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Stardust: Being with Death Collectively

Writer's picture: sophie spiralsophie spiral

A Performance and Installation by Ming Poon and Guests

20.10.2024 – 27.10.2024 (Every Day)

Ufer Studios Berlin


Dates I attended:

20.10.2024 – (Earth) “Cemeterio do Caju” by hugo-huga x tibiriça

22.10.2024 – (Fire) “Ritual of Contingency” by Lee Mun Wai

25.10.2024 – (Red Light) “shards and dust” by Veronika Heisig

27.10.2024 – (Clear Light) “We are made of Stardust” by Ming Poon (in collaboration with all performers)


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Stardust’s installation and week of daily performance rituals provided me with a physical and collective environment to meditate on death and dying. It was a container to grieve and contemplate my own death, and therefore come closer again to life in its essence. In the western cultural context in which I have grown up - having family in northern Germany, eastern and western USA, and growing up in Berkeley, California – most of these western contexts insinuate that grieving is a private thing, only to be done with family and only for a short time period around the event of a funeral. Over the years, I’ve begun to learn other ways of grieving from cultures beyond my own. For example, traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana where funerals are danced and celebrated publicly in the street. Since that experience more than ten years ago, I have been curious to explore and understand other cultural practices of grieving and ways to collectively be with loss. Stardust brought this curiosity into lived experience, bringing me and many others into collective grieving rituals where our individual needs to be with loss could be held in the collective container of this shared aspect of the human experience.

 

Day One (Earth): I enter the installation space surrounded with elements in the color white. The stage is covered in white cushions and chairs, inviting me to find a comfortable spot nestled deep into a white bean bag. hugo-huga (they/them) introduces their ritual with a personal story about losing their grandmother in Brazil while living in Germany. They share about a ritual they did with a tree from here when they could not be physically present for the funeral. hugo-huga invites the audience to join them in reenacting this ritual, which begins with hugging the “grandmother tree”. The invitation is to hug the big tree branch in hugo-huga’s arms and then pass the hug along to another person, creating a hugging chain. The ritual invites each of us to have the chance to bury a loved one who died where we might not have been able to be there, or perhaps want to relive the experience. As someone who lives far away from family, I realize that many people share this experience with me and it makes me feel less alone in my grief. We’re given a contemplative moment to be with this grief collectively either through being part of a big physical hug with hugo-huga and the grandmother tree, or as a witness, where I got to experience the hug from the outside and imagine my own loved one being held.

 

I think of my step-grandmother who died during Covid and therefore my family could not organize a funeral gathering for her. When my grandfather died the next year, we created an opportunity to remember them together. Still, this ritual was a moment to remember her more specifically. When I went to the funeral of my grandfather, I remember I created a ritual for myself where I went to the same tree almost every day for two weeks to make time for my grieving. hugo-huga’s ritual with the tree, holding the big branch to represent their grandmother, made me think about this tree that helped me during this time. Being with the tree was a way to make space for more expressive modes of grieving that I could not manage to create with my family. Taking time apart from them helped me with my own feelings, since my default mode is to hold space for others, here the tree could hold emotional space for me and fulfilled a need for ritual. And in this way, I felt that hugo-huga’s grandmother tree opened a space for embodied connection with strangers. There’s a need to grieve with family, chosen or not but also separately from these family spaces where certain dynamics might be hard to break or when families are not fully accepting of who we have become – for example being queer or artists and not able to fulfill certain societal norms as they might expect us to. This ritual was a space to grieve all of these things, and helped me feel connected to the other people in the room.

 

On the third day of Stardust, I attended the meeting with the resident death doula, Alessa. It was meaningful to be with my own feelings around dying in this informal group dialogue. Alessa introduced herself and gave us time to ask questions related to death and dying. How can I prepare for the death of loved ones in my life? How can I prepare for my own death? What are these processes like and how does one emotionally deal with supporting so many people through such difficult times? She shared how being rooted in her own life, especially being with joy is helping her to be more fully there for others. Funerals are moments when people come together and remember the person who died. This intimate conversation with the death doula allowed visitors to inquire about how to prepare for death. I asked the question: What are the current burial options in Germany and what are the environmental impacts of each method? Having a natural burial is possible in Germany as long as it is in a designated graveyard. Many people get cremated because it is a more affordable option, but this requires a lot of energy and sends toxins into the atmosphere. The true costs, labor, and environmental impact of one person’s death is often a surprise. I’ve learned a lot by witnessing my parents lose their parents in the last ten years, but it remains a private topic and this dialogue reminded me how we can learn more by sharing with each other.

 

The ritual on Day Three (Fire) responded to this dialogue poignantly. In “Ritual of Contingency”, Lee Mun Wai shares his personal story of losing his partner to cancer this year. He got to witness how someone could attend to their own dying process because they knew the transition time was coming soon and could manage to make many of their own arrangements. The ritual becomes an opportunity to practice life by being with loss. Mun Wai shares how the cross-cultural negotiations in their relationship continue even into the afterlife. In mourning the death of his beloved Michael, Mun Wai has to draw on his own cultural rituals from his Taoist family upbringing. The artist shares how he learned from his mother that burning incense is a form of communication, a way to bring your wishes to loved ones in the afterlife. When specific things are burned in Taoism, it gets delivered to people in the afterlife via the smoke. Together, we send out words to someone who has passed and who we haven’t spoken with recently. I think about my German grandmother Mima and say that I miss her and her calmness, and want to tell her that I am excited to finally live with her piano again and ask if she will join me in my new flat. Will she come visit me when I’m feeling alone so that I can enjoy quiet time like we used to together in her house?

 

We do a ritual with a piece of incense, holding it in front of our heads speaking to our deceased loved one and then moving the stick back-and-forth until our message has been “sent to the afterlife,” to reach them there. The ritual ends by gathering outside around a large fire vessel where Mun Wai invites us to burn special gold paper as offerings to our beloveds in the afterlife, which he says is, “hopefully sent by express post”. These moments of humor were a theme throughout the week, bringing a sense of lightness to heavy moments to help us balance between inner deep dives and sensing the collective group experience. I felt both levels were important to my process – to have times where I could feel the depths of my individual grief and allow everything else to fade away for the moment, and then experience coming back into the collective group where I could be reminded that I am not alone with these emotions. Since there was a care team present, I didn’t feel I needed to attend to other people’s emotional processes, but felt inspired to be vulnerably tender, in a space where we take collective responsibility to be with our grief together.

 

As part of the Stardust installation, there were questions written on pieces of clothing hung throughout the space, as if spoken by those who’s clothing had been left hanging to dry. In this time of mass human and ecological loss, this poignant question stayed with me: What changes do you wish your life or death could make to the world? There are currently 12 genocides taking place in the world, and the 6th mass species extinction is already under way. Collectively, we are experiencing so much loss from human-caused destruction. Some of the answers to this question emerged while writing my own eulogy – an invitation to all participants to complete throughout the week and hang in the installation. As a writer and dance pedagogue, the words on the page kept relating to my need to support others in feeling deeply, to have shared experiences of emotional connection, to feel loved in this human experience, and to move through the world with a deeply connected sense of purpose. This is where I began to understand, that in meditating on my own death – I am connecting deeply with my own sense of life and renewed reasons for living.

 

On Day Six (Red Light), Veronika Heisig performs her ritual, “shards and dust”. This time the seating is organized in a circle around a central piece of black flooring in the middle. The ritual is dedicated to Veronica’s grandparents. Her grandfather died in February and until the last day he was cared for by her grandmother, even though she said he never thanked her for it. Veronica shares about her desire to get taken seriously as a dancer by her family, and so she dedicates the first dance to her grandfather. She steps inside the circle and dances in silence. The lack of sound makes her breath visible; we see how her expressions change, and how the dance supports her to be with the complexity of the grief she feels for the loss of her grandfather and the under-appreciated efforts of her grandmother. She takes out empty broken ceramic pieces and walks around the audience three times before dumping them onto the floor. The white ceramic creates a beautiful contrast against the black floor. These shards – broken pieces that get placed on the edge of the circle – become a new composition in the making. Veronika does not try to put the pieces back together, rather she’s trying to show how the pieces are beautiful in their incompleteness.

 

As she rearranges the pieces, it’s like she’s rearranging her life more broadly. The dust in the middle begins to settle. It’s like an exhibition of all the broken parts of ourselves, our society, our cultures, the bitterness of her grandfather, the families that were broken apart, and perhaps the traumatic moments that caused the splintering. We watch in silence as the pieces are arranged around the edge of the circle, placed into a new form of splintered togetherness, where each piece has its place in the larger assemblage.

 

Is there love after all this brokenness? Can we love the incompleteness of each other and ourselves?

 

The leftover white dust on the black circle looks like the starry night sky, with a Milky Way in the center. All the planets and satellite trash piles encircling the earth. As the shards get increasingly microscopic, Veronica continues to pick up the little pieces. It’s a contemplative moment, how long will this continue, I wonder. It could be going on and on, tidying forever, but instead she shares from her journal: „Der eigene Tod ist unvorstellbar… Nur das Wesentliche behalten” (my translation: One’s own death is unimaginable… Only hold on to what’s essential).

 

She questions: “How to let go of something that feels incomplete?” Thus, she proceeds to give some of the little shards to audience members. Letting go becomes a way to experience the intimacy of presence. Veronika connects to several people through silent one-on-one eye contact, and the audience is invited to witness these encounters, captivated by the moments. The shard I receive is white with a blue design, like a little piece of a painting. If I position it one way, it looks like a dragon flying over an ocean. My brain fills in the rest of the image, I feel like one piece in a vast ocean. The setting remains quiet for some time until people start to whisper and chitchat. Are we part of the puzzle now? Bringing the shards out further with us, dispersing further like parts of a broken asteroid, becoming more aware of our splintered interconnectedness.

 

On the third evening of Stardust, I had written my own eulogy. An exercise that prompted me to reflect on what I hope to accomplish in my life and what I hope to be remembered for by others. On the last evening of Stardust, these eulogies, written by visitors throughout the week, were the center of the ritual (Clear Light). Throughout the week, visitors had been invited to write their eulogies on a piece of paper and hang them in the room as part of the installation. The ritual begins with all performers in the space, engaging gently with each other. Sitting next to each other, holding hands, moving together, eventually reaching for the eulogies, reading them briefly in silence and then beginning to rip the papers intentionally. It creates a soundscape of rhythmic tearing, soon becoming a collective endeavor as the performers deliver the already ripped eulogies to different audience members and request them to rip the pieces of white paper even smaller. The invitation is to then “mix these eulogies together”. As we rip the pieces, smaller and smaller, we throw them in the air, and onto the floor where it starts to look like snow. We are then invited to move the pieces with the wind generated by flapping our shirts and jackets back and forth. It creates excitement and a playful atmosphere where performers and audience work together to mix the pieces around the room. There is a child who especially likes collecting the pieces, making piles of paper bits and then throwing them into the air again, like piles of fallen leaves from trees. As the pieces get mixed, my friend picks up two bits and recognizes one piece with my handwriting alongside other pieces with handwriting in several languages. White leaves in a white space. I’m under a white blanket and feel myself becoming part of this landscape. At a time when the days are getting darker, the sun is not coming out much, the temperature getting cold – it feels nourishing to be surrounded by this lightness.

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Berlin, Germany

© 2022 by sophie spiral. 

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