A new festival is headed to the City of Brotherly Love, and its focus aims to transform how we engage with aging, dying, and grieving.
The Philadelphia Death & Arts Festival is officially set for May 29 to June 1 at the Laurel Hill Cemetery (3822 Ridge Ave.), and with it comes a multi-day creative schedule packed with unique performances, end-of-life educational workshops, panels, and advocacy opportunities.
“The festival offers many ways to engage with mortality: your own, or a loved one’s. 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,” says festival co-founder Annie Wilson.
Featured performances include ‘The Croning’ by Shavon Norris, which explores the realities of aging while Black (May 29, at 6 p.m. and June 1, at 3 p.m.) and ‘A Body in the Cemetery’ by Eiko Otake, which explores time, season, landscape, architecture and culture through movement (May 30, at 6 p.m. and June 1, at 2 p.m.)
“The Black is definitely cracking,” notes Norris on her performance. “And I want to expand the references, rituals, and understanding we have access to about aging in Black women bodies.”
“In a cemetery, I think of the recent dead, and the dead from the past centuries, including many whose graves were never built,” adds Otake. “When I enter the cemetery, I try to leave my/our current upsets at the gate, but make sure to pick those up on my way out.”
The Death & Arts Festival will also feature ‘The Politics of Mourning IV’ from DonChristian Jones, which runs in connection with Otake’s ‘A Body in the Cemetery.’ A ticket to either one of these performances includes admission to the other, which will take place during the same time period and place. The total run time for both pieces caps at 90 minutes.
With Jones’ work (May 30, at 6 p.m. and June 1, at 2 p.m.), this performance is a continuation of site-specific interventions on the subject of grief. As a release notes, ‘POM’ first began in 2017 on the shores of Sicily, but this iteration in Philadelphia will be a return home for the creative, as the cemetery is steeped in familial history for Jones.
While at the fest, locals can also catch ‘deciphering the knots in the pine beams’ by Mel Hsu and ‘Viewing Hours’ from mayfield brooks. The former is an intimate musical excavation of intergenerational memory and migration (May 30, at 7 p.m. and May 31, at 3 p.m.), while the latter uses improvisation, voice, and movement to investigate “the spectacle and commodification of Black death and grief” (May 30, at 5:30 p.m. and June 1, at 4 p.m.).
Sprinkled throughout the occasion, the Death & Arts Festival will also highlight the aforementioned end-of-life panels and advocacy opportunities, led by leaders in the end-of-life care field, as well as experiential opportunities for all ages.
Highlights span events with the 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.
As a release notes, the Fest also features death professionals offering educational workshops, including from 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 Philadelphia Community Deathcare group as well as the Philadelphia End of Life Doula Collective Isabel Knight, death doula and green burial advocate Nefertiti Moore, and Ecotherapist and Lenape language keeper Krista Nelson.
A full schedule can be found online.
While the festival is open and welcoming to anyone grappling with aging, dying, or grieving, all events are designed to be accessible to seniors, with options for those who are d/Deaf, low-vision, or use mobility devices. More information on the event and tickets (various prices) can be found online at philadelphiadeathandarts.com
