If you’re accustomed to the non-stop fast pace of NYC, there’s an innovative theatrical event that slows it down and transports you to another plane of dreamlike existence and meditative sensibilities beyond the boundaries of time and place. Multi-disciplinary artists Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya examine food, culture, and community in A Meal, commissioned by HERE and presented as an immersive participatory experience (with periods of the audience standing, walking, and eating) throughout two floors of the arts organization’s Off-Off-Broadway building in SoHo. Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya with members of LEIMAY and the audience. Photo by Maria Baranova. Co-produced with LEIMAY Ensemble – founded by the duo in 2012, and based in body-centered work – the multi-sensory performance combines extended live vignettes, mystical chants and songs, slow-motion ritualistic movement, sacral offerings, and trancelike stares, with sound and video installations, hand-crafted artifacts, costumes, and organic tableware and vessels (made by Garnica, as she announced at the end of the show), and a communal four-course dinner and conversation that explore our relationship with food, the ethics of what gets eaten, and the Colombian and Japanese roots of Garnica and Moriya. The lengthy allegorical segments take on mythic proportions, open to your own personal interpretation and values (kind of like a theatrical Rorshach Test; vegetarians will definitely see it differently than carnivores), as the ensemble and guest performers (Masanori Asahara, Krystel Copper, Derek DiMartini, Mar Galeano, Peggy Gould, David Guzman, Dayeon Jeong, Maitlin Jordan, Akane Little, Thea Little, Juan Merchan, Denisa Musilova, Synead Cidney Nichols, Polina Porras, Carolina Oliveros, Irena Romendik, Jeremy D. Slater, and Drew Sensue-Weinstein) lead us through the evocative pieces with their stylized hand gestures and ethereal motions that conjure ancient civilizations, the evolution of human sustenance, and its impact on the natural creatures and growth of our planet, enhanced with an otherworldly soundscape, hypnotic a cappella vocals, projections on multiple screens around the space, and shifts in lighting that set the tone and range from focused spotlights to total darkness in the black box theater. LEIMAY, singers. Photo by Maria Baranova. Along with the conceptual suggestion of slowly putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to form the table of nourishment, with which the show opens, there are disturbing scenes of a figure writhing in a fishnet and unable to get free, the pounding of the real cut-off head of a fish, slabs of meat being beaten and hung to dry, with a portion performed in full male and partial female nudity, and a video sequence of a couple lying down in a rectangular grave dug into the landscape, then another appearing on top of the covered ground and eating – an indication of the cycles of life, death, and the fertilization of nature. The eponymous vegetarian meal (with other options available at an extra cost, as is sake with the main course), interspersed throughout the performance, consists of drinks (a jar in a rope holder is placed around our necks as we enter the space), arepas and aburi sushi, tamales and chimaki, and culminates in a Shabu Shabu hot pot and mochi dessert that we help prepare in the transformed theater, with a final lifting of our spoons in celebration and thanks. A member of the ensemble leads each table of six individually, in their normal out-of-character demeanors and voices, encouraging us to consider such germane questions as our first childhood memories and our moral principles related to food, to share our responses, and to discuss them with those seated with us, to create an understanding and bond with our fellow participants (representing a spectrum of humankind, our different eating habits and choices, and the similarities among us). A member of the LEIMAY ensemble. Photo by Maria Baranova. While the program, website, and production photos do not identify the specific performers or creative team of LEIMAY, an earlier presentation of the show in development at HERE does (crediting Garnica and Moriya with direction, choreography, light, scenic, and food design; composition and sound by Sensue-Weinstein; and costumes by Garnica and Irena Romendik). Presumably, the intent is to acknowledge that it takes a community, working together with purpose, in gratitude to the greater forces of the universe, both to make art and to provide us with the food that sustains us. It also leaves us with the message that we can survive and flourish as vegetarians, without killing and eating our fellow living creatures of the land and sea; it’s a message I embrace as a lifelong animal-lover and long-time vegetarian. Running Time: Approximately three hours and 30 minutes, without intermission. A Meal plays through Sunday, September 29, 2024, at HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue, NYC. For tickets (priced at $50-165, plus fees), call (212) 647-0202, or go online.