Why You Not Eat is a new work by performance artist Lian Loke.

Created in response to losing both parents within two years, Why You Not Eat explores how grief lives in the body, and the stillness it leaves behind. Anchored by the haunting memory of her father’s inability to eat, the work unfolds around the dining table of her parents’ home.

Loke blends her familiar spectacle with the unexpected, absurd rhythms of family life. Seated at the table, food becomes both symbol and prop as she charms audiences with her feeding ritual, leaving them unsure of their role — guest, family, witness? Through the delicate acts of feeding and being fed, Loke guides us into moments of care that falter, endure, and hold both humour and sorrow.

This is an intimate, playful work shaped by time: past pressing into present; present rubbing against grief.

Please note. Due to the nature of the performance there will be a TOTAL LOCK OUT.
Doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm show.

About the Artists

Lian Loke is an interdisciplinary performance artist working across dance, durational and site-specific performance, costume, and interactive media, her work explores how grief, intimacy, ritual, and relation manifests through bodily action. Drawing on somatic practices, including Bodyweather and other movement-based traditions, Her working processes are often bottom-up, generating actions, meanings and new movement languages from interactions with props and costume. She is co-founder of the Pork Collective, a group of artists working in immersive performance installation in festival environments. She has performed and made costume for de Quincey Co and The Living Room Theatre.

Sound Prescence
Elizabeth Jigalin is a composer, performer and artist guided by curiosity, she collaborates and creates across art-forms. She traverses experimental, improvised and chamber music contexts and her work has been featured at festivals worldwide.  Things that you’ll find Elizabeth intrigued by: pianos, everyday ephemera, collage, instrument building, zine making, miniature forms, strange scores, balloons, notebooks, field recordings, puppets, silent films, noisy games and lists.

Light Prescence
Jo Elliott is a lighting designer and researcher working across architectural and theatrical contexts. Trained in technical production at NIDA and later specialising in illumination design at the University of Sydney, she moves between stage and built environments, exploring how theatrical lighting techniques shape perception in architectural space. She is currently undertaking PhD research into the perceptual effects of theatrical lighting in architectural settings.

Her design of the LRT slit light has become a quiet signature within our productions — a precise, sculptural gesture that shapes atmosphere as much as illumination

Staging Prescence.
Michelle St Anne brings her insight as a composed theatre practitioner. Her charge is to draw Loke’s quiet personal story into a theatrical frame — shaping rhythm, gesture, hurt, and the shifting thresholds between internal and external worlds.

As part of Birds of a Feather, March: A gathering of artists refusing to behave as expected, presenting bold, intimate, and curious work across theatre, dance, performance, musiking, and film. Come for a moment. Stay for a while. Or dive in headfirst—if it feels slightly outside your comfort zone, you’re exactly where you need to be.