Sensory Overload

Food and drink not permitted — that’s the message posted at the door of most dance and theater performances.Not at “Outmigration.”Using a 12-course tasting menu as a primary vehicle, the multimedia performance work, incorporating dance, theater, music, and video under the direction of a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performance artist, Mariángela López, is a seven-act narrative that guides audiences by taste, sound, sight, and smell. Ms. López and her brother, Francisco López, who runs a Brooklyn-based art direction studio, developed a script that loosely indicated the actions and overall arch of a seven-act migration outward from the earth’s interior, proceeding through water, across earth, to the mountains and heavens, and finally into outer space. From this shared script, artists including dancers, set-designers, and a chef embarked on individual explorations. The show begins performances at the Brooklyn restaurant and performance space Monkey Town today.“I really wanted to find a collaboration where all artists could work on an equal level and that would carry the audience into different states through video, performance, and sound,” the Venezuelan-born Ms. López said. Montgomery Knott, the founder of Monkey Town, “proposed the integration of a special menu into the piece, adding another sense, where eating a certain dish would help the audience experience a certain state and tasting food would take the audience to the place where we want to take you,” Ms. López said.Though “Outmigration” marks the second time Monkey Town integrates food directly in a performance, it is a first for the artists involved, and most had to remind themselves that food was to play a principal role throughout the evening.The chef, however, faced the opposite problem. Monkey Town’s newly hired chef, Ryan Jaronik, was instructed to inspire a tasting menu that would take diners on Ms. López’s journey, while adhering to the time constraints of the 90-minute production. Most 12-course menus require four hours.But the basic direction of the menu was clear to Mr. Jaronik from the start. “Water is more seafoody with seaweed,” he said. “The mountains are with herbs, teas, coffees.” Mr. Jaronik said it was a challenge to coordinate his work with that of the others involved. Diners sit along the restaurant’s walls, which serve as gigantic projection screens, and around tables facing inward toward an 11-foot-by11-foot performance space. “This is a first for me, pairing a tasting menu with artists,” Mr. Jaronik said. “I had to keep telling myself that it’s more about the art than the food.”But coordinating the various elements was a major focus for the other artists involved — drawn from around the country — as well. “I started thinking of each passage as a particular color, and I worked with the idea of synesthesia, or the idea that senses over-cross,” a sound artist from Atlanta, Craig Dongoski, who served as Mr. López’s professor almost 10 years ago at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, said. “Throughout the piece we’re working with different sensory input, and I had to keep reminding myself that the sounds should be more subliminal.”A painter and performance artist, Shana Robbins, said “Outmigration” forced her to experiment with alternative inspirations. “Usually I start with a painting and let that inspire me, but working with this outline was totally different,” she said. “Here, I used the sketch of the script like a painting; I saw images for each of the passages, or acts.”Ultimately, Ms. López’s job was to ensure none of the artistic factors overpowered one another. “It is about a balance of all the elements, to create an entire experience where they all have the same weight and we’re all creating together for one purpose,” Ms. López said. “I am not a director looking to guide every movement and development, I am leaving freedom for the other artists to interpret the direction I give them.”Until July 1 (58 N. 3rd St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-384-1369).

Sensory Overload

Sensory Overload

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