Silent Dinner is presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in association with Progress: an International Festival of Performance and Ideas.

--->>>  Performance and post-performance Q&A are FREE. All welcome.
--->>>  Audience is invited to come and go during the performance.
--->>>  Volunteer ASL-English student-interpreters will be present at the theatre during the day to help audience with questions / provide information.

Click here for Sage Willow's VLOG about Silent Dinner

FADO Performance Art Centre presents Silent Dinner, an 8-hour performance in which a group of people arrive to the theatre space, set up a rudimentary kitchen, and then prep, cook and eat a dinner in shared silence, without communicating in their language of origin, in front of the attending audience. The performance is created with special guest artist Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan who is CoDA (Child of Deaf Adults) and 12 performer/participants who are a combination of Deaf and hearing performers and non-performers from Toronto.

ABOUT SILENT DINNER
Silent Dinner is inspired by a choreographic exercise devised by Canadian dance artist Justine Chambers entitled Family Dinner, and American artist Lois Weaver's well-known public discourse practice, The Long Table. In Weaver’s Long Table (inspired by Marleen Gorris's film Antonia's Line, in which the dinner table continually extends to accommodate the growing community of outsiders and eccentrics, until finally the table must be moved out of doors), the rules of engagement allow those sitting at the table to participate in the conversation in whatever way they wish, without limit or restriction to access or content. Using the table as a structure to orchestrate a conversation around, this long table combines community interaction with theatricality. As a form The Long Table “acknowledges the sometimes uncomfortable side of both private exchange and public engagement, while celebrating the potential for new forms of knowledge-making and –sharing”, while the rules (or rather, the helpful hints as Weaver calls them) state that there can be silence.

In FADO's Silent Dinner, silence is transformed from a potential born of discomfort or newness, and transformed into the landscape in which indirect communication between people who don’t share the same language is negotiated. The dinner table becomes a meeting place for the intersection of culture and language (hearing and Deaf culture, English and ASL, performance as language) via a performance score employing the everyday activity of sharing a meal. Over the course of the 8-hours of the performance the performers experience, and the audience bares witness to, the many varied and complex layers of communication, compromise, and decision-making that are being performed through construction and deconstruction, art and food, theatre and everyday ritual, the performance of the public and the private. The table functions as both motif (in theatre the table is a prop, in performance it is material) and metaphor for community and connection.

POST-PERFORMANCE Q&A
When the performance ends, the audience is invited for coffee, dessert and a post-performance Q&A from 9pm-10pm with Amanda Coogan, the performers of Silent Dinner, and audience. ASL interpretation will be provided during the talk. (Further notes about accessibility at The Theatre Centre and the Progress Festival are below.)

THANK YOU
FADO would like to offer a big THANKS to our friends and colleagues who have helped us and made this project possible, including Signs Restaurant and Rachel Shemuel, Nicka Noble, Jess Shane, Deanna Bradley-Coelho, Kerry Grandfield and Corene Kennedy and the 2nd and 3rd year students of the ASL-English interpreter program at George Brown College, and our team of trained professional ASL-English interpreters Amanda Hyde, Tara Everett, Shelly Nafshi and Silvia Wannam.

ABOUT PROGRESS
SummerWorks, in partnership with The Theatre Centre and a roster of Toronto theatre and performance organizations/presenters and companies including FADO Performance Art Centre, Buddies in Bad Times, Dancemakers, Why Not Theatre, Video Fag, and Volcano Theatre, brings the world to Toronto with Progress: an International Festival of Performance and Ideas, February 4-15, 2015.

ACCESSIBILITY AT PROGRESS/THEATRE CENTRE
The Theatre Centre is an accessible facility, with barrier-free washrooms and an accessibility lift to facilitate movement between floors. If you are planning a trip to The Theatre Centre and have any questions about accessibility or would like to make any special arrangements, please call our box office at 416-538-0988.  We will be happy to make any arrangements to help facilitate an enjoyable visit to The Theatre Centre.

Various events at Progress Festival offer accessibility resources including ASL interpretation. Please contact the festival directly with any questions about general festival programming and questions about accessiblity at: info@summerworks.ca or call 416-628-8216.

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