Talking BBQ

What if your barbecue could talk to you?

There’s something incredibly frustrating about being human: you never know how it is to be somebody or something else. Most of us are gifted with empathy to get a sense of another person’s thoughts and feelings; there’s the horse-whispering type of course, people extraordinarily gifted to read a different creature’s responses and find ways of cross-species communication; and then there are objects… In the experimental talk show format What if your barbecue could talk to you? the audience is invited to become their favourite object. To draw it, write about its value, imagine how it would speak to them, reverse their roles. To what extent can we cross that transcendental gap and ‘get’ the object? And how can this contribute to a less anthropocentric understanding of the world?

What if your barbecue could talk to you? is a collaboration with contemporary dance and performance platform WhyNot, and was commissioned as part of the DDW talk show series Re-Create Out Loud developed by MU, What If Lab and Isolde Hallensleven.