PERFORMANCE: KEXIN HAO | “ Revolution Is a Dinner Party ”
In Revolution Is a Dinner Party, artist Kexin Hao adapts a hand puppet performance for Pickle Bar combining singing and spoken word reimagining 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 own head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of a single 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 others dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay. The performance unfolds within a puppet theatre set where guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine, evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme of inter-species intimacy.
This event is part of The Project Space Festival Berlin 2026.
Free admission
Language: English
Duration: 20 min
Doors open at 18:30. Performance starts at 19:00.
Kexin Hao is a visual artist born in Beijing and based in The Hague. Her interdisciplinary practice spans art, design, and theatre, with a strong focus on performance. She works across a variety of media – including video, printed matter, choreography, and music – while drawing on archetypes from pop culture such as aerobic workouts, video games, online streaming, and puppet theatre. Through these elements, she aims to offer audiences playful, participatory, and site-responsive experiences. At the core of her artistic practice is the creation of experiences that address history, society, and cultural heritage through bodily engagement.