Email
PrintWhat's {Re}Happening in the Kitchen
Cooking the Black Mountain College way
The Main Dining Room at last year's [Re}Happening
by Jon Leidel
www.blackmountaincollege.org/index.php/rehappening-2011
Every year, the heyday of experimental Black Mountain College recedes further into the distance. But that's only in linear time. On a higher plane, the apparently unconquerable spirit of the institution (a hotbed of revolutionary art, science and philosophy from 1933-1956) continues to soar, scream, thrum, throb, yawp, tingle and go mute -- in short, express all the appropriate sounds of the avant-garde in whichever incarnation seems most current. On April 9, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and Media Arts Project (MAP) stages its second {Re}Happening, a riff on the "happenings" experimental musician John Cage debuted at the school.
{Re}Happening 2011 will feature video installation, interactive sculpture and interpretive dance, modernly sequestered in site-specific arts spaces, albeit happening simultaneously. The food's the thing this year, though. More than a dozen local restaurants and farms will provide impressive edibles in a sit-down meal in the Main Dining Hall at Camp Rockmont, where BMC was once situated.
Celebrity chefs and small-plate masterpieces certainly weren't on the menu during the college's live decades. But BMCM+AC Program Director Alice Sebrell says: "The decision to involve the culinary arts was part of the plan from the outset, to embrace creativity in as many forms as possible. At BMC they did have a working farm with cows and chickens, and they grew corn and vegetables. It was part of the students’ education and also a necessity because they depended on the farm for at least some of their food."
See the website for the whole lowdown, plus time and ticket information.
