The Grief Series in process:

Making performance, installation, photography and

interdisciplinary art.

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Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………page 3

Part 1: Etiquette of Grief………………………………………………………………….page 4

Part 2: The Reservation…………………………………………………………………...page 6

Part 3: What is Left………………………………………………………………………....page 18

This booklet is designed for performance makers that are interested in the processes

that are being used to create the Grief Series. You will notice the names of the many

collaborators in this booklet. This enables you to get a clear picture of the thoughts

and rationale behind the series from multiple viewpoints. Each section refers to one

performance or artwork from the Grief Series.

Each project has a signature image. If you are reading the other two booklets on

grief in pop culture and perspectives on grief from counselling, you can quickly see

how the theories and articles have influenced the projects in Grief Series by looking

for the pictures. Wherever you see a picture next to a theory or article it means that

article has had a clear influence on the art work produced.

Key

Part 1 Etiquette of Grief

Part 2 The Reservation

Part 3 What Is Left

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Introduction

This charts the development of each project in The Grief Series, as well as the

formulation of the series itself. There are contributions from Ellie and her

collaborators.

The Grief Model

Ellie: After Etiquette of Grief had been completed I felt a slight frustration at the

amount of ideas that had to be left out due to the constraints of time and medium.

Some of my ideas would be more suited to photography or installation than

performance. Throughout the process I had become somewhat of a grief magnet

for other peoples stories and observations and I wanted to allow space for these

other voices. With such a rich subject matter, more work needed to be made. The

grief model seemed like a useful structure for a series rather than picking an arbitrary

number of works, and the stages provided a way of varying the tone of each piece.

The interdisciplinary nature of the series allows me to work with exciting artists from

different disciplines who will push my practice and by placing it in a variety of

contexts, the work will reach new audiences. I’m also aware the series needs to

keep evolving and changing with the medium being a vital part of that…seven

performance pieces about bereavement might wear a little thin. And so The Grief

Series was born.

There are a number of both five and seven stage grief models and so there isn’t a

definitive model. I have simply used one that I thought would serve a making

process best. Whilst I enjoy the model as an opening stimulus for art making, in a

therapeutic context I think the risk with models is that they can be taken too literally

and can become prescriptive. A clinician told me about a client who was

concerned that they hadn’t got their grief ‘right’ as they had missed one part of the

model. For me the model might be used more as a validation of what someone

might be feeling in the wake of a bereavement rather than a blueprint for a

‘correct’ processing of it. My experience has been that any of these feelings might

come and go at any time and some recur while others fail to resonate at all. Even if

the model is a good indication of the feelings that might arise for someone, it rarely,

if ever, occurs in a clean, sequential fashion. I hope the model provides comfort for

those that need it, not as a code of conduct for people in pain and as the starting

point for some interesting art work. My approach to the grief model is reflected

through the series. Showing an awareness of the model but allowing the work to

develop organically, letting it go in different directions depending on the

environment the work is developed and shown in.

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Part 1 Etiquette of Grief. A solo performance by Ellie Harrison.

Video by Matt Tullett, Outisde eye by Ollie Smith and Matt Rogers,

Design by Hannah Sibai and Parveen Ghir.

Ellie: I usually start my process with something to say or at least a theme: something

that bothers me or something that I love. If I’m going to spend a while working on it

and even longer touring it, it really has to matter to me. I knew I wanted to make a

show about bereavement, my own experiences of it and the awkwardness I have

encountered when discussing it. I was also fascinated by the response to Princess

Diana’s death which neatly linked in to my autobiography as my niece was born the

day Diana died. Next I make lists. Lots and lots of lists. With the Etiquette of Grief it

has been lists of death in films, in music, in art. These lists are included in the pop

culture edition. I also tend to find objects as starting points. These are all things that I

might bring into the rehearsal room.

A major starting point for the show was an outfit: A pink suit, white gloves, pearls.

I then work out what I’m trying to say, I might structure an argument comprising two

opposing sides or conflicting ideas. I often borrow structures and from everyday life

to make work. A recipe, a game of ‘I have never’, a speech at a wedding have all

appeared in my previous work as a device to give my thoughts structure. This time I

had written a fairy tale. My most significant bereavement has been losing my mother

and as she was a writer (primarily for children) a children’s story seemed apt. A friend

had also told me about a children’s book that had been written about Diana’s life.

Something along the lines of ‘once upon a time there was an ordinary girl who lived

near the palace and every day she saw the prince riding by and then one day she

was invited to a party at the palace. Diana met the prince and they fell in love and

got married and the whole land rejoiced.’ Quite how this story ends, I’m not sure. So

the fairy tale formed the spine of the work.

In a play, characters surprise each other, moving the plot forward. In solo work you

have to surprise yourself or give yourself something to bounce off: competing with

photographs of myself, a task like handing out biscuits, or playing games with the

audience were all features of my previous work.

So I went in to a space with some ideas and some objects to bounce off: The

costume, the fairy tale, some photographs of dead people. The story featured water

and so I decided the show should take place in a seven foot paddling pool.

Obviously. Not just any paddling pool, this was to be a Diana memorial paddling

pool. The material that emerged seemed okay, although it can at times be testing

to sit in freezing cold water, on your own in a space, talking about your dead family

for hours on end. I scratched the show and there was a particular section where I

listed the people I had lost with accompanying photographs. I had done something

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similar in ‘Dressing the part’ where I listed everything bad that had ever happened

to me and the audience always responded positively. It wasn’t new territory but

something about the way I presented it this time meant that all I could see were

people shifting uncomfortably in their seats, not knowing which way to look.

I use autobiography. Sometimes it works and sometimes I fail. This was definitely the

latter. A word of warning; nothing about your life is inherently interesting to anyone. I

have learned this the hard way. When you have just bared your soul to an

audience and you come out into the bar and someone you respect says ‘but your

work is usually so intelligent…’ it can feel crushing. So after some moping, it was back

to the drawing board. I started again from scratch.

The trick was to make them as interested in my life as I was. People couldn’t hear my

autobiography so directly. I had to be more playful with it, conceal it more. I was

strangely angry at my audience for the very thing I was trying to say through the

work. That talking about bereavement can be embarrassing. So the piece had to

become about not saying it. I decided my autobiography would only work if there

was some kind of decoy, something to lighten the mood. The more bleak the

autobiography, the more silly the pop culture had to be. I ended up giving a large

proportion of my autobiography to a digital alter ego wearing the pink suit and

pearls from the start of my process. A kind of amalgamation of the Queen, Margaret

Thatcher and Delia Smith. The second draft of the show was much better but I won’t

ruin it too much in case you end up seeing it.

This sense of contrast between the bleak and the playful, respectful and irreverent is

becoming a feature of the series.

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Part 2 The Reservation. A one to one performance/installation in

collaboration with Jaye Kearney.

Jaye: When Ellie approached me about working with her all she

knew was she wanted to make a durational performance for non-

theatre spaces. We had both just finished making studio pieces, fussy, set-heavy,

fiddly, long get-in studio pieces and now what we wanted to make was the

opposite. Something portable, that we could tour to festivals, throw in a suitcase

(now trunk) and just rock up.

We also knew that the piece would be part two of seven in Ellie’s Grief Series.

Corresponding to the seven stage model from psychology, part two is ‘Pain & Guilt’.

We knew that we wanted to look at that period after the funeral when it becomes

harder (and less acceptable?) for people to express their feelings of loss.

What followed was a year long process of discussion, trial and error, research, play,

soul-searching and gentle tweaking.

There are ideas, sections of texts, images we have used that I can track the exact

origins of and who came up with them but there are great chunks of the final

performance that seem to have been entirely organic and intuitive that I could not

say if they originated with one or other of us. I do not recall any big sticking points,

battles for supremacy or in defence of one of our own ideas but perhaps that is the

rose-tinted glasses of success talking? First and foremost I do think this was a success.

Just because what we made isn’t anything like we envisioned at the start doesn’t

mean it wasn’t right.

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Step by Step

We stared by compiling lists, as performers often do. Lists about Elephants, lists about

death and grief, lists of moments of cinematic tears.

We considered the demands of the two main elements: durational work and site-

specific/site-generic work.

Durational work

What would the demands on the performers be, physically and mentally

How long should it last? Would it be one piece that repeated at intervals or a

single event over an extended period of time? Was the length a

conceptually significant number of hours?

What did we want the audiences’ experience to be? Would it be something

that was perceived to be totally open (Punchdrunk’s It Felt Like A Kiss had

only one route through the building but once inside the length of time spent

in each space was dictated purely by the audience member, for the most

part) or task related?

Would it be something that could only be experienced once or could

audience members drop in an out? In order to warrant a repeat viewing the

audience would need to see some kind of development.

Ellie felt certain that the work should include some kind of task that it should

accumulate something. That there should be a visual record of all those that had

gone before as a reflection on the fact that grief is something that we all face in life

at some point.

Site-specific

We agreed that rather than site-specific we were looking at a site-generic piece, a

piece that could tour to similar non-performances spaces, such as empty shop units.

What we needed to decide was:

Exactly what we needed from those sites in order to replicate the work as

closely as possible each time e.g. Power outlets, windows, load bearing bars

for anything that might need to hang, access.

How would the space/lighting change throughout the day and how much

could we/would we want to contain that?

What dressing, equipment could we supply in order to make the space

appropriate?

How would we manage the audience journey through the space and what

levels of staffing would we need?

What level of technical support would the piece require?

We talked about how to make a space neutral. Could we cover it in dust sheets?

What atmosphere did that create? We had also talked extensively about keeping it

mobile, of being able to pack our trunks and arrive, possibly as elephants on

parade. This meant keeping it low tech.

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The first R & D

From the offset we needed to see how it felt to work in a non-performance space

and see what influence the space might have on the ideas we had. We made a

plan for three days of R&D in an empty shop unit in the Corn Exchange. We thought

it was important to bring a range of skills and perspectives to the development of

the show so we worked with a scenographer, costume designer and a video artist.

We wanted to work with a costume designer because initially we felt that is where

the Victoriana and elephant elements might be most apparent and that the

costumes might involve an amalgamation of the two.

We started by considering EVERYTHING that might be in the show and began to

whittle the ideas down.

We hadn’t created a plan, or agreed who was supposed to lead. I think perhaps we

should have. We kept it very open. There was a lot of talking, a lot of tea. It was

frustrating. It was fun.

We went in to those three days wanting to look at:

Water/Tears: real tears and Movie tears, Dead celebrities

Victorians – mourning rituals, weeping veils…

Elephants – the poem The Elephant in the Room

The space we were in had three chambers and we played at using them to create

discreet areas that could be revealed as we went along to create a physical

journey. We didn’t want this to be too linear and we played with how distance and

perspective added or detracted from the experience. We used bird hides to create

very intimate spaces where the performer could interact directly with a participant.

We considered what would happen if we videoed this and played it back to the

participant or relayed it to others. We created a gallery of Elephants and started

playing around with an idea of an Elephant sanctuary or elephant specialists.

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At the end of three days the things we had really enjoyed and wanted to take

forwards were:

Intimacy: Distance and proximity, Hides/’safe’/intimate spaces, Discomfort

with tears

Elephants, Safari, Trunks/baggage

Exhibition/installation

Hotels/domestic spaces

We had to let go of the Victoriana as it felt there were too many themes competing

for supremacy. We were trying to say too much.

After the Corn Exchange Ellie felt strongly that we needed to try a domestic space.

The reason we liked the idea of hotels rather than a home is that they are full of

other units, so potentially lots of other people doing the same and feeling the same

as you. We also liked the idea of being inside an institution, the Scratch was set in a

large organisation, with staff, a professional persona but that it offered a retreat, a

hideaway, a home from home. Hotels rooms are private, comfortable and familiar

but not quite home.

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From five down to one…

After the Scratch we experimented with shifting the emphasis from the audience

having supporting roles as ‘carers’ to directly addressing needs they might have and

giving them the starring role.

Without any kind of certainty we began looking at the question

“What if this is a one-to-one performance?”

We were very lucky to be able to secure some R&D time in the Queen’s Hotel in

Leeds, two lots of five days.

Right from the very start Ellie had talked about wanting to tackle the more taboo

elements of grieving in this piece - post-funeral, public grieving, lengthy grieving

processes. After Etiquette of Grief she had found that people wanted to talk to her

about their loss. As though she had opened up a safe space to do that.

Ellie and I also compared stories of when we had been silenced by others in ours

times of loss. Knowing how this felt we wanted to look at ideas of what was

considered 'appropriate' and 'normal'. During our R&D in the hotel we discovered a

lecture by a man called Henry de Mena who's words really struck home. There was

no such thing as 'typical' grief though there were many common issues. Time and

impatience with the grieving was common. There was a clear need for

communication, sympathy and acceptance in grief at whatever stage and that

many people were not getting what they needed.

Having already played around with politicising this, playing on discomfort and

proximity and having the focus on those on the outside of the grief in both the R&D

and Scratch performances we turned our full attention back to the grievers.

The Scratches had mainly served to confirm the things we were already beginning

to suspect.

1. How could we tackle such a personal issue in a group scenario? Was there

any benefit for the audience in being in the space with others or might it be a

hindrance?

2. While the elephants were a nice device were there too many metaphors

going on?

3. How could I control 3 audience members when they had all the ‘power’ in

this scenario, and when I had no previous experience of this kind of work.

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During Queens

After the Scratches we almost went right back to the drawing board. For our first five

days in Queen’s Hotel we shelved everything we had made so far while we explored

other things. Some of it came back later. Most of it didn't.

To introduce a more structured approach than our time in the corn exchange we

had set ourselves the challenge of independently creating one or more one-to-one

performances, lasting only a couple of minutes each, and trying them out on each

other. Afterwards we would talk about what we had enjoyed about them, as

performer and as participant.

We liked:

Personalised invitations/physical invite/love letter? Hand written

instructions/questions

The participant letting themselves in/self-discovery

the elephant in the room

shower/sound of crying

light from the TV

Ellie: It felt like the answer was loud and clear

“This has to be a one to one performance.”

Jaye: The room became the third collaborator in the piece offering possibilities and

raising a number of questions:

How did we navigate the bed, namely how could we desexualise it? How did

we get around any seedy connotations of inviting audiences to a hotel room

for a solo experience?

How could we create a protective bubble around the space to avoid letting

too much of the real world in? How did align our intentions with the day to

day running of the hotel?

The en-suite bathroom offered an additional space to play in. We thought

about the image/sound of crying in the shower. Tears mixing with water. A

safe space. A private space to grieve.

As with all collaborations compromises have to be made. Some things that I really

would have liked in the show just didn't make it. I'm sure Ellie has several of those too.

The main one for me being the sound of crying in the shower. For me there was

something deeply resonant and heart-wrenching about the disembodied sound of

private pain. It was haunting and hard to listen to but maybe it was too visceral, too

potentially distressing. It began to jar with idea of 'taking care' of our audience.

There are still tears in the bathroom but they are now just far less literal.

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Ellie: I think centrally there was an issue of how to communicate tears. If either myself

or Jaye took on the role of griever we may have to sustain the crying over a number

of hours. This ruled out natural or realistically acted crying (I certainly couldn’t sustain

that) and meant we had to represent crying in a more abstract way, if we used it all.

Also if Jaye or I were the griever it made the performance difficult in terms of who

was responsible for whom. If the audience are caring for us, even in the fictitious set

up of Elephant rehab, who is caring for the audience in the real world? Who is

facilitating the encounter? I am a firm believer that the best way to free an

audience up is to give them rules and make them feel that there is someone else in

charge so they will not be held responsible if it all goes wrong. If they feel safe they

can and will invest heavily in participating. If we put them in charge of caring for us I

can’t help feeling it would be placing unfair pressure on them and come across as

laziness on our part. We need to be in charge so they can invest fully.

Drawing on the work I have undertaken with Cynefin and my own work with Pointed

Arrow, I wanted to find structures to tie these fragments or mini experiences

together. Cynefin make sensory labyrinth theatre by creating a labyrinth structure in

hills, fields or rural spaces. Labyrinths are designed as spaces for reflection,

meditation and transformation and appear in many different cultures. The

participant follows one continuous path that twists and turns into a central point. It is

thought that the journey to the centre is about shedding layers so that you might be

in an exposed/open state in the centre where transformation might occur. The

participant then continues forward on the path winding back out (and perhaps

building themselves back up) before arriving back next to the place where they

started with a renewed perspective. I wanted to see if we could adapt Cynefins

structure of voyage, transformation and return for use in an urban environment. The

Reservation starts with a journey where participants are encouraged to literally feel

the weight of baggage and be prepared for the installation section of the

encounter. They journey with a guide who then leaves them to contemplate and

navigate the space alone. By using a one to one format, we are already removing a

sense of group response where individuals might adapt their responses to fit in.

However we felt that even the gaze of a performer/facilitator might be inhibiting at

a potential moment of vulnerability for the participant. In the same way as the

participants of Cynefins’ Caerdroia have spaces in between encountering

performers/inhabitants, we wanted to facilitate a space where they could navigate

the room alone and tailor their own experience. The facilitator would then check on

the participant and interact with them before guiding them out of the space. We

also wanted the participant to be able to create a further section of the

performance in their own time by engaging in the action of eating the cake and

remembering. This also drew out another of Cynefin’s hallmarks; stimulating each of

the senses. We put activities in the room that worked with smell, taste, touch, site

and sound as a means of helping the participant to engage viscerally and

emotionally, rather than on a purely cognitive level.

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Jaye: Music is one element that made it in to the show for a number of reasons, not

least to break the ominous silence of the empty room the audience are left in (the

ticking clock was also introduced for this purpose). Music is a powerful tool for

evoking memory, as I have talked about a little on my blog. One of our outside eyes

suggested that what we wanted was the equivalent of Now That's What I Call

Grieving but looking back I think that kind of commercial element would have jarred

a little, as some have said the Dead Celebrities do, being so impersonal. Instead we

compiled a list of songs, from the obvious; the Diana version of Candle in the Wind,

to the personal; songs played at funerals we had been to. Along the way we

plundered iTunes playlists (yes there are grief playlists) and suggestions gathered via

Twitter til we had our selection of 25 Songs To Grieve To.

Issues

After our initial showings we found ourselves being challenged on our ethical

responsibility to the audience, to ourselves, to the dead?

First and foremost, considering the potentially revealing and sensitive nature of the

content we needed to know we could ‘take care’ of our audience member. We

invited several people to experience the piece in order to identify issues and fine-

tune the structure and execution of the piece.

For the piece to work we needed the audience to invest. It was a case of risk vs

reward and in order for the audience to invest we needed the experience to feel

personal(ised) even if it was to be repeated. While the space had to remain generic,

with certain tasks and interactive elements, the performance had to be perceived

to be just for/about them.

Clear communication was key in managing expectations, engendering trust and

allowing the audience to feel safe in the space. Everything had to be considered

from the language used in the publicity, the communication via the venues, the

ushers role in meeting and greeting the audience to the hand-written note the

audience receive when they arrive.

Ellie: As with many performance pieces, but to a large extent with The Reservation,

the piece is never finished until it is met with an audience. We have learned things

along the way and relaxed into it. The more we have got to know the structure, the

more free we are to abandon it. In fact the piece is never really finished because

each participant and so each interaction is unique. The thing that has accumulated

over time is that the more we perform, the less I expect it to be the same. It is finished

at the end of each interaction and then a minute later it is unfinished as we wait for

the next participant to arrive.

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“The attention to detail was perfect – from everything down to the hand written,

personally addressed letter I was handed on arrival. It made a statement: ‘this is

about you’, so right from the outset it felt like I was being given permission to

talk/share my feelings… Looking back it just underlines for me how powerful art can

be at unlocking difficult things, at encouraging people to share and understand,

and at making them comfortable doing so. It was truly a privilege to take part in this

show – although it didn’t feel like I was taking part in someone’s show, it felt like it

was mine." Annabel Turpin

"In the whole experience I felt looked after, calm, amused, sad at times. I laughed

but most of all I felt like there was an open, respectful dialogue between performer

and audience member." Audience member

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Part 3 What is Left. A participatory portraiture project in

collaboration with Roshana Rubin-Mayhew.

Ellie: What is left is a series of portraits and texts. Roshana and I go to a participants

home to take a portrait and interview of them with an object they have from

someone they have lost. We are working with 10 participants initially and this will

expand to fifty over time. The project will culminate in a book of fifty portraits and

texts.

Underpinning the project is an ethos of gift. The participant gives us the gift of their

time, their object is a kind of gift from the dead to the living and each participant

receives a framed print of their portrait.

Roshana and I knew we wanted to work with a diverse group from different

backgrounds and cultures. I have been involved in several projects of this type

before, mainly with the company I am part of Pointed Arrow. Pointed Arrow make

work on a particular route or in a number of specific geographic locations. When

mapping routes or choosing sites we make a conscious effort to include different

types of places: the urban and the rural, vibrant cities, suburban estates, small

villages or historic sites for a particular community. Our participants are diverse

because they are the people living or working in the different kind of spaces we

have chosen. The space nurtures the diversity. We often work in Leeds and so can

afford to hang around these areas, get to know them and the people that inhabit

them.

Roshana and I want to work with participants across the UK so that the project is

geographically diverse, representing a range of perspectives in terms of age,

gender, faith perspectives and ethnicity. We found ourselves asking:

How do we find diverse range of participants without being tokenistic?

I had comedic visions of an awful process that involved ringing various organisations

we know nothing about and asking if they have anyone who fits a specific criteria

who also happens to be bereaved…or may be bereaved in the near future?

Dreadful.

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Through my research I had read Attig’s theories on what we refer to as web weaving

In bereavement, we also “suffer” in the sense that when we lose someone dear, we

experience loss of our wholeness. It is as if each of us were a web of connections to

the things, places, other people, experiences, activities, and projects we care about

(Attig 1996 pp. 134-143). By extension, it is as if our families, communities, and all of

human kind are joined as webs of webs. Our life stories, and those of our families and

communities, are filled with weaving and reweaving of webs of connection,

patterns of caring within which we find and make meaning. Bereavement strikes a

blow to these webs, to our personal, family and community integrity. The weaves of

our daily life patterns are in tatters. Much of the weaving that comprises our

individual and collective life histories is undone.

Attig, T, (1996), How we grieve, Chapter 2, Relearning the world: making and finding

meanings, p.36, Oxford University Press

Perhaps it was about repairing and reinforcing the webs we already had, people

and organisations we already knew and working outwards to find our participants.

Perhaps being involved might have the potential for participants to feel connected

to the other people involved in the project, a small part of reweaving their web.

This was important to me as there has been an invaluable and moving by-product

of the all the work in the series so far: conversation. Almost more important than the

work is the fact that people come out of the work and have conversations about

bereavement that they might not have had otherwise; with me in the bar after

they’ve seen it, with each other on the train home from seeing it, on social networks

with people they only know through twitter. The series is to facilitating a space for

people to talk about bereavement without shame but often with humour and often

with sadness. I wish I could say that this was my intention from day one. It wasn’t. It is

now. I want to make creative projects that provide a space for dialogue. The Series

has slowly started to accrue a group of people round it: of collaborators working on

the series, of audiences of organisations supporting it or feeding in to it in some

way…it is becoming, in a very quiet and lovely way, a community. Team Grief.

So we started having conversations, asking about. It is sort of an anti-structure in that

we don’t know where it will lead us, or who to. I imagine we will visit new people and

revisit people we haven’t seen in far too long and see people we see all the time in

a new way.

We are just at the start of the process. We will keep you posted. In the meantime,

here are two behind the scenes shot of Roshana and one of our participants.

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