Photo Essay: Immersive Dinners

By Chris Roberts

These images were taken between 2010 and 2014 from a series of immersive collaborative dinners that took place in Minneapolis and New York. The dinners and weeks of planning beforehand sought to provide queer artists of all levels a venue to explore new mediums in the process of crafting edible narratives.

All photographs by Stephanie Colgan.

Sirens nesting in a mirrored room feed you capsules of duck broth marking your face with scallion ash.

Participants pop balloons with skewers taken from a drag queen's headpiece, on which were all the components of Chicago hot dogs. They are looking for clues to find the secret door to the next room.

In the final room of an immersive dinner exploring spiritual sustenance, participants eat from flower pots of bok choy sprouts, dehydrated mole, and beer braised chicken thighs.

An 8’ long replica of the hand of god barely works after the spout has been repaired four times, but still dispenses wine, a transfiguration joke.

At the beginning of “WhoDonut: A Cereal Killing,” after navigating a room filled with dozens of half-eaten cereal bowls, participants look out the window to discover the only person who had information to the murder has themselves been murdered, and rests inside a chalk outline of milk powder. The first course, shown being prepared, is cereal-crusted milk-battered walleye mouse with lemongrass marshmallow.

At the climax of a battle between biblical twinks a single rib is served: barbecue “ribs” braised and served lollipop style.

Video Nachos: projection of pizza zooming into pizza ad infinitum onto taco salad. Presented as an appetizer to a Synesthesia cabaret in homage to the magnitude of chefs loving taco salad and pizza.

A participant obliges the no-hands rule while navigating a donut chandelier during “WhoDonut: A Cereal Killing.”