Dinner Party Series with Jess Dobkin & Joyce LeeAnn

The Hemispheric Encounters dinner party series is a collaboration between Joyce LeeAnn, Jess Dobkin, and Shalon Webber-Heffernan

These gatherings are an offering—and importantly, an experiment—for artists, academics, archivists and activists to gather across borders, language, time zones and cultures for sensory, intimate connection in pandemic times. 

This series of dinner parties were made possible by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and FADO Performance Art Centre.

For this coming together, this meeting across borders, backgrounds, languages and time zones, we welcome that which we each bring to the proverbial table—what we carry and hold, what lies between, behind, and in front of us. We orbit around each other and question what happens when we collide.  

These gatherings hold space and time to briefly linger in the in-betweens of encounter—observing, sensing, experimenting. They are a place to converge, and a practice of being with. You are invited to soften, relax, share, be curious or perhaps even, to embrace discomfort within this shared and ephemeral container.  

We are so glad you are here, as you are.