Dark Dining Projects
Experiential Workshops
Tools Of Perception/ "Whole-Body-Seeing"
Using movement as the primary investigative tool, these workshops explore touch, sound, sight, smell, kinesthesia (sensations generated by the movement of the body itself), equilibrium, language, interpretation, memory and imagination. The workshops consider discovery, object recognition, spatial orientation, navigation and mapping. They range in length from a two hour introductory session, to week-long intensives, to semester length investigations.
- For Everyone: An introduction to sensory awareness, these workshops playfully explore our less used senses.
- For Performers: Workshops focus on using sensory awareness to extend conceptual, choreographic and performative vocabularies.
- For Teachers: Workshops explore simple movement exercises to help students refine their powers of observation and articulate more clearly what they observe. Because movement communicates through metaphor, it is an ideal tool for translating experience into language.
Touch
Touch and the subtlety of communication through haptic experience (touch accompanied by motion) are central to our lives and well-being. Person-to-person touch is never neutral and its interpretation is multi-layered, mysterious and individual. With greater attention to the quality and content of touch, we become more sensate, permeable and open to experience. Communication becomes deeper, more immediate and rewarding.
- For interested adults; no prior skills needed
- Workshops designed specifically for performers also available
Sensualization: Embodied Sensory Imagination
(First offered at the Art Beyond Sight Conference, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)
Sensualization embodies a scenario by placing it in the body’s imagination. Drawing on the senses and sense memory, “sensualization” (a word coined by Salisbury, analogous to “visualization”) describes the elements in a scene or image through all the senses except sight. Listeners are guided to imagine full physical engagement with an environment, real or fictive, using interior sensation to explore and interpret external information. The medium for understanding is the body. To gain access to information that can only be gathered visually, sensualizations permit the observer to imagine moving about the presumed space and interacting with the environment. Derived from Salisbury’s work as a visual artist and choreographer, sensualization captures the essence of experience before it is translated into language.
Sensualization engenders greater sensory awareness and respect for observation, language and multi-modal thinking. It generates rich source material for artists in all disciplines. It offers a shared language of experience when describing physical situations or works of art to the visually impaired and opens new ways for museum curators, educators, docents and art lovers to engage with works of art. The workshops open with an experiential primer on embodying the senses. Following that warm-up, participants are guided through several sensualizations. Finally the group creates a sensualization and explores the uses of this process.
- Suitable for adults; no prior skills needed.
- Special workshops for children also available