A story told through sensorial experience (I Fiori del Te' by gruppo LIS)

Few years back I participated in an itinerary performance, the rituality of which involved its spectators by engaging their senses of touch and smell apart from vision. I Fiori del Te' (which means 'The Tea Flowers' in Italian) was presented as part of an annual art festival, Fabbrica Europa. Since my work has evolved around sensory experience and audience participation, I recall this piece quite vividly and haven't happened to see anything like it ever since.

Gruppo Lis took its spectators on a journey that illustrated the Japanese ritual of tea through letting them explore their sensorial perception and thus making the delicate story somehow more accessible and real. Each participant was separately greeted by a performer with a hug and led into another chamber. The dark atmosphere suggested from the beginning that vision was not the only sense that was to be explored and used in this performance. One by one, audience members assembled in a dimly lit chamber and were seated on the floor. As the performers began to recite part of the story, people were given little knives and before we realised we were all engaged in peeling potatoes together. The lack of light made it a highly sensorial task, which brough together everyone in the room, including the performers.

The sense of touch and manuality were explored individually although by using the same elements audience members became part of a community. The simple manual task emerged spectators in the rituality that is attached to the growth and preparation of tea in the Orient.

The itinerary nature of the performance made spectators feel more participative as we were led to new rooms, each with different settings as every time another episode of the story unfolded. The performative actions, which concentrated on the visual perception of spectators, blended with moments of haptic experience, triggered by the settings and objects within the spaces. As single moments were marked by different places, it became clear that each episode contained its own ritual, whether it included visual, auditory or haptic involvement.

Barefoot, participants were conducted to a path of warm earth in order to reach the chamber where the story came to an end. The act of walking itself was transformed into a sensual experience, leading the audience into the conclusive act of the performance.

I Fiori del Te' made its spectators part of the performance by physically making them aware of the rituality that is contained within the Eastern tradition of tea. The theme of the performance perfectly matched its sensory elements, thus making the piece a very special event that hovered between theatre, performance and ritual.