell it deeply and touch it from all angles curious about the next surprise, but this precisely ends up instigating Naomi to dance like a pig on an interactive dance between audience and performer.
Cardinal Sins is the interactive contemporary dance performance that one would expect to see running in a venue for a month, a delightful evening of pungent food celebrated through audience interactions with intriguing choreography. Naomi Tan is a champion of the arena, challenging audiences as young as 7 to engage in contemporary dance practice and fine dining.