Dining Room Tales is a social art practice conceived and directed by Xan Colman and produced by A is for Atlas, in which strangers are invited to the dinner table, to intimately share in the life, culture and practice of internationally acclaimed artists over a communal meal they design for their audience. For each ‘Tale’, Xan and collaborates with a new protagonist artist to devise a performance that presents that artist’s practice over an evening of slow, relational, story-imbued time.

In April 2020, we will première the 10th Dining Room Tale in Porto, in collaboration with food artisans Garfada do Ouro. During this première season we will be presenting the 100th Dining Room Tales performance event. To drive us on to this 100th performance and beyond, we are looking for 100 donors to donate $100 each. A hundred for a hundred. Please join us.*

Driven by the premise that communities who engage with each other often, and with empathy, are healthier communities, Dining Room Tales is a highly specific practice to drive social resilience. It’s a practice of humanity and of art, shaped by a sustainability framework that emphasises slowness and social intimacy.

We make works around the world, and take them to as many diverse communities as possible. It important to note that we travel light and work hyper-locally (with hosts, food producers etc) to deliver these works. We also work with environment groups to ensure our travel-related carbon is offset (one person-hour in the sky equals one new tree in the ground). We talk about the global local; small communities, leaning on each other from afar.

Dining Room Tales deploys food, performance and storytelling to cultivate cross-community connection to narratives of art, place, culture, family, and life practices which inform the way our society can better function through harmony. In the slow time of communal gathering, the structures of Dining Room Tales open space for critical conversations about who we are as a society, and the future we approach together.

It is from the relentless ripples of discrete stories that we begin to form our social narratives. We need to slow down more. Smell the roses. There’s time. Really. 

*Dining Room Tales is a long-term global project. We would of course be delighted to receive larger donations, and to discuss with you our future practice engagements around Australia and in Japan, Korea, Portugal and Scandinavia.