Eating animals on stage

If you’d asked me a few months ago whether I could see myself delivering an impassioned monologue to a stuffed chicken, I would have said, ‘probably — just maybe not with people watching.’

I’m not a performer. I didn’t do plays in high school. I don’t give speeches. Even when supremely intoxicated, I’m more likely to hide under a table than dance on one.

So it’s kind of strange that I will perform in The Performance Collective’s upcoming show, “Eating Animals,” based on UNC’s summer reading book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer.

The Performance Collective is a group of performance artists sponsored by UNC’s department of communication studies, which I came to through a couple of performance studies classes in the communications department.

The wacky but layered work of these classes hooked me, and I joined the group so I could continue doing things like yodel expletives from the Venable Hall balconies in a rainstorm.

The Performance Collective’s work is collaboratively devised through Viewpoints, a composition technique that employs the elements of space and time rather than plot and character to create a performance.

In devising “Eating Animals,” we used the book as inspiration for performance movements and then paired passages of text with those movements.

Since the book is a journalistic discussion of the factory farming industry, this tactic produced a lot of slaughter mimery in the creative process.

But the show we’ve made isn’t a heavy, guilt-inducing bloodbath, for the most part.

There’s an extended Julia Child impression. There’s an acoustic ditty about fecal lagoons. There’s some sexy dancing.

It’s entertaining in a way that will make you laugh — and then wonder why you’re laughing.

A stigma is attached to the public conception of performance art. When I told a friend of mine that I was working on a performance art project, he suggested that I “go wear all black and smoke some clove cigarettes.”

Yes, performance art sometimes means self-interested people pulling foreign items out of their body’s every orifice.

But it also provides an angle of discussion — especially for relevant social and political issues — that’s not available elsewhere.

It’s a live thing with live people, and if you’re watching, you’re a part of it.

You can certainly sit down and talk about the twisted agricultural practices that factory farming has made the norm, but you can also make something funny and weird to add to the conversation.

That’s what we’ve done, and you should come see it. Bring a kitten to snack on.

Contact the Arts Editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.