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It’s hard to know what kind of event this is, even as I am watching it. Opening boxes of your father’s things, and watching you experience his loss in your face and your body, in your laughter and your weeping, I am moved to sympathy for you. I imagine the personal story behind the objects, imagine your difficult childhood and his difficult fatherhood, make up moments of joy and commonality that you might have had. I think about my own family, about what will be in the boxes I leave behind when I die, about what I will do to mark the passing of my own father. There’s an obvious question raised by these boxes and their inevitable, laughable incompleteness: is this what makes up a life? A travel Scrabble game? An apron with a naked woman? An ornamental pewter mug? An unused set of artists’ pencils? I wonder how many of these were gifts, and think about the gifts I have received which just sit unused in my desk drawer, and about the gifts I’ve given my father for which he had no use.

But this is not just a space for reflection, but a space for action. A space for a particular kind of action: performance. It’s demarcated from everyday life by the transition from the lounge space, in which you talk to us as if we’re all in the same room, and our entry into the performance space, in which dialogue between you and us seems inappropriate. It’s a space further separated by the beautiful arrangement of the space: the objects and your body shrouded in white (not black); the clock on the wall ticking time away; the cast breasts below the clock suggesting mothering, nurture, wholeness, purity; the sound of recorded birdsong casting the space outward from itself. The presence of a filmmaker also works to separate performance from everyday life: it suggests that there is something in this place and for a fixed time which warrants recording.

So, in addition to my sympathy for you and my thoughts about myself, another thing that is going on is me watching you make a performance out of these materials. And there are some very striking moments, some resonant connections you discover in your improvisation. The moment near the end when you use red paint from your father’s paint set to make a St George cross on your chest, recalling the very early object (the first object?) pulled from the box: an English national flag. The first flag is somewhat funny and somewhat loathsome, tragic in a way which is everyday and banal just as racism, as an abstract ubiquity, is both tragic and banal. The second flag has more rich layers of meaning, as I imagine you taking your father’s beliefs into your own body: you may not like them but your body is partly his. Your exit from the space is similarly evocative. Having discovered a (military?) patch with a bird wing on it, you circle the room, stepping lightly, the wing sticking out of the corner of your mouth, and then leave. We are left, holding the eggs you gave us, listening to birdsong, with the painting of a bird made by your father blacked over on the wall.

These are rich moments, moments which I can appreciate, even savour, as a spectator to a performance. But at the same time I question that enjoyment, question my own complicity in a process which transformed personal grief into public spectacle. There’s a satisfaction in this improvised connections, but I am also disquieted by my own satisfaction. I am not here to see a performance. As you said in your introduction to the audience, this work is not about illustrating grief. To put it simply, I do not want to evaluate this event only on the basis of how well you perform. It helps that you perform well, but what is it that it helps? There is more going on, more that is suggested.

One of the elements of this ‘more’ is something which can only happen over time, the way in which improvisation necessarily takes it time to discover something. The way in which improvisation can, in some sense, ‘waste’ time – so that in watching events like this we often see a lot which fails to coalesce, or which is derivative of other such events, but which unexpectedly gives way to some small moment which is new. In your sharing, this happened in the way you began to move your body towards the end of the time together, particularly as you held the four boules (?) to your face and the breathtaking, bacchanalic (?) stomping dance which ensued. What came across here was a way in which you started to take in these objects, not through looking at them or thinking about them and their memories, but through what seemed like a very deep bodily connection. This seemed more profound than a casual sensuality – it was more than you just holding them to your face, more than just finding new ways of you, as you, experiencing them, as them. Instead there was a strong connection between your body as object and the balls as objects. (I think now of similar thoughts watching incredible moments of butoh, when it seems as if the performer is somehow trying to escape from his or her own skin, or indeed as if the flesh itself is dancing, trying to dance, trying to get away from the performer.)

And on quite a different note, something else which I left wondering about was this very question: what are we watching? What have you invited us to watch? What are you achieving by making the kind of separation of the performance and the performance space, which I described above? What might it mean for people to have gathered to watch this performance, as opposed to inviting friends, or strangers, to be with you as you opened the boxes? The relationship with the spectators (as spectators) unquestionably affects the experience – but what ‘uses’ might this affect have? What discovery is made possible by this performance separation?

I don’t have any answers here, but I want to keep asking this question as the residency goes on. One of the things which is challenged is the question of who this is for. Performance is usually presented as something for the spectator. In the case of what you are doing, maybe it is about letting us be there for you. Rather than seeing an already-recovered body, we are there at the site of recovery-in-process. We are there to nurture. This is your gift for us – that we get to be there for you.

Queen Mary, University of London

Bringing together experts in bereavement care, dance, and other relevant professions we will consider how performance can be a catalyst and vessel for emotional recovery through two days of presentation, performance, film and discussion.

Presenting at the symposium will be:

John Fox and Sue Gill (previously of Welfare State International) will give an illustrated talk about their new company Dead Good Guides which they formed in 2006 and which picks up where Welfare State International left off.

Patricia Repar founder and director of Arts-in-Medicine at University of New Mexico (US) a program of clinical service, research, and education. She will present her work in this area with a particular focus on bereavement.

Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson, will look at the place of the religious and spiritual in performance work that includes bereavement. For the past two decades she has been exploring Gnosticism in her life and visionary work.

Rosemary Lee, will talk about walking the tightrope between community and high art in dance. Her choreography is one of the best examples of a practice that located itself successfully beyond the limited terms concert dance and community dance.

Robert Pacitti, will look at the socio-political as it interfaces with art, bereavement and life. His critical theatre practice explicitly navigates the socio political with elegant lack of dogma.

COST: £35 for 2 days or £20 for 1 day full-time salaried/funded
£25 for 2 days or £15 for 1 day part-time salaried/freelance artist
£20 for 2 days or £10 for 1 day concessions

We offer a 10% discount for group bookings of 7 people or more.

To book for the symposium please contact Helena Hunter, Chisenhale Dance Space, 64-84 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ. helena@chisenhaledancespace.co.uk, tel: 020 8981 6617

How might crochet and contemporary dance be combined to build a grieving ceremony that empowers the bereaved and offers ownership over the process of saying goodbye?  These workshops will be the chance to develop a bereavement ritual that is personally meaningful, and publicly significant in a way that the funeral never could be.  Using elements of the residency’s studio research participants work over three weekends sharing domestic, industrial, performance, musical and artistic practices to create ways of celebrating, commiserating, letting go, and never forgetting.  This is a chance to create performances, private or public, that surprise and inspire ourselves and others. Open to everyone, no professional training in the arts necessary.

Doran George is currently Artist in Residence at Chisenhale Dance Space. His project “The Mourners Dance” is to research the development of a “culture of bereavement” as a different way to think about recovery from loss. In much the same way as you might attend a funeral or a wedding and gain satisfaction from playing a role in an important transition in someone’s life, Doran has designed an experimental bereavement ritual that is intended to publicly acknowledge a life transition, that of moving through loss. This event has been designed in response to discussion at the residency launch meeting on Novemeber 16th about what it’s like to be an audience for a piece of performance that is explicitly dealing with the emotional recovery of the performer. This event is by invitation only and you are being invited either because you have already had a connection with the residency, or because you have some expertise in this area that will be valuable in furthering this research.

On February 4th which is Doran’s late father’s birthday, he will open a box of his father’s things, and dance with the contents. These boxes were set aside for Doran following his Dad’s death in 2006 and it will be the first time Doran sees them.

Gill and I had this conversation where I was realising that, for me, the action of actually opening the boxes has significance for me on another level. I have my own needs. I’ve realised that I had these needs for a kind of validation, and the opening of the boxes is an emotionally demanding and traumatic moment for me. As an artist, I’m interested in asking audiences to engage with that. And as an activist, so to speak – and I suppose this is the conceit of the residency – I’m interested in the potential of bringing the traumatised body – the body in trauma – into the frame, as a way of both changing the terms of the frame itself, but also in a way changing the terms of trauma. A thing is traumatic not just because it has an essential “trauma” to it; trauma isn’t like “trauma” in the way that grass is green. Trauma changes in different circumstances. So, for example, the trauma, I suppose, of coming out as gay … the terms of what that trauma is, or the terms of what that shift is, change as a society’s relationship to homosexuality changes. And I’m interested in the potential for bringing a traumatised body into the frame as a way of changing the terms of trauma as well as changing the terms of the frame.

But one of the things that I’ve realised was that I actually have my own real needs around this. And that some of what I need is a kind of validation, that this is a scary thing for me. But artistically, I also have a need for validation that’s quite separate from the nature of the traumatic event. And that need for validation is a primal, fairly human need. Like [my cousin’s] need for us to enjoy her house, and validate that she lives in a nice house. Or my mum’s need for us to validate her soup, that it’s a tasty soup. They’re fairly mundane needs for validation, but they’re still needs for validation.

My need to know that I made a good piece, that I made an effective intervention into culture, or I had an effective speech-act, somehow sits alongside the need to feel like people understand the significance of the action for me. And I had a real question of, well, what does that mean in terms of what I’m asking an audience to do? Because for me to really be to have clarity about the boundary between those two things, to a degree I would need to not be a traumatised body. It would need to not be something that is about my own emotional recovery. I would need to have “emotionally recovered”. Now, I don’t think that the idea of an emotionally recovered body is very real, but there’s a way in which in inviting an audience to engage with a moment that is specifically about emotional recovery invites a kind of blurring of those boundaries between the need for validation in the process of emotional recovery and the need for validation of an artists, at a much higher level.

On an artistic level, or on a methodological level, it made me start to think: so, how do I get the validation as an artist and how do I get the validation as somebody that’s in a process of emotional recovery? Or do I really need to separate those things out? And in some senses, like when I’m talking about a practice with audience, or a different way of practicing “audience” as part of the work, maybe one of the things that I’m doing is practicing “audience” in a way that questions the role of the audience. What it made me want to think about is how do I bring up that issue of these two different kinds of validation that we’re asking for from an audience. Because as an audience you know that you’re in a piece of work, that you’re being asked to consider whether it has value as a piece of artwork.

I guess what I’m saying in a way is that there’s a convention around audience that’s it’s almost like it’s a given. It’s unquestionable. And if I sort of say, okay, maybe part of the work can be to ask the audience to actually reflect on their role in this piece of work. That somehow that’s starting to enter into this whole idea of a practice where art is a supporting vehicle towards a change to the way that we think about how bodies exist in public space. Or how we think about bodies being in the world. So that this “traumatised body” is not a body that is vanquished to the realms of therapy, or hospitalisation, or whatever it is, but that this traumatised body might be acknowledged as something that is always already existing at the centre of society. Like it’s always there.

I suppose there’s this kind of notion in contemporary post-industrial capitalism that the body that exists in public space and the body that exists in the ordinary exchanges of life is a recovered body. Is one that isn’t undergoing anything, and those are the terms by which we relate to each other, too. One of the things that I really like, in terms of thinking about bereavement, perhaps in industrial capitalism, but definitely in pre-industrial capitalism or pre-industrial society, is that people marked their difference in various ways in society. For example, if you were grieving, in some societies you wore a black armband. Or in some societies you wore a black veil. So that people understood your difference.

In the claims for civil rights, which are an important part of capitalism, it’s almost like we expect a kind of equanimity between everybody and everything that’s completely unreasonable and just doesn’t make any sense. And of course it makes absolute sense that art would be a place where we would start to think about how we can re-discover the difference within bodies. The different bodies that exist alongside each other all the time. And that we can also problematise that notion of the democratic subject, the free, democratic subject. Because that’s what it’s about. Or in American terms, the constitutional subject.

I had a couple of different thoughts while you were talking. But also, from all the other conversations and experiences of this trip today, I’m thinking about the way in which our experience being in a family is linked to knowledge of generationality. And that this connects ideas of family with ideas of death: at some point you become aware that generationality has not only to do with new people being born, but also people passing. You were just joking earlier about this “tour of death”, but in a way any kind of family structure is about …

… a tour of death. Yeah, as much as it is about life.

Yeah. Maybe connected to that might be an idea about the “nurtured body” as opposed to the “recovered body”. As opposed to this kind of “normal” body.

One thing that just struck me was something that Gill said about her family recently. Gill’s family is experiencing a sort of sense of vulnerability, and of her father particularly in the moment, because he has a heart condition. Gill’s nephew died four years ago, and he was very young. So what we were talking about the other day was that, in a way, the family is being confronted with mortality from all sides. And what you were making me realise in some sense is that any relationship to generationality – any relationship to family, actually – invokes a relationship to mortality.

I really like this idea that you’re saying about the “nurtured body” instead of the “recovered body”. What I’m understanding from that, I suppose, is that in contemporary, post-industrial capitalism, there’s an expectation to have a certain kind of body. It does seem that this is shifting in some cultural locations and in some business locations, but the expectation to have a certain kind of body is the expectation that you will nurture that body in other circumstances than the site of the generation of capital. The idea of nurturing the body at the point of the generation of capital would be a way of re-thinking that notion, so that instead of needing to have a body that doesn’t need to be nurtured at the point of the generation of capital, we think of the body always needing to be nurtured at the point of the generation of capital.

In terms of theatre or art, the way that that’s mimicked or mirrored is that, to some degree, the expectation in art that we won’t be dealing the “real” situation of the artist is the very expectation that is central to the way the body exists, or is expected to exist, within capitalism. To say that we could think about the body of the artist needing to be nurtured at the point of cultural production is a way of experimenting with the idea that the body of the worker needs to be nurtured at the point of the generation of capital. And I like that idea of “nurtured”, because what that says is that the body is something that always needs to be nurtured. That the body is not something that is ever recovered.

Yeah. And it sounds like one of the things you might be questioning is the idea of recovery, because it implies a kind of process which is exceptional. Like the norm is “whole”, and if something gets “broken”, then you need to do this “recovery” process so that you get back to the “normal” whole. Whereas nurturing is counter to this, and you constantly need nurturing.

Exactly.

This is kind of a bit of an aside, in a personal sense. But I know that for me, because of what happened when I was 16, there was a way in which for a long time I felt like if I’m broken then I need to be fixed. There’s a way in which I can be fixed, and I need to be fixed, because there might be a point at which there’s no one to nurture me. I don’t know if that’s an odd way to be; it might be the norm for a lot of people. I know it is for a lot of queer people. I don’t know if that’s something peculiar to being queer – it may or may not be. But this is a kind of re-thinking of that and saying, no, it’s not about fixing about yourself so that you’ll be okay and so that you don’t need anybody. It’s actually about recognising that you always need to build networks that support the process of nurturing. That’s part of what you need as a body, as a human organism.

At the beginning of what you were saying, when you were talking about validation, I was thinking about this weird knife-edge that the performer has to walk. On the one hand, you can dismiss a piece because it’s too personal. You can see something and just say, oh, that is just an artist working through his or her issues, and it’s not art, or whatever. But you can also dismiss something because it’s not personal enough. This comes up a lot in identity politics. What right does that person have to speak about this? Or to represent blackness? Or otherness? Or queerness? And so on. Somebody’s politics is always missing something. You can dismiss something for not being rooted in experience, for not being “from the heart”.

So it’s a balancing act. And, in terms of negotiating that balance, I was thinking about the possibility of validation being something which extends to the audience as well. Validating the audience. In those examples you gave about your cousin and the soup, or your mother and the house, what’s going on there is not only, “oh, somebody likes my house” or “somebody likes my soup”, but for the person being offered it’s “somebody likes my opinion”. Or, “I matter to this person”. In performance, quite a crucial feeling is that sense that, as an audience, you matter to the performer. And that validation might be what can negotiate that balance between being too personal or not being personal enough.

Well, it’s interesting, because in what I’m doing on Monday, I’ve chosen to give the audience two different ways to express how they feel, or what they think about the process itself. There’s going to be a camera outside the space that you can go and talk to, and there’s going to be a letter-writing table as well. Their opinion in this case really is valuable to me, because the performance is also a kind of research. It’s an experiment in the potential to do this, with the idea that, for me – and for other people if they’re interested – maybe this is a way of building a practice.

When we first met I told you about the piece that I made with the guy that I first had sex with, and, in a sense, this residency is kind of building on that practice. Can art be practiced in a way that still has value in terms of “that’s artistically very beautiful, or interesting, or whatever” but that part of what’s beautiful or engaging has something to do with social engagement, or social practice? That’s basically the question.

It’s been a while since I looked at this, but I am reminded of Bill T. Jones’ work, and how there was this whole critical uprising against it. The argument that this was beyond criticism, that it’s not art anymore. When Jones was working with people who were going to die, people asked, how can you criticise what they have to say? And there was this really vehement reaction against it.

Right. Absolutely.

That’s partly why I’m inviting opinion and inviting discussion around this. I’ve never seen the work directly, but I thought the work that Bill T. Jones did was incredible thing to do, and I have full support for it. But, partly because of my own misgivings around this whole idea, and partly because some of the reactions to ways that I’ve worked, I’m kind of like: okay, I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing, but I am going to invite you to dialogue around it. To think about what it actually means to do this. You can recognise the degree to which you lose critical distance, but at the same time, you’re invited to have critical distance through a dialogue about the actual doing of it. There’s that invitation there.

I mean, part of the reason they felt robbed of critical distance is because people don’t know how to talk about death. So that’s not a problem of the work. That’s a problem of the context. And that means that the context needs to change. And that’s partly why I’m trying to do what I’m trying to do. Because we do need to talk about death. Because talking about death, and being able to engage with mortality is going to change the way that we live our lives. For the better. And I feel really convinced of that. I’m experiencing the benefits of that, actually. Even though I had a nightmare that I met Death last night.

People for whom it will be 8pm
Del La Grace Volcanoe, Sweden, He’ll be thinking about his Mother and Friend.

Joao Da Silva, Doesburg, Germany, He will be thinking about his Father.

Doran George, Arnhem, Holland, He will be thinking about his Father.

There was a moment during which I thought of everyone. I could feel pain, pain about my Dad’s death, how much he suffered in the lead up to his death, than I became aware of the other losses in the congregation, some specifics that I new. I cried, for the first time in one of these.

My Dad’s widow came to mind and I could feel a physical sensation in my body that I associate with them. As I felt this I took myself to different people in the congregation.

Sometimes I felt quite distant, like none of this really matters. I felt like “oh no I mustn’t be doing it right” but just acknowledged that as another feeling among many. In the second half hour I worked with movement. My feelings about Dad felt like a slippery nodule I couldn’t rest on, didn’t want to. I just breathed through this feeling. I felt a deep sense of disappointment and distrust in my Dad. Remember mistrusting when he was nice to me. This made me sad. Then I had a wonderful sweet memory of when I was very small and he came into the bedroom after mine and my brothers bed time. He had just gotten home from work and showed us the present he had bought for us to give to mum on her birthday the next day. It was holders for corn on the cob that looked like corn on the cob. He was so excited.

Mary Fulkerson O’Donnell, Arnhem, Holland, her Dad George O’Donnell who died October 10th, 1998, at the age of 80. He was very lucky to have survived WWI and have a long life of as BellTelephone Executive, worker for profoundly retarded individuals, and “The Voice of the Century” –also wonderful FATHER.

Sarah Payton, Amsterdam Dear Doran and other members of the Congregation, Although I have not lost anyone close to me, I wish to join your congregation as a supportive mourner.My thoughts will be with you tomorrow evening.

People for whom it will be 7pm:

Caroline Foreman, Burbage, Leics UK, she is the daughter of the person she’s thinking about.

Florence Peake, who joined us last minuteIt took me a while to settle, I waited for my boy friend to leave so it wasn’t until 20 past eight that I lit a couple of candles. I felt a lot of peace and a feeling of warmth to know that I was connecting with others in that moment.

I see the church, it is her funeral, a freezing winters day with a bright blue sky. There is a song thrush high up on the tree yelling its song at the funeral procession. A strange mix of joy and grief and guilt as well. I remember my grand father there, 8 months later he died, I think he died of loneliness.

A very peaceful meditation, images of Ashwell and they seem very far away now, peaceful. Then they are close to me but in such an abstract way that I don’t recognise them.

I spend some time praying.

I speak to Desmond and I ask him if he would like any prayers for his father , he said ‘just tell him Thank you’

Isobel Terry, Leeds, she’ll be thinking about her sister.

It is a year and a day since she died. At 7 pm I enter my room in the roof from where I can see the sky, I set the timer for an hour. I light the orange candle and ring the Tibetan bell. On the cream carpet I lie closing my eyes. My body moves. After ten minutes I stop. I track and record my movements and sensations.Then from a warmth lingering in my groin grows a sensation. A climax of descending, up and inwards, deep inside my pelvic girdle. A caven of muscular darkness in which I can see, the huge pool of sorrow is slowly receding. I rest a while. My cells are breathing. A lightness of air. In the opening of my closed eyes I remember, her last letters placed in the box covered with tulips. I get them out of my chest. I move the white paper between my thumb and finger tips, a textural gesture of hers. Touching, now of mine. And in a brown envelope, with my name on the front underlined, are scraps of collage. The last she will ever give me. Torn jade and pink. I read her handwriting. Her words are clear and composed, poetic and personal. Deeply personal. I cry. A piece of shattered glass. The words of a song in my head ‘ Where do broken hearts go ? ‘. Answer, into the embrace of my moving self. The timer rings, an hour has passed in this zone of timelessness. I ring the bell, three times. I blow out the candle and leave the room. It is 8pm, greenwich mean time. The time. A time created for the powerful in the mapping of our superiority. I feel a deep gratitude for the collective consciousness, of us all, at the same time, re member ing our beloved ones who have passed over to the other side.

Isobel Terry in Leeds, UK, her sister, Helena, died 19/1/07, of suicide.

Pen Mendonca, London, will take this moment to remember my best friend Michelle who died 12 years ago.

At first the idea of a scheduled reflection seemed a little odd, normally it’s a song, a smell or a familiar feeling that stirs me. Stops me for a moment and makes me remember.

It was reassuring to see others on the list who were also thinking of people who had died a long time ago, others with crazy sad stories you’d expect in a film. It’s been nice to share a moment with them. Sometimes it can feel like if it happened a long time ago we shouldn’t need to talk about it anymore, as if it’s no longer relevant. Bizaar really when you think about the impact something like this can have on your life.

The experience last night made me realise how confused my memories are becoming. I spent the time making a sketch book about it. It was both a sad and a happy hour.

Fabrizio Manco, London, paternal grandfather whose funeral I didn’t/couldn’t attend, paternal grandmother, who died when my father was a kid and maternal grandmother who died when she was also young (dramatically struck under an olive tree by lightening). This is a chance to connect with their ‘presence’ and especially a way through a ‘pre-loss’ about my mother (cancer survivor) and my father (liver problems).

Tania Tempest-Hay, London My Nan, Winnie My Dad, Bruce Nan’s death 5 years ago was my first experience of losing someone I loved and was very close to; since then I have also lost my grandad and my Dad.

Before the congregation, I had thought that knowing that people all over the world were engaged in the same thoughts and feelings would give me a shared sense of loss and a support for bereavement, but strangely it didn’t. It was still me, alone in a room, with photos of my Nan and my Dad, and all the feelings I have had before.

Uppermost of these is that death is inconceivable, unbelievable. After 5 years (for my Nan) and 2 years (for my Dad) it is still hard to believe that these people who WERE here will never be seen by anyone again. It makes the problems of life seem so meaningless. This lead me to remember the emptiness of the houses and rooms they left behind once everything had been cleared out. For my Nan that meant months of removing 50 years of a life from one semi-detached house; for my Dad, one afternoon of clearing his one room in the old people’s home. Both so different, but in the end, you are left with empty rooms.

With regard to the ritual aspect of this project, I found myself feeling guilty that my brother and I had no celebrant at my Dad’s funeral, as he died in Australia, with no friends or family. My brother and I flew to be there, and we felt that as we knew everything about him, why did anything have to be said by someone who had never met him. But, in retrospect, I wish that we had done so; it is for us the mourners after all. One element of ritual at Nan’s funeral which stands out for me is the undertaker walking in front of the hearse, wearing a top hat, till the end of the street. And at my Dad’s in Australia, one of the coffin bearers wore black Driza-bone coat and Akubra hat.

I started thinking of death in general, including my own, and the inevitablity of deaths to come of people I love. I also started thinking of the deaths of the hundreds and thousands of my ancestors, who I never knew, whose births and deaths led to me being here.

Having a place to go (a grave) is for me a solace, where I can think about the person and know that they are actually there beneath my feet. I visited my Nan’s grave at xmas, but in death, as well as in life, my fathers grave in Sydney is too far away.

I have photos of my Nan and Dad around the house, but even with these constant reminders, I feel that the essence of them is fading away from me.

People for whom it will be 2pm:
Carline Blackman New York City

Katto Wittich, Los Angeles, She will be thinking about her sister Hannah.

I decided that to be with Hannah, my beloved younger sister who died this year at the age of 45 after a very hard struggle with ovarian cancer, I would spread a blanket on the floor and do some quiet yoga stretching. that was always hannahs favorite thing to do. in the middle of dinner parties, or just hanging out and talking, suddenly she would be down on the floor with her legs stretching into the air, enjoying the stretch of her muscles while she talked. within two weeks after major abdominal surgery to remove massive amounts of cancer, she was already stretching her legs from her position on the couch.

So I started slowly stretching and just thinking about her. I also thought about all of you, just feeling the sweetness of knowing that other people were thinking about people they loved and had lost.

As long as I was moving I felt really connected to Hannah and loved doing leg wiggles that I used to watch her do, but had never done. But then when I sat still I got a little itchy and uncomfortable. So I just sat with the uncomfortableness for a while, recognizing how that unbearable edginess is how Hannah lived so much of her life. I sat with it until it eased.

But what came in was that I really needed to sit not just with hannah, but with my mom who died 16 yrs ago and my grandmother who died 14 yrs ago. and somehow all the female relatives that are gone that I loved, and my living sister who will one day be gone if I am not gone before her.

And I can feel all of us in my body, in the ways I hold myself back, in the ways I twist and pull myself in different directions, trying to move forward and hold back at the same time.

And I can feel how there is so much possibility for healing and for change in me if I let myself feel how much love can flow through me — and if I let the love be there, how much sorrow and loss will be there too.

So I laid on the floor and felt all that flow through me and tug me in different directions. The fear of letting in so much love and being vulnerable to so much pain, and the knowing that it is a threshold that I am fast approaching because it is where I need to go. And that in some way it will heal all those who went before me as it heals me. And that each beloved woman who has died before me has contributed some piece toward healing this ancient pain and fear that is in our very dna.

And that Hannah, of all of us, in the process of her dying, brought us the closest to the healing that is needed, by letting go of her fear at the very and and transforming into a being of pure love. Mom too, and grandma too, they were all luminous at the end and each death has been such a gift for me as it shows the steps on the path to living with a fearless open heart.

I’ve been dreaming Hannah nearly every night as we get closer to the one year anniversary of her death on February 10th. She is so with me in so many ways. I wake up in the mornings delighted to have seen her face, to have touched her hair and heard her voice, knowing always that I won’t ever do that again in waking life, so I am so grateful for how strong she is inside of me.

I don’t know if anything of hannah still exists, but I do know that she exists strongly inside me, and for that I am glad.

I was delighted to participate in this experiment. I am not sure if I felt all of you or not, but I very much liked knowing everyone was out there. I think because of the timing, it feels like not a separate event, but just part of the flow of really living with the process of Hannahs dying and the changes that the one year flow of it is bringing for all of us in our family.

I’m also glad to have done it in this house with my bald headed 45 year old brotherinlaw who has stage four melanoma and may well not be here in another year. I love watching him and being glad that he is still here now, finding him so precious in his wild sad angry nature, knowing how ephemeral we all are. Even when the awful punk music he is currently blasting is making it hard for me to write! And I watch my 56 yr old husband, with his tired face, loving his brother and so sad because he knows what may be coming, having watched it with Hannah. And I challenge myself to let in all the way how much I love him. To not keep myself safe by holding back because he too may someday be gone. To learn how to let in how precious he is and to let it wash through me and not hold on to anything.

People for whom it will be 12midday

Deirdre Egan, Mesa, AZ. I lost my little sister, Heather, this year-we were very close and shared a lot. She died from complications from childbirth at 37. She was a beautiful dancer, spiritual seeker who engaged deeply in all she experienced and with all those she touched.

People for whom it will be 11am:

Jordy Jones. California High Desert – Joshua Tree – “Although it now belongs to Another, Daddy Alan will live forever in the heart of His boy.”

Johanna Went, Los Angeles, I will be thinking about my mother she died 46 years ago January 19, tomorrow. I always feel kind of blue in January and today I was feeling depressed, then I remembered that it is a yearly occurrence and it dawned on me that on Saturday is her death date.

I try never to think of her, for many reasons too long to list here. This is what I wrote while I was sitting with my memories of her. The strange thing is while I was participating I received a call on my answering service about a dear friend who passed away at 1o’clock in the Sunday morning. The candle lit, the room quiet, and I am alone, trying to remember my mother, now 46 years dead.

The last night that I saw her, she was sitting in a hospital bed, her breathing labored, she smiled, a bit dazed from drugs and weary from illness, but she was pleased to see me, her middle child.

I had taken the scissors to my hair that day and sprinkled glitter in it. She didn’t scold me as I feared but gazed at me in a dreamy way, that was so out of character for her. She brushed the hair from my brow in order to see my face clearly, and then said so softly that I could barely hear her, “you have star dust in your eyes.” She was elated, as was I by her words. I felt that for the first time in my short life, (which actually seemed quite long at the time) that was the very first time my mother really saw me. She noticed something inside of me. Stardust, not a speck of glitter dangling on an eyelash, but something mystical and magical in the face of me, a skinny middle child with the butchered bangs. In the sliver of a moment, I felt that she reached into the deepest realm of my consciousness and switched on a light. She died the following day.

Intangible as it was, the concept of dust from a faraway star radiating within me, helped guide me through that painful rite of passage, the loss of her, and all of the other deaths to come.

Deogracio Simeon Secretario, Los Angeles, CA, Mother/son “The loss of my mother cut deep. I continue to mourn and celebrate her in a myriad of the most unexpected ways.”

My mother was a second generation Filipino American. I think that in part, because of the open prejudices against Asians during WWII and in part, because my siblings and I weren’t interested, we never learned to speak Filipino and possessed zero knowledge of the Filipino culture. Sadly (but regardless), what little of the culture we did know is handed down mostly through the remembrances of the preparation and consumption of scrumptious Filipino food.

For my hour of contemplating my relationship with my mother it occurred to me that because she taught me how to cook, cooking might be a very appropriate activity to honor her and remember us. I decided to make an everyday dish that my mother taught me to make, which in my homogenized American life is now a very special dish and absolutely my favorite kind of comfort food.

As I shopped for the ingredients on the day before, I began to put myself in the frame of mind of the Congregation of Mourning event. My mother loved to eat and be it as it may, the apple did not fall far from the tree. I can be a gourmet and a gourmand and like-mother-like-son, I am fully capable of eating myself to near orgasm. I relished with anticipation my hour of contemplation.

At the beginning of the hour of the observance I took a few moments to invite her spiritual energy to be with me and I started to recollect how intently and eagerly I always paid attention to her instructions as she cooked. I layed out the sliced vegetables, cut chicken, and exotic spices just as she had demonstrated over fifty years ago. Back then, the chicken would have come from our local butcher, the vegetables from our garden, and many of the spices and mystery “flavorings” were from places and people only my mother knew. On this day the chicken came wrapped in a styrofoam tray from the supermarket, the vegetables from my local Hollywood Farmers’ market, which were remarkably similar to the ones my mother had used in the past, and the spices, although not all authentic, were happily more than reasonable facsimiles.
In the calm of my intimate kitchen, only the sounds of knife-to-cutting board, searing of succulent meat, and sizzling of the pan as the veggies hit the hot oil spoke to me as the aromas layered and intermingled by stages in the air; evoking a time long gone and joyfully still here.

Janice Lynde, Hollywood, she’ll be meditating on her father.

Whatever your location you’re invited to join a group of people across the world to contemplate someone from your life who has died. You’ll be part of a temporary congregation of mourning that is a coming together to honor our grief with confidence.

This invitation comes from Doran George as part of his residency, “The Mourners Dance” at Chisenhale Dance Space in London. http://www.chisenhaledancespace.co.uk/interface.htm

It is one of a series of events that is exploring the potential of a ‘culture of bereavement’ to change the way we think about grief. Many of us usually hide this part of our lives except with those that are very close. So mourning lacks any sustained public presence in our culture. This event is to experience a different way of doing things, a new way to negotiate loss.

The idea for a congregation of mourning through creating space to contemplate the loss at a mutually agreed time came through work Doran has been working with Joao Da Silva. Joao, who lost his father last April, and Doran, who lost his father in July 2006 and his Grandfather in November 2007, decided to create a space to contemplate their loss and each other at 8pm GMT for 1 hour on Christmas Day. Doran was in Los Angeles (12 midday) and Joao was in Sao Paolo Brazil 6pm GMT. The experience of joining in contemplation with someone who was located elsewhere was powerful, and led them to repeat the experience with a third person on January 4th. This is your opportunity to join in this experiment, and report back on the experience.

When:
Sunday January 20th @ 7pm Greenwich Meantime you can find out what time it will be in your own time-zone at:

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/

Practicalities.
-Send an e-mail to Doran with your name, location, person you have lost, and no more than one short sentence or any special information you want the congregation to know about the significance of this loss for you. The list will be sent to everyone who is joining the congregation.
-The congregation will be active for 1 hour.
-What you do is up to you but you are encouraged to make space to contemplate your loss and the whole congregation by: Scheduling your time so that you have no other demands at that moment, unplugging or switching off phones, finding a place where you can give space to your thoughts of the person and the congregation, engage in an activity that promotes gentle focus, this might be sitting, lying, walking or something else that makes sense to you. The intention is to create a momentary temporary community of people facing bereavement.

The foundation of the residency is to work with emotional recovery through performance in the context of bereavement. The concept for this is built on the history of my practice as working with emotional recovery. As I’ve entered into an authentic dialogue with my own bereavement my understanding of emotional recovery has collapsed and with it the methodologies I used as an artist in the past. Particularly I’ve had to let go of preconceived timetables for recovery, what it means to recover, and am discovering my bereavement as process with its own pace and trajectory that I can ride but not steer. In essence the degree to which I embrace my bereavement, I’m experiencing my life as being transformed by it. This is not something I can contain within the notion of recovery, or a ritual, or performance that would mark or catalyze it. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying, because it entails letting loose the moorings I’ve relied on as an artist for the majority of my practicing life.

I’ve consequently disbanded any pre-conceived notion of a methodology of the work in favor of deepening my relationship to the emotional, kinetic and psychological impulses that my bereavement exists as. The way this exists, in terms of a current methodology is sitting with the impulses in a simple form of meditating on the breath as I watch the impulses, moving through the kinetic impulses in movement meditation, and sorting through the psychological impulses in conversation that supports my negotiation of the trauma of my bereavement both in terms of loss and the crises in attempting to reconfigure familial relationships.

In the late 90’s I started worked with emotional/psychological impulses as they manifested in my body through movement. I experienced them as a place where I could relinquish choice about ‘how’ I moved. This was very appealing because I had no desire or confidence in the aesthetic canon of the dance I was seeing or knew how to do, and the movement that emerged in this ‘lack of choice’ was very wild and emotional, it was a kind of feral vocabulary. I had confidence in it as something that could speak clearly in the context of Live Art practice, and it seemed to express my relationship to the world through my body by speaking of the way I felt corporeally ‘interred,’ buried by the culture and the legitimating violence of the two sexes that made a pariah of me.

The movement meditations I am investing in now feel like a return to this work, but as I return I’m experiencing it with the benefit of my years. The moment at which I would or could relinquish choice now reveals itself as a point where, if I let go of choice and invite the feral movement I would need to close myself around my emotional adversity. It feels like I would have to apply a kind of personal, or even spiritual pressure to my own pain that shuts down the movement of energy in my body. It feels uncomfortable, closed and painful, like a sensory migraine. So the decision to relinquish choice in the face of sensory adversity feels like a choice that has now been removed. It would be self-destructive.

Instead I find myself opening through the sensory adversity to the possibility of movement. In the moment of moving, I’m acknowledging the full pain, complexity, and discomfort of who I am, what my situation is, but movement is like a breath that anchors me in another place. Over the few times that I’ve worked this way my movement has slowly gotten larger. The dancing I’m doing, the movement, does not currently emerge as something I can engage with artistically, it’s surprising, embarrassing, delightful, pleasurable, disconcerting to me on an artistic level, largely because it’s so different from anything I know, like, or could imagine working with.

I have no idea where this will go, and no sense as yet of any solutions to the question of aesthetic or the relationship to anything describable that would be relevant for thinking about bereavement in the context of art, health, and social care. However at the moment it feels important to give space to this process and trust it’s authenticity. I feel clear about my aesthetic integrity in relation to the contemporary context and have decided to trust that I will find a way, when needed, to have this process communicate effectively with whatever context I bring it into. Sometimes the degree of this shift from my familiar practice is devastating. Right now, writing to you, it’s deeply rewarding because it feels very open as a place to engage with you.

I may find myself returning to the methodologies that are more familiar to me as this process develops. I’m still scheduled to do the opening of my Dad’s box on February 4th and somehow I see that as a marker on the way toward the integration of my artistic trajectory and this intercession of my moving living body. We’ll see I guess.

1. Reassessing what recovery means. I’ve let go of preconceived timetables for recovery, and what it means to recover,realizing that this is like riding a wave with it’s own pace and trajectory. I can steer myself but I can’t steer the wave. I now feel able to offer space to other people in way that doesn’t collude with any fixedness around how a process might travel. I’m amazed that in an artistic process not engaged with recovery I might not be concerned about timetables and predetermined outcomes, and then in emotional recovery try and control these things. Anyway, clearly an important step.

2. Reconfiguring my role. I’ve started to intercept my own preconception of ‘artist as therapist’ in this residency by letting go of the idea that I’ve got to have an artistic formula for recovery from bereavement. I’m approaching bereavement with curious inquiry, which is allowing me to consider going in more directions, to make more connections, because I’m not pressurizing myself to know the answer. I’m presenting my own discoveries as just that, my own discoveries, rather than formulas.

3. Navigating the ontology of medicine. This underpins my other discoveries. Interfacing with medicine makes me panic about who is sick and who is the healer. I believe Foucault deals with this in “The Birth of the Clinic.” The notion that medicine is built on identifying a sickness to heal and can’t see outside of that model. Bringing art practice in relation to the medical model I can feel the pressure to have quantifiable outcomes, provable cures, clinically sick people who get undisputable help. As an alternative I’m moving toward the notion of “A culture of bereavement.”

A culture of bereavement
Within the medical model I experience a pressure to be either the healthy expert or the sick and in need. Instead I want to investigate my own bereavement and offer that as a context for people to speak alongside, or contemplate as different way of thinking about bereavement. As a result, my next step is to set up perform a ritual with an invited audience, I’ve attached two different flyers for the ritual. Dancing with a dead man’s things is intended for the art audience, the people who already came to the talk and who’ve already had contact with the residency. The second Feb4thgeneralinvite, is intended for the health and welfare sector. It’s to try and peak their interest in the work I’m doing.

I’d be really interested in any feedback you have about the second flier in particular (I’m comfortable and confident with the arts audience) and any thoughts you have about the event.

That’s all from me for now,

Doran x