Local arts company holds community feast for 200 at Tilbury Port

11 Jul Local arts company holds community feast for 200 at Tilbury Port

Internationally renowned arts organisation Kinetika, based in Purfleet, Essex will host innovative Chilean arts company Teatro Container in July, in conjunction with the Tilbury on the Thames Trust and the Port of Tilbury. Teatro Container brings its La Cocina Pública – the Public Kitchen to Tilbury Cruise Terminalfor 10 days of community workshops and a final community feast for 200 people on Saturday 21 July as part of the Port of Tilbury Open Day 2018. 

La Cocina Pública is a mobile kitchen housed within a shipping container. It is a space for exchanging ideas about food, for producing food and recording local culinary traditions and recipes. Teatro Container, from the Chilean port town of Valparaiso, use the kitchen as a place for social encounters to happen around a relaxed dining table. Kinetika has invited them to Tilbury as the culmination of the T100 Recipes walking festival and to launch of Kinetika’s new two-year project, Kitchen Table.

Over a series of workshops in Tilbury, Teatro Container and Kinetika will work with the local community, gathering recipes for the community feast, seeking out foods diverse peoples have brought to the area over decades and sharing traditional local foods and favourite tastes and flavours. The stories, memories and ideas that come out of these workshops are an essential part of the project for Teatro Container, and for Kinetika, who will host its own community feasts as part of Kitchen Table in 2019.

The workshops will also create a performance to accompany the feast, with dancing and singing. Featured in the performance will be the four metre high Tilbury Docker puppet made by Kinetika with input from local schools and colleges and commissioned by the Tilbury on the Thames Trust. The puppet marks the start of a process to revive the Tilbury carnival.

Kinetika’s new project, Kitchen Table, is a culinary based programme to explore, share and celebrate the histories of many communities from around the world that now live along the lower Thames Estuary through conversation, food and activities. It is an opportunity for participants and people of all backgrounds to come together through sharing the ‘ingredients’ of their cultural heritage, against the backdrop of the Thames, as it moves from river to sea between Barking Creek and Southend-on-Sea.

Kinetika’sj previous community cultural and heritage projects, Thurrock 100 and Silk River, have over the last few years, explored on foot the local history in the towns, villages, marshes and industry of the estuary. Kitchen Table builds on these connections, aiming to bring together groups of more isolated diverse populations along the estuary, who have arrived in the last 20 years, with each other and longer settled communities.