The Four Food Groups is a dance, music and spoken-word piece produced by Kim Popa and Lindsay Jones (Pones Inc.) of Cincinnati at ComedySportz for the Indianapolis Fringe Festival.
What's the Scoop?
"The Intro, the Prospect, The Climax, The Morning After." This is the intriguing tag line for The Four Food Groups, a series of true stories interpreted through spoken word and meticulous choreography, exploring the themes of sex, love and everything that happens before, between and after them.
The play opens with four characters seated around a dinner table, making introductions, small talk, shy/daring eye contact and awkward pauses. This is all accomplished through clever dialogue (usually rhyming) and abrupt – but symbolic – body movements that are at first jarring but grow more involving with every passing minute.
If anything, that's the overall feel of the show itself. At first, it seems the audience doesn't quite know what to make of what's happening onstage, but as the show wears on, we are gradually drawn into the world of these four characters and the tangled web that is their lives, until – rather than watching a performance – you're watching an actual event.
Relationships Depicted in Dance
At its core, The Four Food Groups is a slightly disjointed story told in several small acts – made up of a combination of delightful wordplay and interestingly choreographed movement – about varying concepts that are still closely tied to each other. For example, an entire portion of the show explores the different types of sex ("Dull Sex", "New Sex", "The Best Sex", and so on) using a brilliant balance of spoken word and dance. It even goes so far as to take a look at the darker side of its chosen topics, not shying away from things that could be uncomfortable: loneliness, being 'Just Friends', the one that got away, the search for a soulmate...
The four characters also become representations of archetypes, elevating them to becoming much more than simple interchangeable mouthpieces for the script. While the nature of the show keeps them from being truly fleshed-out characters, we're given a glimpse at what makes them tick and what they really desire under the superficial.
Final Verdict
Though the first minutes of the show are spent trying to get on its wavelength to better understand its intentions and storytelling style, The Four Food Groups is a fascinating and often witty look at the most universal of themes: love and all the messiness it entails. Three and a half stars.
Note: The Four Food Groups contains some adult language and content.
Lydia Ballard - A writer who got her start in the perilous world of fan fiction, Lydia Ballard is an aspiring comic book writer and self proclaimed lover ...
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