Birdie Dance Macabre
The Birdie Dance Macabre: a folk horror performance lecture combining puppetry, noise making, costume, and scenography..
Reflecting on Marx’s use of monstrous metaphors, the big poultry industry and precarious work, this performance lecture will dramatises research around the ‘frankenchicken’, a symbol of what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine.
The performance confronts the intersection of human, animal and environmental abuse within the ‘Big Poultry’ industry. It includes performative readings of archival worker testimonies to narrativise an overlooked history of exploitation and suffering from the 1980’s to the present, as well as research on the history of the Broiler Chicken that has been subject to intense genetic selection to grow four times faster than in the 1950s.
The satirical narrative remixes the allegorical Danse Macabre, a memento mori that described a social levelling from the middle ages with the 1970’s chicken dance craze record “The Birdie Song”. The performance re-imagines these past participatory narrative devices as a way to address the ethical cost of cheap chicken and the lived experience of unseen poultry workers within industrial scale food production and delivery.
