Toast with lots of butter is about cheese strings, candy pop rings, dinner ladies, and a trip to the Big Supermarket. This performance explores food, and our relationship with it: celebrating food as a way to connect, to create community, and cooking/feeding/sharing food as crucial acts of care. We’re interested in its unparalleled ability to remind us of a home, a place, a person, at any age, to foster a feeling of belonging and safety, and, most importantly, its potential for playfulness and how it so easily provokes strong, silly yet very serious opinions in anyone and everyone (what is the proper way to a cheese string? Do you want a stodgy middle lasagna slice, or a crispy corner?).

 

In Toast with lots of butter, we follow the busy day of two dinner ladies, glammed up and dressed to the nines in their aprons, crocs, pasta necklaces, candy bracelets and pop rings. They make very important cheese string tutorials that get slightly out of control, have never-ending conversations about what to make for dinner, negotiate the trials and tribulations of technology with their live camera feed and try very hard at perfecting their dance moves. The show is eccentric, melodramatic and absurd with touching moments of honesty and nostalgia. This performance is about the never-ending job of caring for people, of feeding people (of cooking lunch for 400 children, of coming home and making snacks, dinner, packed lunches, breakfast then doing it all again), and the worry that comes with caring, the worry of not having enough to around, of not having enough for yourself, and about how important it is to find the joy and the fun amongst it all. This performance is about strangely specific yet collectively shared memories, such as eating pink and blue sour bottle sweeties until the roof of our mouth gets all raw and rough and then run our tongue across it for the rest of the day, or seeing a chocolate fountain for the first time. It’s about big dreams, like making a giaaaant chocolate cake with 461 spoons so that everyone gets their very own spoon to lick, or owning one of those fancy conveyor belt toaster machine that you get in hotels. And it’s about tired adults wanting to go back in time to when all you had to do was pick a snack. It’s about the importance of playing with your food, of saying thank you and of doing a little dance when you get that perfect bite. This performance hopes to be a celebration of cooking, caring, working hard and doing it all over again, again and again.