Futurist Cookbook - Coffee Service

Four dancers gather around a table for a formal coffee service using a set designed by Allan Wexler. Drawing pencils are attached to the sixteen chair legs and the base of each coffee cup, while rolls of white paper cover the table and floor. As the dancers sit, shift, gesture, and drink, their movements are continuously recorded in pencil.

The performance unfolds in three movements, beginning with the anxious preparation of the room, followed by the polite rituals of serving and gathering, and finally a breakdown of social etiquette. Stumbles, spills, and increasingly chaotic movements disrupt the formality of the service while completing the drawing. What begins as a fleeting performance becomes a visual record of the gathering and the physical traces left behind.

Coffee Service is part of A New Futurist Cookbook, a project by Allan Wexler and Michael Yarinsky that reconsiders the rituals of dining through a series of culinary performances. Inspired by F. T. Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook, the project redirects its experimental and multisensory approach toward contemporary questions around food, social interaction, and hospitality. The book will be published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2027.