The Grief Project

The Grief Project is an ongoing research project conducted in collaboration between the ATD Lectorate; the Lectorate Social Justice & Diversity in the Arts; ARIAS network and Performance Philosophy network as part of the AHK Thematic Collaboration Program.

For the project, researchers from the Lectorates together with invited artists formed a research group to consider grief from a social justice perspective and explore the role of creative practices in responding to individual, collective and ecological grief. Their questions include:

  • What can the arts contribute to how we relate to death and dying?
  • How can we live with the dead?
  • What kind of rituals and ceremonies do we need to grieve or to meet death and loss?
  • How are grief and loss lived in the [performing] body?
  • Can performance be a form of grief work?
  • How can art relate to individual and collective grief?
  • What insights might the arts offer to grief work, end-of-life care and death practices, and vice versa?
  • What new rituals do we need to acknowledge ecological grief and the death and loss of nonhuman entities?

Foregrounding the need to for collective as well as individual grief and mourning practices, researchers experiment with a wide range of approaches – including trance, touch, channelling, lament, somacoustics, meditation, weaving and through image, dream and object-based work. 

The Grief Project shares its insights in a series of public manifestations including What is grief doing in the Academy? - an installation hosted during Research Month 2024; With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, dying and grief - a hybrid workshop for the Performance Philosophy biennial conference in May 2024; and a special issue of the Performance Philosophy journal to be published in November 2024.

Guest lectures: Staci Bu Shea and Camille Sapara Barton on Arts, Dying & Grief 

In November 2023, the Lectorate invited guest lectures on the topic of Arts, Dying & Grief from Staci Bu Shea and Camille Sapara Barton as part of the joint lecture series Participation in arts and education co-organized with the Art Education Research Group for students on the Masters Art Education and Masters Creative Producing.

You can watch the lectures here.

What is grief doing in the Academy?

To be alive is to be with grief, and yet many communities have lost connection with the rituals and public gatherings that allow us to support each other in our grieving. Sometimes, it feels like grief has no place within the academy. And yet, even as the institution tries to contain us, our grief, rage, and suffering are everywhere. 

Throughout January 2024, to mark the third edition of Research Month, seven artist-researchers hosted extended moments in which we collectively acknowledged the impossible feelings of this moment. These artists were: Kai Hazelwood, Paulina Trejo Mendez, Phoebe Osborne, Rajni Shah, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Sofia Araujo de Ornelas dos Santos Pinto, and S†ëfan Schäfer.

The Research Month included an installation in ‘the Punt’ public space within the ATD, with listening stations, reading material, tea, and zines. As well as this, there were over ten workshops, dinners, and gatherings – full list here.

Alongside this, the wider grief research group put together a reading list, and in collaboration with the Health & Performance department, created a list of care resources available for everyone.

With the Dead: Performance Philosophy workshops

For the Performance Philosophy biennial conference in May 2024 , the project will offer two hybrid (live + virtual) workshops hosted simultaneously in Austin (by Will Daddario and Siegmar Zacharias) and Amsterdam (by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Catalina Insignares). 

Across 2 x 90 mins workshops, participants in both cities will be invited to embody 4 creative grief practices facilitated in person and remotely. 

Performance artist Siegmar Zacharias will offer a listening practice, for giving our bodies as resonance spaces for each other to be in the wild space of grief and connection through sound. Somatic listening invites you to sense into our metabolic intimacies with the other, with the dead, with the un-known. 

Performance philosopher and counsellor, Will Daddario will offer an exercise on the social learning of grief asking participants to answer the question, "If I could create grief lessons for myself in the present, what would those lessons be?" For Will, to reconnect with and turn-toward grief, so as to actualize the full capacities of being human, it is necessary to un-learn the lessons on grief we encountered. 

Choreographer Catalina Insignares will share practices from her research ese muerto se lo cargo yo: listening, tuning in, sounding, moving with, attuning to the voices of the dead. In the workshop, Catalina will hold spaces where sensoriality and humor will enable us to move through what is sometimes perceived as negative affects, where being responsible and listening, become opposites to resolving, repairing, appeasing.

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca will offer a score for thinking alongside nonhuman animal grief - attending to the specific case of Tahlequah: the killer whale who in 2018 pushed the body of her newborn, which died shortly after birth, with her snout for 17 days, in what whale biologists called ‘a show of grief’.

With the Dead: Performance Philosophy journal

With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, Dying + Grief will be a special issue of the online open-access journal Performance Philosophy edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Will Daddario and Rajni Shah published in November 2024. 

Contributors:

Catalina Insignares; Siegmar Zacharias; Stefän Schäfer; Paulina Trejo Méndez; Phoebe Osbourne; Raoni Muzho Saleh; Kai Hazlewood; Natalia Sánchez; Ash Williams; Aditi Sethi; Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis; Will Daddario + Joanne Zerdy; Staci Bu Shea; Camille Sapara Barton

Delen