To peel an onion, to grate a carrot, and to set a table, each has its own choreographic recipe. Culinary art/ cookery is choreographed everyday life, and cooking is a dance everyone knows.
The Art of Peeling an Onion is based on the dance piece Gæst (Guest), choreographed by Kasper Daugaard. The piece is for five dancers, a female soloist and four choir dancers, and originates entirely from culinary actions. The purpose of the article is not to maintain theory and practice as two separate entities, but to show how they supply each other and offer each other content. We aim to create a balanced understanding of the relationship between the creative process, the audience experience, and the aesthetic theory related to both the content and the outcome of artistic work. We view theory and practice hand in hand, because we have strived to put into words that which can be experienced, to verbalise the spectator’s experiences, the physical as well as reflexive, with the ambition of formulating a quite tangible experience-based aesthetics.
