Dana Salisbury choreographer and multidisciplinary artist
Dark Dining Projects Performers Press
Visit us at DarkDiningProjects.com
For information or to book a private party, call Dana at 917-686-7474 or email dana@darkdiningprojects.com
Dark Dining Projects' feasts are participatory art events revolving around fine food, sensory awareness and pleasure. They take many forms, from intimate parties to full-scale performance installations. What they have in common is that guests are blindfolded and the experience is non-visual, three-dimensional and fully-embodied.
In its simplist form, blindfolded diners are guided to tables by “dancer/embodiers” and served a specially conceived meals paired with fine wines. Between courses, the room is quieted and guests are treated to artist performances. On a given night, that might be a tap dancer, a vocalist, a flamenco guitarist, a beat-boxer, or a baroque violinist. The menu is revealed at the close of the evening. Then diners are led outside where they remove their blindfolds. They never see the room in which they dined.
From the Guest Book:
“I was a little leery of it beforehand, but in the end, I was entirely won over by the experience. I would call it 'a return to the senses' in a world when we are continually baited visually and verbally -- To return to smell, touch, taste, non-verbal sound and no doubt 'the 6th' -- with integrity -- that is, there was nothing about the experience that was duplicitous or manipulative – was greatly relieving to the psyche. It was a kind of reversion to an infant state (depending on others, not knowing what's to come, what you are eating, what the sounds are, being ministered to -- ) but consciously and in an aesthetic and trustworthy universe. In that way it transported us nearly to another realm or at least gave us a good break from the one we have created, for the most part, in our lives."