Secret Kitchen, video documentation
Margaret Dragu
September 12, 1992
Creative Access Description
Colour analogue video of a piece of performance art. The video opens with a shot of a small TV playing a video of a white woman dressed in all black with her hair tied back beating eggs in a bowl with a fork. A melancholy country song plays. The camera pans away across a set made to look like a kitchen with a small round table with a mug and a clock radio, a single chair, and a mini fridge with a toaster oven sitting on top of it. The fridge and walls are covered in black and white posters and newspaper clippings, and several papers are clothespinned to a line suspended above the table. The camera pulls back and the woman pictured in the video enters from the darkened side of the stage. She turns on the toaster oven and sits at the table, turns off the music and begins a humorous dialogue, seeming to address an imaginary child about the dangers of the hot oven and the time it will take to bake. She continues amid audience laughter, pantomiming answering a phone call and talking to a friend about her experience as a mother: administering medicine to children, enduring whining, and drinking alcohol during playdates. Hanging up the phone, she reads a series of parenting tips from cards on the table and continuing her joking monologue on a variety of topics related to experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, domestic labour, and nursing. Occasionally she sings nursery songs, at times frenetically, speaks in French, and speaks directly to the imaginary child. Eventually she stands and walks over to the TV, the stage lights shift to a purple glow and she delivers her final lines before exiting the stage to applause. The lights fade to black and then come up as she returns to the stage just in time to turn off the oven and instruct the audience to wait until the cake within cools before eating it.Description
Video documentation of Margaret Dragu's Secret Kitchen performance. Shot by Mike MacDonald.Identifier
1991.0912 SEC V001Extent
1 Hi-8 tape, 00:31:33Tape Number
91-019Language
Videographer
Mike MacDonaldArtist
Margaret DraguPerformer
Margaret DraguRelated program
Secret Kitchen (Related)In copyright. For uses outside of Fair Dealing please contact grunt gallery.