Danielle Hatch’s Our Story Starts with a Tear was a visual, haptic, and gustatory experience that is rarely encountered in a festival of performance art. Held on the final day of the INVERSE Performance Art Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, Hatch and her fellow performers presented a nine-course gourmet meal to an audience seated around a table set for forty-two in The Momentary’s Fermentation Hall, a black box theater designed for performances, film screenings, and presentations that had been repurposed from a cheese factory.

For one day, Hatch, who is known for her stunning fabric installations and sculptures, created a canopy of colorful draped chiffon that sheltered an oversized dinner table covered with a quilted and appliqued tablecloth and set with silicone mats at each chair. The audience, clutching plastic cups of sparkling pink wine, many of whom had attended other performances in Fermentation Hall the previous evening as part of the festival, were immersed in an environment that looked like a pink and purple bounce house/lunar landscape dotted with padded and appliqued sculptural forms. These forms were later revealed to be covers for the food and the performers (Hatch, Heidee Lyn Alsdorf, Jessica Colangelo, and Monica Thomas), whose hooded, trapezoidal costumes hid all traces of their bodies as they hunkered down on the stage, accompanied by the soothing vocals and music of Dana Idlet, a Northwest Arkansas-based singer/songwriter.

The performance began once the audience had taken their seats. Most of the meal was meant to be eaten with hands, although there were exceptions. The fourth course, a spoon of ceviche was placed directly into eager mouths, just like baby birds accepting from their parents. For the ninth course, plastic forks were delivered with a piece of birthday cake. The audience, seated below the performers, had little control over their meal as they depended on the performers to bring them food. The service was choreographed, with the performers activating their beautiful and voluminous costumes with carefully choreographed movements that included turning, kneeling, and gracefully extending their bare arms in order to offer the food. The experience of this gourmet meal, prepared by two local chefs (Ali Cameron and Brandy Barnes) for this event, was like sitting in a highchair. The effect was intensified by the height of the table, which was calibrated to be about chest height to the audience. In conceiving this performance, Hatch was influenced by the ideas of pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who linked early parent-child relationships to adult mental health, emphasizing how childhood experiences influence adult functioning.11D.W. Winnicott, The Child, The Family (Penguin Books Ltd., 1964), 30–45. Winnicott argued that infants learn to trust by having their needs met consistently. Responsive caregiving allows the child to leave infancy and become independent.

Hatch’s performance was unique: a combination of alternative dance, the transformation of a large space into an intimate environment, creative costumes, and a nine-course feast. There are two earlier works to consider, both of which were produced on a much smaller scale and addressed the psychology of food, consumption, and the role of the mother. In 1969, Barbara T. Smith staged Ritual Meal at the Los Angeles home of collectors Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, who also funded the performance. Ritual Meal was very different than Our Story Starts with a Tear, as the setting was uncomfortable for the sixteen guests, who drank wine from test tubes, cooked raw food at the table, including chicken and beef, and used surgical instruments to cut it, all while being bombarded by loud synthetic music. Ritual Meal was monstrous rather than affirming, forcing the guests to ingest something resembling human viscera.

The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar, performed by Jess Dobkin in 2006, took a less serious approach to ingesting body fluids by serving breast milk to audience members at FADO performance space in Toronto. Dobkin collected breast milk from local volunteers and then served it along with a card explaining how each of the samples tasted different based on the mother’s diet. The Lactation Station, unlike Ritual Meal, avoided most, but not all, of the implications of breast milk by approaching it from a sommelier’s standpoint. Nevertheless, many people chose to abstain.

Smith, Dobkin, and Hatch are biological mothers. Smith, who found maternity incompatible with being an artist, exposed the relationship between hunger and monstrosity. Dobkin, a single lesbian mother, approached the “breast [milk] is best” obsession in the aughts with a wry sense of humor. For Hatch, the relationship between the caregiver/mother and the child is an ongoing project that began with her 2023 performance I am Nothing, I am Everything. The power of Hatch’s Our Story Starts with a Tear is that the artist acknowledges the need for nurturing. She and her studio have created a monument to caretaking and mothering, one so powerful that when Idlet stated that one’s mother “was everything to you,” several people were moved to tears. Included in the price of admission for the festival was a limited-edition of MotherTongue Zine vol. 3 by Molly Bess Rector and Katherine Rutter, a zine created to compliment Our Story Starts with a Tear that ends with the following verse, a powerful tribute to the importance of caregivers and mothers:

They ache for your notice.
Notice them. Tend to Them.