Grief will unite us on July 1. Part concert and part communal mourning ritual, Grief is a new choral piece composed by Benjamin Hackman (the front person of The Holy Gasp) for 10 vocalists, 2 pianists, and percussion. Conducted by Hackman, Grief will be performed from sunset to sunrise – without break – and live-streamed from the basement of the Historic Kiever Synagogue (where Hackman is currently Composer-in-Residence) in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Prior to July 1, the public is invited to record the names of their deceased loved ones in The Holy Gasp’s Database of the Dead. Each name will be inscribed on a scroll which Hackman will read throughout the evening, as the ensemble performs Grief. The performance will conclude only after the last name has been read.
Hackman has developed Grief over 2 years. During this time, he has contemplated the work sometimes as a concert, sometimes as performance art, and still other times as concept art. “Ultimately, I think it must be a hybrid,” he muses, “borrowing from liturgical music, durational performance art, and ritual psychodrama.” The pandemic, of course, has required modifications in the performance. Originally planned as an outdoor performance with a 30-person choir, Grief has been scaled down to allow the performers to maintain the physical distance required by the COVID-19 restrictions. Through its virtual platform and closed captioning, however, it is now accessible to a wider audience . The performance will also be bilingual: vocals will be performed in English and American Sign Language.
Grief was born of personal necessity when Hackman was seeking to comprehend his own process of grief. He immediately saw that the project could be a possible model for communal grieving. He saw no such model within our more-or-less secular culture, so he sought to fill this absence with a communal mourning ritual of his own. In fact, he started to explore ritual as an artistic medium in and of itself. “There is an underdeveloped skill within our culture to comprehend grief, and provide adequate support to those who are grieving. I argue that these underdeveloped skills are due to both the absence of codified mourning ritual, as well as to the under-representation of narratives and depictions of complex concurrent grief in popular culture.” Hackman lost several significant people in his life within a 5-year span. He desired support, but most people who offered it, or to whom he reached out, could not relate to his simultaneous “experiences of grief, nor provide adequate emotional support”. This was true of his contemporaries, especially the men. Even those possessing skills to support someone grieving did not do so with confidence, and often could not conceal their incredulity.
Hackman was disappointed by the pallid awkwardness of this support. It was “as if people are surprised that people die and suffer, and that bad things continue to happen”. He believes inadequate modeling is the root cause: “We ought to act less surprised by death, and because death ought to be less surprising, we should be learning to support the grieving early on in life, developing mature perspectives on death, and honing our empathetic capacities to sit among the grieving, with patience, compassion, and love.” If Grief does nothing else, he hopes that it will confront the public with the “ubiquity of death, and the extent to which it is the destiny of everyone”- and provide some of that much-needed modelling.
Since learning about this project, many people have shared their personal stories of death and grief with Hackman. (In fact, Hackman encourages connection and invites people to send letters to theholygasp@gmail.com, saying “I have made many interesting pen pals, and I welcome more.”) Interestingly, the observation of absurd details seems to be a “distinct, almost predictable part of the grieving experience”: for example, a playful dog skipping around the undertaker when he arrives for the body; or the ice cream truck that drives by the funeral playing What a Wonderful World while the casket is being lowered into the ground.
Hackman buried his grandmother early on during the pandemic – an experience that was “as dystopian as you might think”. He and his brother buried their grandmother with shovels in the rain, with others, gloved and masked, kept at a distance: “It was just the two of us, because no one else was permitted to help.” He recalls the grey of the sky, the squelch of the wet earth, and hearing his aunt weep as they dug. “Those who came to support us did so from the parking lot, from within their cars, and the family dispersed soon after. Nobody hugged. No one placed a hand on anyone’s shoulder.”
So might Grief help those who are experiencing such loss, especially at this isolating time of physical distancing? “We do not need help grieving,” Hackman counters. “We do it whether we want to or not.” Where we do need help is being reminded that grieving is normal and healthy, and the consequence of having felt connection and love. Where we also need help is reminding ourselves of the inevitability of death. Don’t be surprised when the people you love die. “Be ready for it, and cherish every moment with them as if they might die. Because they will. Adjust your life accordingly.”
In broad terms, Hackman hopes to provoke an urgency for us, the living, to interact with life, and for diverse audiences to seek out and share emotional experiences collectively in real time: “I dream of a world in which people approach others and say, ‘You seem sad,’ and in which people respond, ‘I am.’ And then they sit there. Talking about their feelings. Without trying to fix them. Without trying to ‘get through them.’ Without trying to medicate, or mitigate, or make the feelings stop. They just feel. Until things have been felt. And then they do something else.”
To this end, Grief will unite us on Canada Day in the “normal and healthy” – and therefore potentially transformative – experience of grieving: “I hope that after reading this interview, people will decide to watch the live stream of Grief–to stay up all night with their friends and family, and listen to the names of the dead, and talk about the feelings associated with grief – their own and others’. And I hope people feel closer to each other afterwards, like they have been through something together which has enhanced their connection to one another, and deepened their awareness of how precious love and life is.”
News You Can Use
What: Grief composed by Benjamin Hackman | conducted by Pratik Gandhi | presented by The Holy Gasp
When: Wednesday, July 1, 2020, 9:03 pm – 5:41 am Eastern Time
Where:
- Free Live Stream: facebook.com/TheHolyGasp or theholygasp.com
- Database of the Dead
Info: theholygasp.com
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2020
