PHILADELPHIA: A new biannual Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival (PDAF) has been announced, incorporating performance and educational elements with the aim of transforming person- and community-centered engagement with aging, dying, and grieving. The inaugural festival, which will feature performances by five artists, end-of-life educational workshops, panels, advocacy opportunities, and experiences to collectively process and reflect on mortality, is set for May 29-June 1 at the historic Laurel Hill Cemetery. Partners include the cemetery, Headlong Dance Theater, The Collective for Radical Death Studies, The Threshold Collective, This Hallowed Wilderness, and more.
“The festival offers many ways to engage with mortality: your own, or a loved one’s,” said festival co-founder Annie Wilson in a statement. “Whether that is through addressing a practical aspect of dying that, left unattended, may make a death even more stressful than it already is, or by offering a space to reflect together on the deep mysteries of aging, dying, and grieving.”
Original work includes:
- A Body in Laurel Hill, a site-specific exploration of time, season, landscape, architecture, and culture by MacArthur Award-winning performer Eiko Otake
- The Croning, a solo movement theatre piece exploring the realities of aging while Black by Pew Fellow choreographer Shavon Norris
- Viewing Hours, an interdisciplinary performance interrogating the spectacle and commodification of Black death and grief by Bessie Award-winning performer mayfield brooks
- The Politics of Mourning IV, a continuation of site-specific interventions on the subject of grief by Philly native interdisciplinary artist DonChristian Jones
- deciphering the knots in the pine beams, by cellist and experimental musician Mel Hsu, an atmospheric re-interpretation of the symphonies and (many) vinyls her grandfather cherished
Workshops and panel discussions for all ages will cover topics of caretaking, end-of-life conversations, Black elderhood, decolonizing death, green burial and shrouding, navigating a terminal diagnosis, how to “die for cheap” in Philadelphia, and more. Death professionals include death midwife Narinder Bazen, scholars from the Collective for Radical Death Studies, Laurel Hill Funeral Home funeral directors Pat Quigley and Tasha Dugan, death doula and founder of the Philly End of Life Doula Collective Isabel Knight, death doula and green burial advocate Nefertiti Moore, and ecotherapist and Lenape language keeper Krista Nelson.
The Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival’s mission is to transform the culture of dying from one that is overmedicalized and taboo to one of deepening meaning and care, centering communal and individual experiences, practices, and traditions. PDAF believes that the poetics of art, when paired with pragmatic tools and space for shared reflection, can offer life-affirming support for individuals and their loved ones.
