REVIEW: WHY YOU NOT EAT - Lian Loke Finds the Body's Language for Grief.

 

Created and performed by Lian Loke

The Living Room Theatre | 21 Shepherd Street, Marrickville

Dramaturg/Director: Michelle St Anne

Developed through The Living Room Theatre’s Open Room Residency Program.

The dining table is one of the most loaded pieces of furniture in any home. It is where families gather, argue, celebrate, and grieve, and where the absence of a person is felt most acutely in the empty chair, the untouched plate. For Lian Loke, it is where grief took its most physical form: in her father’s inability to swallow food after the sudden death of his wife, as though sorrow had lodged itself somewhere in his body and refused to move. Why You Not Eat, her solo performance work developed through The Living Room Theatre’s residency program at 21 Shepherd Street, Marrickville, begins precisely there, at that table, with that silence, and does not let you go for the better part of an hour.

Loke is an interdisciplinary performance artist whose practice spans dance, durational work, site-specific installation, and costume, and all of that breadth is visible here. The work is not linear, not narrative in any conventional sense. It moves the way grief actually moves, in circles, in sudden lurches, in long stretches of stillness broken by the absurd or the unexpectedly funny. Food is present as both symbol and prop: handled, offered, withheld. The ritual of feeding becomes the central grammar of the piece, and Loke deploys it with precision and care.

This work is no mere autobiography. It is intelligence about the body as a site of memory. Drawing on her somatic practice, including Bodyweather and related movement traditions, Loke does not tell us about grief so much as demonstrate where it lives, in gesture, in posture, in the hesitation. The performance has the quality of something still being discovered in real time, which is partly a product of its development stages and partly, one suspects, a deliberate and courageous artistic choice. To perform as such is to honour what loss actually feels like.

With a small audience of perhaps thirty people gathered in the intimate space at 21 Shepherd, the performance has the quality of an invitation rather than a presentation. Loke moved among her audience, drawing individuals into the work directly. This was also felt in a glance held too long, a movement begun that was then maybe reconsidered, or a moment of contact that made you conscious of your own breathing. The blurring of roles (are we a guest, a family member, or a witness?) is not merely a conceit but the emotional engine of the piece. Grief, after all, asks the same question of everyone who encounters it.

The dramaturgical collaboration with Michelle St Anne (also the performance's director), has clearly sharpened the work. There is structural confidence beneath the apparent spontaneity, the oscillation between worlds that Loke has previously described in St Anne’s practice is evident in the way warmth, connectedness and sorrow coexist here without diminishing each other. A moment of genuine spontaneity can arrive inside a gesture of mourning, and Loke navigates these shifts with a performer’s instinct for timing that is, frankly, remarkable.

But this is not an easy watch. The anguish is real, the sorrow undeflected, and there are moments of such concentrated heartbreak that the room seemed to hold its breath collectively. But it is also, unexpectedly, a generous work. It’s one that does not wallow but instead reaches outward, seeking connection in shared experience. The title itself, borrowed from the worried, loving shorthand of a family’s language, carries the whole weight of the piece: a question that cannot be answered, asked over and over by those who remain.

Why You Not Eat is likely a work that is still finding its full form, having previously been presented at the Melaka Art and Performance Festival in Malaysia and now further developed through this Marrickville residency. What is already present is more than sufficient to reinforce Lian Loke as an artist of uncommon emotional and physical intelligence. See it when it surfaces again.

(images: Liz Ham)