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Dana Salisbury is an artist from New York City who produces unique experiences of dark dinings: http://www.darkdiningprojects.com/index.htm Interviewer: Netta Stahl.

Dana: Dark Dining Projects create sensory feast for blindfolded guests. They're celebrations, really, for the senses.

Netta: How did you come up with the idea?

Dana: I'm a choreographer and when I was doing research on the world view of the blind and their sensory world. I found that eating with my eyes closed was quite delicious. I love the expended three-dimensionality. I love what happen with sound, I love what happen with flavour. And basically I decided I wanted to have a dinner party which celebrates all of these things. This kind of questions is what got me going - so I was doing a chorography with my eyes closed, and I had my lunch and thought, why am I creating something to illustrate the idea? Why won't I create the experience to give the pleasures of the idea? Originally the Dark Dining Projects were a benefit for the dance I was creating. What happened is that guests enjoyed it so much that I've been asked doing it, and I've been doing it now over five years, in various fashions: modest to theatrical; there are a lot of versions. I do about 25 a year. 

I think there's a difference between blacked-out restaurants, or what people call "blind dining" and what I do. The restaurant is not blacked out, I'm not a restaurateur - I'm an artist. People often confuse what I do with blind dining - this is not blind dining. I don't believe that closing your eyes or being blindfolded temporarily makes you blind. It just means you're temporarily not using your eyesight. "Blind" is a much more complex being, and I think it's not the same thing.

Netta: How do people react?

Dana: It's fun! Maybe in the first two or three minutes the people are a little bit anxious, but then they're being taken to their tables. Between courses we have artist performances and we interact with the group. It's not just going out to a restaurant - there's a real entertainment and real interactions with the guests, with food, with wine.

Blind people experience the situation as normal to them in Dark Dining Projects, and they have an opportunity to bring other people into their world, with certain aspects of the pleasures they have in the world, for people who aren't blind.

Another project that I do which is parallel to Dark Dining Projects is that I have a dance company and we create dances for blindfolded audiences. In the dances people experience on and off visual things. They can feel the space of the room. We touch them. They have different special relations with the space. That works fatuously.

I've been in many places in the United States with Dark Dining Projects, and earlier this year I went to Dublin, Ireland. Most of the events take place in New York City because that's my home base, but they can take place wherever people invite me to. The price depends on the place of the event, its type, and for how many people it is. The place where I do most of them, for weekdays it costs about 100$ per person, and on the weekends it costs 120$. It costs more when I move out from that restaurant. 

Generally about 30 guests arrive per dining, but that depends in the restaurants I'm working with in New York. I have done them larger, I've done them smaller - for two people or just for one person. And I've done for over an hundred. I think I prefer them smaller because I love the intimacy. Everybody likes it in every size. I have never done anything in my life that people seemed so uniformly to enjoy. There are always people who aren't happy, but most of the people enjoy it.