Coco Pops for £1 and a Roast Dinner Sandwich for £5 – this reasonably priced art-café is the pop-up project of performance artists Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton. As well as being a working café, it is an art piece (because they, the artists, say it is) presented as part of the Escalator East to Edinburgh programme. It is a cosy place animating the life of customer service by pushing it through a performance art funnel.
Hunt and Darton waitress in their own café – they wear pineapples on their heads and red lipstick as they swim around the café in an endless loop, and their customer service is efficient and friendly. It takes a no-mess attitude to be a waitress: ‘What can I get for you?’, ‘Is this yours? This isn’t yours is it, I should take it away’. You need to finish with a smile and a, ‘Was everything all right for you?’. These lines are the script of every waitress (as a waitress for six years, I know them well). Hunt and Darton also have little set-pieces, Haiku-like poems and ten-second ‘dances’, such as their mimed horse-race, that they deliver at random. ‘Did you make the right choice?’ Darton asks a customer. ‘Was she rude to you?’ She presses, gesturing towards Hunt.
I have a bacon sandwich and a coffee at a table by the window. There is a deconstructed Action Man on my table – other than this I was a lonely diner. I text my friends, watch the other customers, and read the menu. The menu supplies options for café conduct: How to sit – Conversational (opposite), Consorting (next to each other) or Co-existing (diagonal separation with chairs in between). Every aspect of potential café behaviour is explained, including the dos and don’ts of attracting a waitress (tapping forks on glasses definitely a no-no) and you can delight in experimenting with your options; mix it up maybe, be the customer that makes extreme demands, be the customer that winks at strangers, be the customer that tries to be overly helpful.
Behind me is a huge blackboard listing breakages and complaints (cold coffee, no bin in the loo, the waitress has silly hair). The profit/loss margins are also listed along with the takings for each day (Day 1: £480.30). All the inner workings of the café that are usually kept for the staff are open to the customers. When you’ve finished eating you are given a piece of chalk and asked ‘Have you chalked in today?’ On the blackboard every customer has been tallied; you add yourself to this list and so your participation in the project is solidified – the café is recognised as a community of fleeting visitors all equal to the next in this chalk line.
There are guest waiters, and these have included Escalator regulars Richard DeDomenici and Bryony Kimmings. Today it’s Tom Marshman (in Edinburgh for his Legs 11 show at Summerhall). He swans about in spandex and cocktail-glass specs offering a free Martini or tea-leaf reading service. I go for tea. In my cup are an ant and a horse’s head (not literally of course, this would require a pretty big cup). There is a record player in the café that you can change at will; a customer has just put on ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel – again. I think: they must really love this song. They mutter along to it whilst flicking through the papers.
In the café’s side room is the base of this year’s Forest Fringe project – Paper Stages. Paper Stages is a book of instruction-based performance for you to undertake, collecting the contributions of 20 Forest Fringe artists. To get a copy you have to register with pioneering project Shmoney, a website that is experimenting in creating an alternative to money, where you exchange an hour of your time for something, on the basis that an hour of your time is equal to an hour of anyone else’s time. To get a copy of Paper Stages you commit to an hour-long task, which can be washing the dishes, making cups of tea for the staff, dusting the ornaments or telling the customers about your life. You can fulfil this task at the Hunt and Darton or at the newly relaunched (on a different site) Forest Café. My Paper Stages task is to write a review for the Hunt and Darton Café. Here it is.