Dana Salisbury choreographer and multidisciplinary artist

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Dark Dining Projects            Performers           Press See Calendar page for upcoming dates. See us on YouTube. Dark Dining Projects feasts are participatory art events revolving around sensory awareness and pleasure. Blindfolded diners are guided to tables by “dancer/embodiers” and served a specially conceived four-course meal 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." Among the venues at which Dark Dining Projects events have taken place are Camaje Bistro (Manhattan) www.camaje.com, Abigail Café (Brooklyn, NY) abigailbrooklyn.com, Green Street Cafe (Northampton, MA), Pond House Café (Hartford, CT), Rover's, Nell's, and Dinette (all three Seattle, WA), Fisher Island Club (Fisher Island, Miami, FL). Art venues include Galapagos Art Space and Chez Bushwick in Brooklyn, NY, the KO Festival of Performance at Amherst College, Amherst, MA, and the "Art Beyond Sight" Conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. www.darkdiningprojects.com