Food & Home Across Generations

Masil Theater (based in South Korea) and Rising Youth Theatre (based in the United States) are collaborating on a multi-year project that explores food, migration, and culture across generations. The two theatre companies will form a joint ensemble with youth and adult members from each organization. Over the course of the project, each ensemble will work locally in their home community and virtually with the larger ensemble to research stories at the intersection of food, culture, migration, and age and how they work to shape how people experience their own cultural foods and the lineages that relate to these foods. Artists and community members from across generations - ranging from Gen Z to Millennials / GenX to Baby Boomers to the Silent Generation - will collaborate on this project. We will come together to share stories and recipes because both food and artmaking can be a connector across generations and cultures. 

Each organization will partner with a community of elders in their home country as a core community organization collaboration. The theatres will build relationships with elders through story circles, interviews, and time spent cooking and eating together discussing cultural foods. Ultimately we will produce a binational performance in both the United States and in South Korea, with the possibility of travel between the two. 

As a result of these collaborations and conversations, the two theatre companies will work together to create a performance and film project that reflects the stories and learnings shared by interviewees and community members in both countries. 

Some of the questions at the core of this work will include: 

As you move through time and place how does your food travel with you

How does food connect with memory? What do we pass down across generations (recipes and stories) and as we move through place and time?  

How can food be a tool of love and care and community and memory?