Coffee Service - A New Futurist Cookbook
Coffee Service is a choreographed coffee ritual meant to capture the unseen physical traces of social etiquette by transforming the table, chairs, and dinnerware into instruments for drawing.
Four dancers (Alexander Díaz, Wendell Gray, Catherine Kirk, and Stephanie Terasaki) gather around a table to partake in a formal coffee service. Allan Wexler created custom set pieces for the performance, attaching drawing pencils to the sixteen legs of the chairs and to the base of each of the four coffee cups. As the dancers sit to sip their coffee over rolls of white drawing paper covering the tabletop and floor, their physical shifts, gestures, and cup movements are continuously documented in pencil lead.
The project explores the tension between rigid social decorum and the chaotic reality of human interaction—reflecting on both the anxiety of hospitality and the physical marks we leave on shared spaces. The act of drinking coffee becomes a generative drawing process—moving from careful preparation to polite gathering to social breakdown. What begins as a fleeting performance ends as a permanent visual archive, where the dancers' choreographed movements are preserved in drawn lines on paper, ready to be rolled away for the next event.
Performed by Alexander Díaz, Wendell Gray, Catherine Kirk, and Stephanie Terasaki
Choreography by Catherine Kirk
Stage Set by Allan Wexler
Production by Michael Yarinsky (Office of Tangible Space)
Coffee by Head Hi
Photography by Claire Esparros (Note: Event will be photographed and attending the event implies consent to be photographed as part of the book.)
The conceptual wellspring for Coffee Service is A New Futurist Cookbook, a project conceived by Allan Wexler and Michael Yarinsky as a direct response to the 1932 Futurist Cookbook, a manifesto of culinary innovation by F. T. Marinetti. The project seeks to harness the provocative energy, the emphasis on innovation, and the multi-sensory focus that characterized historical Futurism, but works to redirect these potent methods towards contemporary aims: broader awareness, inclusivity, and a thoughtful re-evaluation of our relationship with food. A New Futurist Cookbook will be published in Spring 2027 by Lars Müller Publishers.
For the purposes of this performance and the book, "Futurist" was not a call for a nostalgic revival or an uncritical imitation of this historical movement. Instead, it was an invitation to harness the innovative spirit, the unwavering commitment to multi-sensory engagement, the boundary-pushing ethos, and the call to be both PROVOCATIVE and EVOCATIVE.