A Q&A with Elaine Mitchener about her performance piece Sweet Tooth – a visceral, overwhelming indictment of the role sugar and the slave trade played in building the British Empire
As its name implies, Elaine Mitchener’s Sweet Tooth began life as an investigation of the links between the British sugar industry and the slave trade upon which the empire’s wealth was originally made. Commissioned by Liverpool’s Bluecoat arts centre, the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Slavery Museum, Elaine Mitchener Projects premiered the work at Bluecoat in November 2017, and have just given its first London performance proper at Bloomsbury St George’s Church, a place resonating with slave history, ranging from the church’s benefactors who profited from their enforced and unpaid labour force, to the church’s role in the eventual abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.
Described by Mitchener as a cross-disciplinary music piece, Sweet Tooth is a visceral projection of slavery as the cruellest manifestation of the British Empire as exemplary capitalist money machine, constructed from West Africans abducted, bought and sold and chained and transported in filthy, overcrowded holds of sailing ships across the ocean to work in sugar plantations in its colonies in the West Indies. Over its 50 minute duration, Elaine Mitchener Projects – Mitchener on vocals and movement, Jason Yarde on saxophones, Sylvia Hallett on violin and accordion, and Mark Sanders on drums and percussion, plus diverse objects and actions played out by all four – variously transform St George’s Church into the ship’s stinking hold, slave market place, plantation row, whipping ground and more.. . .
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