LONG READ: Breaking Bread with the Enemy: A Performance Art Reflection on Modern Conflict

By Ekaterina Belukhina & Gemma La Guardia

As the world seems to be teetering on the brink of a series of uncontrollable conflicts in Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel and Gaza, and many other places, art can give an alternative lens through which to think about how we’ve gotten here.

Anyone sitting around a family dinner table knows it can become a “war zone”. But, as we watched the scene unfold in front of us, we hadn’t expected how much a simple dinner could deteriorate. Ekaterina’s performance piece, co-produced by Gemma’s KNST Collective,"BREAK THE BREAD" started as a simple idea: put people at a table, tell them they represent different countries, and give them one rule - you can't feed yourself. Your "enemy" across the table has to feed you.The performance explores the possibility of reconciliation between participants representing fictional warring countries. Over dinner, the producers would appear before the diners and the audiences to read out newsflashes that mirrored actual reports from real-world conflicts, such as civilian bombings or trade wars. While being bombarded with incendiary news reports, the participants were increasingly reliant on their feeding partners more intimately. Meanwhile, their cutlery started disappearing piece by piece, a seemingly unimportant resource until you don’t have anything to eat risotto with. 

During two separate performances, a troubling pattern emerged. These were just made-up countries - fictional places with fictional problems. But within seconds, dinner table guests turned into stern-faced diplomats, morphing from individuals into representatives of their fictional states. Someone would read out news about a missile strike or a border dispute, and suddenly, the spoons would slow down. We watched hands hesitate, eyes narrow. The simple act of feeding another person became political. 

The performance's central mechanism - the inability to feed oneself - creates a forced interdependence that exists in our real world, though often invisible to us. Nations, like people, cannot truly sustain themselves in isolation. We rely on global trade, shared resources, and cultural exchange. Yet, like the participants who sometimes withheld food from opposing diners, despite their own hunger, nations often choose mutual suffering over cooperation. As such, the cutlery came to represent the infrastructure through which we enact this interdependence. As in the real world, the tension between wanting to finish one’s dinner, and the intimacy of being fed by someone else’s fork; combined with the quickening pace of divisive newsflashes, led to the formation of alliances to feed each other across the table, and the increase in trade value of other resources to offset the loss of the highly prized cutlery, such as alcohol, napkins and even the decorative nectarines.

Wars Echo Wars

A striking observation emerges when we examine how people process different conflicts. Yet war, at its core, is still a war, regardless of your political affiliations. All wars include the fundamental horrors and human suffering that we must first acknowledge before delving into nuances.

The events following October 7th in Israel and Gaza illustrate this complexity. While the response by Israel to Gaza might be understood by many Israelis as a logical consequence of unprecedented attacks, the human ability to rationalize such escalation in one conflict while being horrified by similar actions of Ukraine in Russian territory reveals our own biases and emotional entanglements. 

As someone personally touched by both the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, Ekaterina notes her own contradictions. How can one understand certain military responses in one context while feeling deep unease about similar actions in another? When news emerges about military actions by Ukraine on Russian territory, there is no satisfaction, despite her opposition to the war in Ukraine. This personal contradiction mirrors a broader human tendency to process conflicts differently when we feel personally invested in them - horror at what happens to one nation, anger at another, and sometimes, indifference. 

Becoming Your Flag

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of "BREAK THE BREAD" was how quickly participants began to internalize their assigned national identities. Even in this fictional setting, they didn’t just act as representatives. They started to align emotionally with the interests of "their country." When news of a hospital bombing was announced, the participant representing the accused nation wasn’t questioned - they were met with hostility. But on the flipside, participants would justify actions from their "country" that they'd condemned minutes earlier when someone else perpetrated them, highlighting the mental gymnastics we do to make sense of violence when it's "our side" doing it.

Remarkably, participants began raising personal grievances and incorporating them as defining traits of their fictional national identities. It wasn’t about judging actions, it was about picking sides. Francis Fukuyama argues that the weakening of strong governing institutions leads to an erosion of shared civic values, causing people to factionalise along national, religious, or sectarian lines.

Another observation was that while we presented the news items without contradictory reporting, not a single participant questioned their authenticity or objectivity. This observation reinforces our premise as performance creators that all news inherently functions as propaganda, regardless of its perceived objectivity.

A potential area for further exploration was that all the participants were either Gen Z or Millennials. As Millennials ourselves, identity politics was considered fringe politics for most of our childhoods, but growing into adulthood it has become our modus operandi, particularly on social media. If we ran it with older generations, would the experiment have run any differently? 

In our own world, as in the performance, individuals become one-dimensional ambassadors of their nations' actions. A Palestinian student must answer for actions they never endorsed. A Russian artist faces a boycott for their government's decisions. We forget that nationality is assigned randomly at birth, not chosen. The performance reminded us of news clips where reporters stick microphones in people's faces in search of a “gotcha!” moment: "As a Russian, what do you think about Ukraine?" It’s almost as if the passport you carry determines the thoughts you're allowed to have. 

Worse still, identity politics comes to justify the most horrific of crimes. A frequently heard sentiment across Israeli media is that there is not one innocent Palestinian in Gaza - they all support Hamas’ actions. Likewise on the other side of the floor - all Israelis are complicit. 

“Break the Bread”

This climax of the performance leads to our unwitting participants breaking a loaf of bread  wrapped as a gift and sharing it between them in a symbol of peace and reconciliation, only that it didn’t work out that way. By the time we got to the end of the show, in a Lord of the Flies-esque debacle, the participants were so factionalised that a rogue state was not given any bread by the other participants, despite the producers extending the show to wait for them to reach a consensus. It never quite arrived.What we had hoped would be a heartwarming show that, by the end, would demonstrate that peace, reconciliation, and human good nature had the potential to resolve conflicts, became a microcosm of today’s world instead. International trade wars broke out, alliances were made and broken, rogue states emerged. Were our participants inherently evil? No - rather, when we interviewed them at the end of the performance, they confessed they would never have behaved like that in “real life”, they were just representing their countries! They had assumed they had to play politics.

Social scientists identify this as 'demand characteristics'—the tendency of research participants to modify their behavior based on their perception of the study's purpose. Yet this concept extends far beyond experimental settings. The same fundamental mechanism—adjusting our behavior to meet perceived expectations—operates constantly in our daily lives through what we recognize as social norms, social roles, and self-fulfilling prophecies. In this sense, society itself functions as the "experimenter," and all of us respond to its subtle and explicit cues, whether consciously aware of them or not.

Looking in the Mirror

These staged conflicts are children's games compared to Gaza, Ukraine, and other bleeding parts of our world. But they show us something important: how easily we slip into seeing people as walking flags rather than human beings. In our performance, participants started identifying with their fictional in-groups within about 10 minutes of the performance starting. The ramifications are a slippery slope - In the case of the Gaza war, on one side, the real suffering of Palestinians become a simulacra for virtue signalling online, losing their dignity again as their hopes and dreams are stripped and reduced to images to be reposted for maximum shock factor. Similarly, Israelis are reduced to the ravings of right wing settlers talking heads. And vice versa: Palestinians are reduced to Hamas fighters waving AK47’s and pulling blood soaked Israeli women out of cars, while patriotic Israelis shelter from rocket fire. The human aspect and the reality of the horrors of war is lost, we fall deeper into our echo chambers, images used to entrench ourselves further onto our own sides. 

The cherry picking of identity politics spills out from the internet into real life, where we are unable to engage with the other side on a human level. As we sink deeper into our voyeuristic echo chambers, a question arises - Are we forgetting that we are all three-dimensional people, not just the representative of whatever faction we belong to (nation, ethnicity, fandoms etc…)? Daniel Taub, in his book, Beyond Dispute, points out that while technology has taken the barriers away to engaging with anyone, anywhere, in a time such as the 21st century where we face multiple critical challenges, like climate change, wars and the advance of AI, we have unlearned the skills to talk and disagree effectively with each other. 

There's no easy fix here. The wounds are real, the grievances have roots, and the pain cuts deep. But maybe if we can see how quickly we build these walls even in a staged performance, we might catch ourselves doing it in real life.