Belarus Free Theatre Chops Onions

photo: Julieta Cervantes

Trash Cuisine, La MaMa, 2015

Don’t get me wrong, Trash Cuisine was a strong show overall: an impassioned polemic against torture and capital punishment across the globe, staged with inventiveness and performed with urgency and verve. And Belarus Free Theatre most likely deserves a spot on any list of the most consequential theatre companies of the 21st century, for their lived commitment to human rights and resistance in their authoritarian home nation. All that being said—I am here to talk about the onion moment.

The onion moment came at the end of Trash Cuisine, performed in NYC at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. Six actors lined up, kneeling, across the very front of the stage, each with a pile of onions and an absurdly large knife. Wielding the knives like machetes, they began to chop the onions, as quickly and aggressively as possible. Of course we in the audience knew what was coming: sure enough, our eyes began to sting and water, as the room filled with the smell and accompanying prickling familiar from our own kitchens. The actors continued chopping for what felt like a very long time, as the room grew almost hazy with onion gas. My eyes were leaking full-on tears by the time it was finally over.

Throughout the performance, food preparation and consumption had served as the organizing principle for sequences drawn from real-life international instances of violence and cruelty. Two executioners compared techniques from their respective countries over a gourmet meal; meat sizzled in a saucepan during a horrific account from the Rwandan genocide. But the onions provided the evening’s simplest and most brutally effective use of food imagery. Taking a familiar everyday action and turning it into a weapon against the audience, the exaggerated destruction of the onions literalized the ways that organized violence produces a kind of moral miasma that affects and damages all of us. 

The gesture was poetic, certainly—but it was also utterly, exactly itself. Six people chopping a massive quantity of onions and making a room full of people cry. It wasn’t “staging” anything, it was doing something. That very quality is what would soon draw me to contemporary choreography, a form that is very much based around doing, and the real changes that happen in a room when those things are being done. More of this kind of work will appear on this list; but it started, for me, with a room full of onions.