A Conversational Dance

At The Table is an ongoing series of events in collaboration with performance artists, musicians, dancers, philosophers and activists. These events bring together individuals to experience and explore performance, participation and food as a celebration of our basic needs: sustenance, shelter and connection to others. These events are an invitation to be present with each other, creatively exploring new ways of communication and exchange while fully embracing the possibility of failure. This project questions the sustainability of a social structure based on debt and individualistic “survival of the fittest.” With an awareness that individual and community health are inseparable, we undertake an experiment in social technology inspired by mycelial communication of needs and resources. 

Through mycelial behaviour, we're experimenting with a model of community exchange that responds to individuals as members of a collective ecosystem. We invite audience to co-create unfamiliar models of conversation to discover resilient and responsive new forms of social architecture. This event will respond to the ideas unearthed at the October event which will be developed with a group of movement practitioners and dancers, who will explore these mycelial prompts by co-creating possible scores and choreographic systems to bring this biological model into the body. These scores will be offered as a new model for conversation from the body with audience as active participant. 

At The Table began in December of 2013 and has hosted two home events at artist's Lindsay Hopkins and Bryan Saner's homes. These events provided a platform for performance and sharing a meal together while experimenting with community building, skill shares and conversation. At The Table also recently co-hosted the 2nd annual Hygge Party with the Chicago Time Exchange at Links Hall in Spring 2015. The At The Table collective is a collaboration between Lindsay Hopkins, Mike Lahood, Jessie Marasa, Lara Oppenheimer, and Bryan Saner.