Revolution Is a Dinner Party
Kexin Hao
Pickle Bar, Stephanstraße 11, 10559 Berlin-Moabit
Revolution Is a Dinner Party by the artist Kexin Hao is adapted for Pickle Bar version of a hand puppet performance combining singing and spoken word that reimagines Mao Zedong’s phrase, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship. The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat—each a puppet on one of the performer’s hands. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts.
Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and other dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay.
Performance unfolds in the puppet theatre set up where guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine—evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme of inter-species intimacy.
Pickle Bar
Dedicated to an unlikely form of knowledge production–one where hospitality and discourse are inseparable–Pickle Bar, is a non-profit art space in Moabit, Berlin, co-founded by its artistic director Anastasia Marukhina and artist collective Slavs and Tatars, with a focus on performative and discursive formats. Thematic programs invite investigation and animation of the area between the roof of the mouth and the tongue, cutting across spoken word, poetry, and politics, and exploring the limits of ideologies and the edges of belief systems in often-overlooked areas of study with the focus on the region of Eurasia.
Founded: 2020
