Laboratory of Multiple Sensory Experiences

With the Laboratory of Multiple Sensory Experiences, Danse-Cité brings together dance artists and people living with partial or total blindness in a cultural mediation project.

Designed as a space for research and creation, the laboratory gathers three dance artists and eight blind or partially sighted participants. Together, they take part in three intensive two-day sessions and a final roundtable open to the public. Each session focuses on a theme connected to multisensoriality—touch, space, material and objects, sound and voice, etc.

• Blind or partially sighted participants are engaged as sensory consultants, contributing their observations and experiences to the development of new artistic approaches that respond to non-visual perception.

• For the artists, the laboratory provides an opportunity to deepen their practice and experiment with new ways of sharing their work with audiences whose sensory experiences differ.

Led by artist Emile Pineault, the Laboratory of Multiple Sensory Experiences opens up a unique field of exploration where dance becomes a meeting ground for dialogue and the exchange of knowledge.

"When Danse-Cité asked me to create a cultural outreach project with people with visual impairments, I knew right away that I wanted to move away from a one-way educational or didactic format. My desire was to create a genuine encounter between two communities and see what mutual learning could come of it.

Here, we’re talking about the blind and partially sighted community in Montreal and dance artists who work in research and creation. I wanted to focus the project on sensory perception, particularly the non-dominant senses. Many choreographers are already exploring somatic approaches or designing sensory experiences for audiences through choreographic mechanisms.

For their part, people with visual impairments, with their diverse and unique experiences, have developed not only sensory tools and abilities to live in a world where sight remains very central, but also unique ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world. With Danse-Cité, we felt that these two worlds had a lot to learn from each other.

It is important to me that this project remains experimental and contextual. The idea is not to claim to be working towards universal accessibility in dance, but rather to provoke a human encounter focused on research and creation, exploring the senses and seeing what emerges. What knowledge and methods can arise from these exchanges? And how can these moments of encounter shift our preconceptions about dance, creation, accessibility, sensoriality, and blindness?

I am very excited to dive into this destabilizing work and give us the space to explore complex artistic questions together." — Emile Pineault