Monkey Banquet

This piece titled Monkey Banquet plays on the practices and experiments of Sir Richard Burton. Sir Richard was a 19th century colonial naturalist who acquired 40 monkeys in an attempt to discover the monkey vocabulary and eventually the entire monkey language. The young British officer had the monkeys sit around a table as servants served each their proper meal. He had a certain fascination with a silky monkey in which he called it his Wife and she sat in a baby chair to next to him. Here Walton plays on the almost ridiculous sounding tale of the Sir Richard Burton and his attempt at research.