Cooking the Vegan Salmon of Knowledge
Winner of the Axis Green Arts Award
Fringebiscuit - ★★★★
The New Theatre, Dublin Fringe Festival 2022
Supported by PAN PAN Platform
FeastFest, London, 2023
Photography by Simon Lazewski
Winner of the Axis Green Arts Award
Awarded by Axis Theatre Ballymun at Dublin Fringe Festival
About the Play
An experimental 35-minute live cooking performance for our future.
Join James Ireland as they cook a vegan version of smoked salmon, using the ingredients to have a conversation about the history of food, and human impact on the environment in deep time. Winner of the Axis Green Arts Award at Dublin Fringe Festival.
This isn’t the first ecological catastrophe we’ve created. 10,000 years ago, human societies across the world changed from hunter-gathering to agricultural lifestyles. We’d hunted our food off the face of the earth. We’re making another catastrophe now.
This is a look at our current practices of food consumption, one element of unsustainable modern life. Without changing our behaviour and our diets in the past, we wouldn't be here - so what can we learn from that now? This work centres on a plant-based (vegan) recipe, but that's just one part of the conversation.
With some small optional food consumption. Key allergens: gluten, soy, garlic, citrus (lemon).
This show premiered at Dublin Fringe Festival, supported by PAN PAN Platform.
Trailer
Shot by Alex Ireland, edited by James Ireland
Praise for Cooking the Vegan Salmon of Knowledge
"Part-lecturer, part-masterchef, performer James Ireland emanates warmth and wisdom as they weave tales that transport us to Ireland's forested mountains whilst sharing fascinating histories of the food we take for granted. The vibe is very cosy - imagine being beckoned closer to a campfire...
[...]
a rich complement to the food, grounding, memorialising, and lending a sense of hope that humankind might find a way through environmental catastrophe after all."
- Fringebiscuit - ★★★★
"They carry out their tasks with ritualistic care and you have a sense of watching a scene from an unknown ancient ceremony.
[...] Their engaging smile which envelopes their face every now and again reassures you that you are in the company of a human whose humanity is their driving force not the orthodoxies of any ritual."
- No More Workhorse
Winner of the Axis Green Arts Award at Dublin Fringe Festival 2022.
Images by Simon Lazewski
Creative team
Directed by Kate Bauer
Written and performed by James Ireland
Music by James Ireland
Produced by James Ireland and Bradán, with support
from Lisa Nally and PAN PAN Platform
About Bradán
Bradán is a collaboration between Kate Bauer and James Ireland, who met in Dublin on a theatre undergrad in 2012.
We make ecological theatre, often with live music. We talk a lot about how difficult subjects like the climate can be to think about all the time. The last thing we’d want is to make a depressing climate show for people to sit through – there’s enough of that in our daily lives. We want to create work that energises, work that opens spaces for contemplation and coming together, and work that gives back. We create work for the future.
Bradán's debut show My Lover Was a Salmon in the Climate Apocalypse won the Staging Change x VAULT award for ecologically-conscious development, and was followed up with Cooking the Vegan Salmon of Knowledge which won the Axis Green Arts Award at Dublin Fringe Festival, where it was also awarded support from PAN PAN through the PAN PAN Platform initiative. Bradán's work has been called "a masterclass of gig theatre" (Everything Theatre), "eco-political theatre at its best" (audience testimony), and "the best gig theatre I've seen" (audience testimony).
Follow our journey with the show!
Instagram @bradantheatre
Twitter @bradantheatre
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Photography by Pranav Darshan