Call for participants: Sublime Picnic – a Dining Room Tales testing event

Parahosted by PUBLICS

Lian Bell and Xan Colman are creating a light-foot, location-responsive, walking-conversation-picnic-performance. At the conclusion of their creative development week at PUBLICS, Lian and Xan invite you to walk, chat, and eat with them this Friday 12 June…

This is an experiment, and we need your assistance. This will be the first time we’re testing some of our plans for this Dining Room Tales work; we’d like to try it out with a few people and hear what you think.

We’ll be meeting at Publics at 12.00 and walking with you for a couple of hours, ending up back near Publics. You can count on being well on your way by 15.00.

If you’d like to join, please let us know by Thursday 11th 18.00, and tell us if you have any dietary requirements or allergies.

Phone: +358 40 363 5898. WhatsApp +61 414 912 969. Email: xan(a)aisforatlas.org.au

If you can, we’d like to invite you to wear something (or somethings) yellow.

FURTHER INFORMATION

At every point in human history, your family was alive. The Black Death? Vikings landing in Dublin? The invention of the sandwich? At every single moment, your family was alive. How does thinking about that affect our sense of scale, and our place in the world? What might this mean for how we share stories about our past, and about our future?

Acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Lian Bell is the next collaborating protagonist in Dining Room Tales, the performance practice of Xan Colman that invites audiences to spend time together over a meal designed by an artist.

Xan and Lian first met in 2018 on a walking tour of Porto. Since then, they have never met twice in the same place, but have walked, talked, and eaten together in Belgrade, Aarhus, London, Bodø, Stamsund, Luxembourg, Berlin, and Dublin. As artists coming from families with peripatetic colonial histories spanning Ireland, Australia, Canada, Scotland, and India, they wonder how what we know of where we came from connects us with where we are now.

We’ve been talking a lot about lineage. We’ve been eating local produce + asking local people for tips. We are interested in maps + family trees, and in genealogical imaginings. We’re interested in thinking about how small we are in the history of the world, and in the landscape. We are interested in how groups form, and where our bodies begin and end. And what exactly is a picnic?

While walking as a group, Lian and Xan will lead participants in lightly scripted and open conversation. The work will probe how we engage with each other and the world around us, paying attention to the group’s own expertise of their homeplace, and giving them time and gentle structures (from macro to micro) to see it with new eyes.

THE ARTISTS

Lian Bell is an artist and arts worker based in Dublin whose work often relies on designing shapes that attempt to hold and influence human interactions, however ephemeral or fleeting. She has a background in scenography, visual art, project management, coaching, and feminist activism, and is interested in hanging out, walking, quiet resistance, and travelling without flying. She has worked for over 25 years with some of the most significant arts organisations and contemporary performance makers in Ireland. www.lianbell.com

Xan Colman is an artist and producer based in Helsinki. With a background in performance, theatre and classical music, Xan’s contemporary work centres on Dining Room Tales, a social art practice that invites a public into slow relational connection with an artist (and each other) around a meal. For Xan, togetherness is critical. How we choose to be together, how we commit to certain possibilities that arise from togetherness, these are the critical faculties that stimulate and train our collective resilience. www.diningroomtales.com

Dining Room Tales #18 Sublime Picnic with Lian Bell is in development in 2026 with the assistance of PUBLICS and Cairde Sligo Arts Festival.