on grieving & festivalling
by Ivan March
only after a storm can you feel the sun
only after a storm can you feel warm
– Michelle Gurevich
Act I – the unbearable lightness of being a moth
Warm showers end. Songs end. Parties end. Books end. Love stories end. Feuds end. Breathing ends. Everything ends.
“if we love we grieve. that’s the deal. that’s the pact. grief and love are forever intertwined. grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.”
– Letter to Cynthia, Nick Cave
There is no grief without love. There is no love without grief. This mantra loops into the fierce inhalations and exhalations of sweaty bodies. The psychedelic breathwork session opens the morning hours at Apuro, the counterculture stage of Waking Life. Counterculture is a salmon swimming upstream. It’s dissent from dominant ideologies and an attempt at alternative value systems. Counterculture amplifies a marginal, collective voice into a significant minority.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Hold the breath. Diaphragms relax and tense up. People drop into their bodies. Tears roll. A respiratory trance, and with prompts to the breathers to invite grief into their lungs and to exhale the loss.
Death is taboo. Dying is a core stigma, at least in ‘the West’ it is. We are death-phobic and grief-illiterate, the ones opening up the grieving spaces are a minority, but one with significance. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, folks mummify the bodies of the deceased and care for them as if they were still alive. The Malagasy peoples of Madagascar exhume the bones of dead ancestors and dance to live music while carrying the corpses over their heads, before returning them to family crypts – very different vibes to most European funerary rituals.
“People think that grief slowly gets smaller with time. In reality grief stays the same size, but life slowly begins to grow bigger around it.” Dr Lois Tonkin was a grief counsellor who wrote about growing around grief. The scars and disfigurations remain, but we beat on like boats against the current. Dances and kisses and trips and late night conversations and movies and flirtations and jokes and kinks and infatuations and strange pleasures still undiscovered.. – these are the things that help us grow around grief.
Who says that moths flying into lights don’t also enjoy the burn? Many come to dancefloors or psychedelics to encounter grief, and sometimes even when they are not looking for it, grief meets them there.
Act II – death is a cabaret, my friend
“if that’s all there is my friends
then let’s keep dancing
let’s break out the booze and have a ball
if that’s all there is”
– Peggy Lee
“We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life” said a dead Greek poet once.¹ So begins our night programme, with The Veiled Sun, an immersive mood experience that feels like Gysin’s wet dream. The acolytes of the sun veil the initiates eyes and bodies with a liminal fabric that becomes the substrate for their visual cortex to expunge what seems to need to be expunged. The veiling of the sun becomes a solstice allegory, a psychomagic ritual, that we imbue our own meaning into – how do we internalise transitions and endings? What matters is that we create little ceremonial experiences, ritualised practices that allow us to sink into greater depths of feeling – that’s where liberating lessons of self knowledge live.
Even cabarets can be consecrated places, with the primordial sanctity of liberated hedonism instead of purity and moral righteousness, we venerate a space through commitment and devotion and the electrifying immediacy of shared experience when taking in raw performance.
‘The Veiled Sun’ by Michela Pelusio
Image courtesy of Aneta Urbonaite
The epilogue of our ‘garden of unearthly delights’ variety opening show, Grief Canyon, set a tone to the space, frivolity and lightness can coexist with intense emotion.
“Our clothes are made of nettles
Our skin has shrunk in the wash
Our sleep is haunted by the void they left behind.”
Performer and audience blur, while the grief clown undergoes a transformation, a shedding, a rebirthing of self. “It isn’t pretty, grief. It rips us open and asks us to become more than what we were before. Shed the skin that wouldn’t fit. And brave the unknowable chasm of life after death.” – Gutter Gucci.
We receive inputs in more visceral ways when we find ourselves in unfamiliar and charged contexts, a performance can strike a chord in ways a therapy session or even a hearty talk can match.
Watching a sculptor create a death mask of clay, shapeshift from humanoid form into beast into gargoyle, then creatures from Hieronymus Bosch’s gardens, while folkloric laments fill the space. The clay is moulded and then broken down, we build up and recreate ourselves constantly; looked at this way, loss becomes a chance for renewal, and this message can pierce people more profoundly than a therapist on a screen.
Intellect takes you to the door but it doesn’t get you into the house.
Act III – mourning in stereo
“and all that you held sacred
falls down and does not mend
just remember that death is not the end”
– Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Responsible hedonism.
A maturing festival is an exercise in epicurean and hedonistic practice that enhances our connection to the world, our senses and our selfhood. Like pilgrims going through a rite of passage, festivals become microcosms where personal challenges can be encountered and overcome alongside a high density of memorable moments.
Epicureanism bases its ethics on a hedonistic set of values, seeing pleasure as the chief good in life. Epicurus sought to eliminate the fear of the gods and of death, seeing those two fears as main causes of strife in life. There was not a chance correlation between party culture and the gay plague of the 80s. Joyous resistance they called it – marches and protests were frequently followed by sweaty disco parties..
“They hosted AIDS memorials in those same clubs, and read the names of the growing list of the dead using the same mics into which they belted Whitney on disco nights. Clubs were still for dancing, cruising, and performing, but they were also sites of communal grieving, a space to share outrage, share resources, and spark action” writes Han Powell.
Frankie Knuckles famously referred to house music as ‘disco’s revenge’ and house parties and subsequently techno raves served as processing grounds for intense feelings. How can we learn from the joyous, dancing, fucking queers that came before us?
Asked about those times, a disco veteran and AIDS survivor replies, “I can’t remember the question, but the answer was: Party.” Some mourn through tears, others through hugs, others become adrenaline junkies, and some mourn in stereo, side by side, through the dark, into the dawn until the death of night and the reawakening of the day.
Paradise Garage’s dancefloor, New York, 1979.
Image courtesy of Bill Bernstein
Perhaps it is the heightened global awareness of loss of life whether in the rubble of Gaza, in the wake of Covid, in famines, floods & fires, or perhaps the simple fact that we are ageing festival producers and we have started to lose more people – we could not help but put death centre-stage this year. ‘The most personal is the most universal.’
The curatorial challenge was to imbue our programme with a transcendance of stigma, messing with the normative narrative of festivals (often reduced to fun playspaces), and invite layered, human whole-being into a context usually identified with radical joy. But no radical joy without radical sadness. No grey without black and white. Loving alongside mourning. And so midweek, in the festival’s peak, solstice day, full moon night, June 21st, 2024 we dedicated the whole day to grief and loss.
Our grieving rituals are unrelatable or nonexistent. We lack the capacities to hold grief, to metabolise it back into love and longing, memory and gratitude. We get mired in sorrow or regret or immense avoidance as coping. Coping is a temporary crutch but it is not processing.
Grief is inevitable, yet we behave as if tomorrow will always come.
In ‘Raving’, McKenzie Wark confides that she has “a problem with ongoingness. With wanting the story to have another season”.² Yet rave teaches us to let go of the need for ongoingness. The rave ends, and if you’ve raved ‘properly’ there’s not much of you left, the tank is empty, you are a vessel that can now only be filled. A week-long festival is so dense experientially, that if this level of psychosomatic stimulation was at baseline reality, we’d burn out like a candle in a hurricane.
If rave is the peak of sonic processing, then ambient soundscaping is the valley of nuance and subtle expression. The Access All Areas sound meditation invites folks to lay down and be submerged in quadraphonic sound, waves of gentle music washes away layers of loss, peeling the griefs that remain stuck to the mind. A sound journey can take you into labyrinthine frequencies at the ends of which we can truly be surprised by what we encounter – deep listening, fortified by tuning forks, gongs and cymbals, allows for drops into trance like states of stillness and grounding that can release bottled emotions.
“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.”³
‘Masking Death’ by Myrgon
Image courtesy of forrestflanders
Act IV – entertaining loss
“we like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
To entertain something generally means two things. To provide enjoyment and to consider something, to give attention to something. Entertainment need not be distraction. It can mean ‘encounter’. The word originally meant ‘maintain in a certain condition, treat in a certain way’, in the late 15th century it meant ‘show hospitality’. Festival culture can hold all these meanings. Hosting, offering enjoyment and giving close attention to. Yet, the common association between festivals and entertainment is cheap, superficial, distraction-from-reality amusement park vibes form of entertainment.
Workshops and somatic experiences teach us tools for self-healing and collective therapy. It was humbling to see participants in the Dark Matter session using rage-release vocalisations to purify their insides from stored hurt, the sticky residues of loss that accumulate on our insides. Bodies dropping into somatic suspension and releasing howls of pain, connecting to the bestial and animalistic urges that tear past all our cultivated personas, and cut to the heart of the matter. Loss is devastating and certain – and embodying grief means feeling it in our muscles, bones and then releasing it outwards.
Before the somatic release, our Grief Council prepared the terrain with talking and performative therapy. Psychodrama being the roleplay tool that allows people to more easily express all that which they wish they could express to the people who are gone, to find some reconciliation with those who have passed on and so the living endure life like ghosts with unfinished business. Closure can feel like a massive tension reliever, even done with a stranger standing in for a loved one, a surrogate dearly departed – a festival being a charged environment where people have seriously heightened receptivity, can be the ideal space for such experimentation.
Entertainment also gets a bad rep because it’s regarded as distraction or escapism. As if there isn’t self-preservation in escapism and coping support within distraction. Distraction is, for Martin Heidegger, a “flight from death.” Distraction circumvents the “possibility of authentic existence” for Dasein aka human existence.⁴ Only by facing death as “the measureless impossibility of existence” does one become aware of the possibility of authentic experience.
Fuck that. And fuck Heidegger.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s outlook is way more vibey as she writes in ‘The Language of the Night’:
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”
Illustrations from a 1460 adaptation, printed by Schneider Ausgabe XII.
Act V – orphan wisdom
“intense love always leads to mourning”
– Louise Gluck
In several places specific manuals were developed to guide individuals through the encounter with death, whether experienced on a symbolic level within the framework of spiritual practices or associated with the physical destruction of the biological vehicle. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), the collection of funeral texts usually referred to as the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Pert Em Hru), and the literature from medieval Europe known as The Art of Dying (Ars Moriendi) are the best known examples of this kind.
Remembrance rituals. How do we remember those who have left the physical plane? What parts of them do we hold onto and retain alive in ourselves?
“Anthropologists who study the wretched consequence of conquest, language loss, and ethnic cleansing say that it only takes two generations of rupture to sever the chord binding people to their ancestors and their ability to be at Home.” – Frantz Fanon
We write songs, letters, poems, we paint, we photograph, we dance, we journal, we create mementos of meaning and we create little tokens imbued with memories of our ancestors or our loved ones – sometimes all we need is a sage to illuminate such options and guide us through them.
Grief is just love with no place to go. So we pour it into our talismans of loss – whether we then choose to keep them or sacrifice them in fires or cast them into waters is on us. Some grieve by holding on and others grieve by letting go, but ultimately spending time with grief can let us find gratitude for still being alive, still having the spark of life which permits us to miss, to remember, to weep over, to mourn.
“Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.”⁵ Yet many die so young, before capacity for such gratitude can even develop – these seem to be the most senseless and cruel contractions of life.
Our fishbowl discussion ‘Land, Ancestry, Freedom’ was a collective elegy on uprooting and loss of life in Israel/Palestine. While words were exchanged about the transformative power of music, psychedelics and struggles for liberation, ultimately this large group dialogue was a space for mourning human violence, deaths of the innocent and attempts at finding common ground and understanding in pain as the first step towards healing.
A final lens through which we contemplated death was the erotic realm. “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” writes dear Freud over a century ago.⁶ ‘La petite mort: a sensual soiree’ – was our space of fusion of the sex drive and the death drive, mixing eros and playfulness in confronting death. The little death is defined as ‘a state or event resembling or prefiguring death; a weakening or loss of consciousness, such as during an orgasm’. That which connects us most to life must be a thin veil away from its opposite, death, and if we can find wisdoms in such entanglements perhaps we can one day die wisely. “May we have the courage to tend to our wounds and move towards aliveness.”⁷
—
Festivals are breeding grounds for ecstatic experiences, peaks of elation and celebration of being alive, however without a close inspection of its shadow, the obscured truths that live in the dark sides of our consciousness, we miss out on half the story. There is much to be learned in the shadow of ecstasy and festivals as alternate worlds can start to produce more grief-literate and less death-phobic cultures, allowing us to encounter fears and tragedies and through them rejoice in courage and comedies, since only after a storm can you (truly) feel warm.
References
1. The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (1960), Nikos Kazantzakis, Simon & Schuster, p43 (see below)
2. Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark
3. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), Oliver Sacks
4. Being & Time (1927), Martin Heidegger
5. Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Stephen Jenkinson
6. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud
7. Tending Grief (2024), Camille Sapara Barton
Full quote: “We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial essence.”
with special thanks to:
Gisela Casimiro, Manuela Maciel, Gutter Gucci, Michela Pelusio, Marnix Dekker, Aria, Myrgon, Kabaret Nebula, Eva & Alex Jenkin, Amir Ashkar & Yahav Erez, Lea Fulton, Nuala Seaton & Lucie Forster and everyone who held space for grief within Apuro and beyond <3