Dana Salisbury choreographer and multidisciplinary artist

Home Current Projects Past Projects Calendar Bio Contact        Unseen Dances   Dark Dining Projects   Workshops and Other Projects     Bio   Resume

Unseen Dances             Performances & Performers: the No-See-Ums            Press Dana Salisbury and the No-See-Ums create Unseen Dances, performed works to be experienced by blindfolded audiences. Dancers reveal themselves and the space through sound, scent, touch, temperature and air currents. Audience members are placed within the action and periodically moved, causing shifts in their relationship to the environment, the performers, and one another. Each dance is site- and audience-specific. Based on non-visual perception, this work is also the first dance form fully accessible to the visually impaired. Deeply situated in the present moment, Unseen Dances evoke un-socialized instincts that jostle with context, memory, metaphor and imagery. Under-used sensory resources are called up. Touch, hearing, smell and balance bypass language. Defenses are undermined by dislocation. Vulnerability creates permeability and makes for work that is close-to-the-bone and personal. Layered consciousness is a hallmark of Unseen Dances. The work is experientially derived, yet deeply informed by the science of perception. Audiences experience heightened self-consciousness. Concrete questions like “Where am I?”, “Where are they?”,  “What actually is going on?”, and “How shall I hold my body?”, toggle with physical sensation, and responses shaped by social, cultural and personal history. Unseen Dances call attention to how we create and interpret meaning, and underscore the complexity of social connection. They make us question how we come to know what we know and how we judge experience. Link to audio file: "Why the dog had to eat my homework" Dana explains why video documentation of Unseen Dances doesn't really work. Letter from an audience member: “As something of a classical scholar, I came away from the performance thinking that it must have been a similar experience for new initiates into the ancient Mysteries—the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries, especially—who were also blindfolded as they were led into the initiation chambers. I felt a similar psychological shift of consciousness, an experience of awe (in the true sense of the word). Unseen Dance was utterly sensual and breathtakingly emotional and now remains a Memory—of mystery and beauty (there's that word again!).” Unseen Dances have been created with support from Green Space, The Field's Fieldwork Summer Intensive, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program with space at 14 Wall Street donated by Capstone Equities.