Revolution Is a Dinner Party
2025
performance
painting
puppet show
Revolution Is a Dinner Party is a hand puppet performance combining singing and spoken word that reimagines Mao Zedong’s phrase, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship.
The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat—each a puppet on one of the performer’s hands. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts.
Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and other dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay.
The performance unfolds in a hand-painted puppet theatre stage on which guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine—evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme on inter-species intimacy.
The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat—each a puppet on one of the performer’s hands. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts.
Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and other dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay.
The performance unfolds in a hand-painted puppet theatre stage on which guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine—evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme on inter-species intimacy.
Credits:
supported by:
Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst
head and neck piece:
Laura Snijders
corset and dress:
Vincent Wong
puppets assistance:
Laura Snijders
original song:
"Dolci Speranze" by G. Buonand
concept, script, visual, puppets, song written, re-arranged and produced by:
Kexin Hao
Presentation
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