FOOD NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (8)
See it if You like magic, awe, and watching humanity devolve (and re evolve) via uncanny sleight of hand
Don't see it if You're freaked out by magic tricks, silent shows, or watching someone eat things that are obviously not food (or are food, but too much) Read more
See it if you want to explore the boundaries of performance/appreciate performance art.
Don't see it if you have a narrow view of what is acceptable entertainment.
See it if Bizarre and funny. Very creative immersive experience about food and environmentalism.
Don't see it if You prefer more conventional storytelling.
See it if you want to see a show be outrageously extra in all that it does just to prove a point; you want to get meta about food and its consumption.
Don't see it if messy eating and mouth sounds gross you out; you hate audience participation; you’re very sensitive to dust/smoke; you actually want dinner. Read more
See it if you’d enjoy a unique piece of physical theater that meditates on our relationship with food and its industrialization
Don't see it if you prefer traditional theater or dislike audience participation (though there’s ample opportunity to avoid it) Read more
See it if you like creative physical comedy with some audience participation. Complex illusions and sets. Performance with a message. Just go with it!
Don't see it if you get squeamish about gluttonous behavior. If you hate nontraditional performance art, don't bother with this - it's pretty crazy.
See it if you like immersive and more avant garde type performances set in smaller and more intimate theaters
Don't see it if you don't like audience participation, if watching someone eat food to excess may be triggering Read more
See it if You want a thought provoking examination of human evolution and how we consume the world around us
Don't see it if You are even mildly disgusted by someone eating "food" for an unbroken 10+ minutes. Read more
Critic Reviews (7)
“In addition to its considerable wizardry, Sobelle's piece is concerned with food as an expression of civilization. If we are what we eat, what does that say about us, and do we really want to know? Sobelle, who is possessed of a Keatonesque precision and restraint, steps lightly (and, largely, wordlessly) through each sequence, captivating us and making us think about his subject in entirely new ways.”
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“You can’t help but be amazed at the third-act transformation, and the perfection of the props, while at the same time being vaguely nauseated by its speed and by how thoroughly human activity occupies what once was open space...We’ve stepped outside the realm of the individual, from being awed at to the rapaciousness of a man to being chagrined at the overpowering gluttony of humankind.”
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"The eighty-minute piece might feed your hunger for unique and unusual entertainment, but it won’t satisfy your stomach; no food or drink is served, although it will be seen, sniffed, and touched. But Geoff Sobelle will satiate your appetite for pure, unadulterated pleasure with the show, in which he reimagines the concept of 'farm to table' as he explores humanity’s overconsumption and preference for capitalism at the expense of the natural environment."
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“Using the seemingly simple lens of his show’s title, Sobelle zooms out to reflect on how crushingly, irreconcilably enormous — and how precipitous — the human footprint currently feels...But the show is no somber, finger-wagging affair...the performance remains light, buoyed up by a flow of sleight of hand and ingenious object play.”
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“For all its playfulness, this brilliant show has the power to make you look with fresh eyes at a daily act that you probably take for granted — a surefire sign of its worth as a work of genuinely thought-provoking art.”
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“Geoff Sobelle’s FOOD” is not easy to sum up. It wasn’t one thing; it was a journey, an unexpected one: dinner party, history lesson, freak show, parable. My reaction traveled too, from expectant to baffled to amused to amazed to disgusted to inspired to impressed.
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“Geoff Sobelle’s ‘Food’ at BAM Fisher is performance art of the most engaging kind. It provokes rumination about man’s relationship to nature, to the use of the environment, and to the distance between tilling the earth with dirty hands and the meal that arrives on a plate at home or in a restaurant...Despite the title, food itself is less important than the questions Sobelle raises about mankind’s treatment of the earth that gives us sustenance.”
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