Invocation, Evocation and Ceremony with Alan Schacher

In this semi-ritual /semi-performance workshop Alan will lead participants through a process of group invocation, where all participants will simultaneously invite and invoke a deceased relative, significant other or friend, to become present to a gathering within the room.  In other words the room will become doubled, populated with the living and the imagined spirits.

In this gathering participants will each, and collectively, attempt to create/ generate suitable sounds, utterances, laments that form a conversation of the unsayable between the dead and the living. To mourn, resolve, greet, allow a flow to the present, to incorporate.

In this workshop, Alan will be assisted by WeiZen Ho.

Alan Schacher is a contemporary performance-maker: a director, choreographer, designer, performer and installation artist, whose focus is on spatial experience and bodily mediation. An undercurrent of cultural landscapes and diasporic references, both imagined and inherited, form significant motifs in his work. He has developed an architectural approach to the interpretation of sites and use of materials which is carried through in ensemble performance, solo dance, video, installation and performance art. The body is a primary means and reference point in his work, which also employs large sets and spatial manipulation to realise projects, most of which involve a major collaboration by an artistic team.

With over 25 years experience, he was the founder of the Performance Ensemble Gravity Feed (1992-2004) he conceived and designed most of the company’s works and performed in them all. He also formed G.R.I. in 2000 and this is his current production company. As a dancer he was influenced by the methods of Butoh dancer Min Tanaka, with whom Alan trained and performed in Japanfrom 1989-91. Alan was recipient of the NSW Helpmann Scholarship for Dance in 1994, and completed an MFA at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW in 2000. He lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

Die Wise with Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen Jenkinson is one of the world's most powerful and poetic advocates against the death phobia of our culture. He will be speaking via video link from Ontario, Canada on Saturday 19th November as part of the Sydney Festival of Death and Dying.

Stephen is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house and learning house for the skills of deep living and making human culture. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time et to come.
 

Listen to Stephen's wonderful interview with Rachel Kohn on The Spirit of Things on Radio National

From Music Into Silence with Peter Roberts

We are honoured to announce that musical thanatologist, Peter Roberts, will be presenting and playing for us at the festival.

Learn more about Peter, and listen to his beautiful music, by going to his website: robertsmusic.net

Deep Listening with Annette Tesoriero

Deep listening is a term that Aboriginal elder Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann uses to translate “Dadirri”. She says: “To know me is to breathe with me. To breathe with me is to listen deeply. To listen deeply is to connect.  It is the sound of deep calling to deep.  Dadirri is the deep inner spring inside us.  We call on it and it calls on us.”  

This workshop will explore deep listening in relation to breath, sound and voice. Each of our bodies has an internal resonance that informs how we listen and how we live. If our lives were a song that were improvised minute by minute, how can deep listening take our final improvisation, that of our death, to a place of integrity? 

Deep Listening is also a term coined by American composer and musician Pauline Oliveros, She describes it as… “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.” 

Deep Listening, as developed by Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening.  

Every breath ends, every sound decays but how present we are in our deep listening determines the quality of every breath and every sound.

Annette Tesoriero was born in Sydney, Australia and studied Linguistics and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Her early music training was in piano and she has continued to study classical singing both in Australia and in Europe. She has a Masters in Management in Arts Management from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her artistic practice is the intersection of sung and spoken text in contemporary performance making.

In 1995, an accident while bushwalking led her to an understanding of internal body resonance and the importance of touch for trauma victims.  This understanding informs her vocal pedagogy and she now facilitates vocal explorations using this information.

Her work explores the emotional range of voice and the essential eroticism of the sung voice in contrast to the privileged position of image.  Intimacy is encouraged in her work, as a space where the voice-making body can be experienced.

Highlights of her performance career include multiple seasons with the Sydney Front, Calculated Risks Opera Productions and Chamber Made Opera and she has premiered major works with these companies. In 1995 she co founded the opera Project with Sydney artist/director Nigel Kellaway and within that company co-created and performed in three critically acclaimed major works: The Berlioz – Our Vampires Ourselves, The Terror of Tosca and Tristan.

As well as creating and presenting her own contemporary performance works she has collaborated with many theatre practitioners, writers, musicians, composers and visual artists to create new works.  She is often invited to create and perform customised vocal recitals for art galleries and museums.  She has made several recordings for ABC Radio.

In 2014 Annette moved to the Shoalhaven Region of NSW where her business Shoalhaven Health and Arts works with local communities to creatively explore both mental health literacy and death literacy.  She is an accredited instructor in both Mental Health First Aid and in safeTALK (an internationally recognised suicide alertness program).  Annette is currently a lead artist in the Bundanon Local project through the Bundanon Trust. 

Voluntary Assisted Dying With Sarah Edelman, Ph.D

Repeated opinion polls show that the vast majority of Australians want the option of a medically assisted death, should they be faced with unrelievable suffering at the end of life. Yet bills that have attempted to legalise end-of-life choices have been consistently voted down in our state parliaments.

In this workshop you will learn about the arguments in favour and against medically assisted dying. You will also have the opportunity to explore your own thinking in relation to this issue. Options currently available for individuals who want a peaceful death at a time of their choosing will be discussed, as will other key issues related to the debate.

Sarah Edelman, Ph.D is President of Dying with Dignity, NSW. She is also a clinical psychologist in private practice, author and trainer. Sarah conducts programs on popular psychology topics for mental health practitioners, GPs and the public. She is author of the bestselling book “Change Your Thinking”, and is a frequent guest on ABC 702 radio.

Sarah became an advocate of end of life choices in the 1990’s when she was running groups for women with metastatic breast cancer. The experience highlighted the importance of having choice, when one is confronted with the reality of one’s own impending death.

Soul Kits with Trypheyna McShane

In this workshop, Trypheyna will teach you how to begin your own “Soul Kit”. A “Soul Kit” is where you will keep all your end of life wishes, stored in one easy to find place for one day when it will be needed. It will also have the things you are proudest about your life that you want to be known as your legacy. It can include practical things like passwords to your social media accounts and emails so they can be shut down to ideas on how you would like to be remembered to songs you would like played, funeral arrangements and what you want to be done with your body.

Trypheyna says: “We’re all going to die at some point. Our lack of preparation for the one thing we will all do, die, can cause such heartache and angst for those left behind that it makes real sense to spend some quality time on considering how we would like our end of life to be, long before it actually happens. I believe this needs to be creative and enjoyable and so that is what I have built into my workshops.”

Tryphryna McShane is co-author of The Intimacy of Death and Dying — Simple Guidance to Help You Through. She is an artist and art therapist, who has worked at Bear Cottage Children’s Hospice. She currently teaches at Nature Care College, Sydney

Check out the top 5 regrets of the dying

Yoga with Savasana Mind with Akhila Hughes

Savasana translates as ‘Corpse Pose’ in English.

BKS Iyengar taught that in this pose, you learn to relax “by remaining motionless for some time and keeping the mind still while you are fully conscious.”

This yoga class will begin with Savasana with the aim of developing a Savasana mind and taking that deep relaxation through the class.

Intensity is often seen as fast and physically difficult and more exciting than slowing down and really feeling what is happening – in our mind, in our body. But intensity can be tender, it can be instinctive and intuitive, it can be spacious and slow. It can be Savasana.

Akhila Hughes has been practicing Iyengar Yoga for over 15 years and teaches at Black Lotus Studios in Enmore, Sydney.

She aims to practice and teach yoga on a deep feeling level and her teaching is about guiding her students to feeling, to see the difference between feeling and thinking, to feel the connections in the body, the breath and the mind and to understand the relationships between them.

Faith and the Afterlife: A Panel with Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio and Wendy Wright

In this interfaith panel we will explore how faith and the afterlife is thought about in Judaism and Buddhism. 

Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio was born in Adelaide in 1967. She attended Adelaide University where she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Law degree. Rabbi Ninio then attended Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion where she obtained a Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters and rabbinic ordination in 1998, making her the seventh Australian-born progressive rabbi and the third Australian-born female rabbi. Rabbi Ninio joined Emanuel Synagogue in 1998 and was the congregation’s first female rabbi. She is interested in the areas of midrash and liturgy and has a passion for storytelling. During her sabbatical in 1995 Rabbi Ninio studied Jewish folk stories and storytelling. Rabbi Ninio has established a women’s Rosh Chodesh group, and a number of child-focused celebrations and events such as Shabbat tot. Rabbi Ninio believes in the centrality and importance of community, and providing a place where people feel valued, included and treasured. Rabbi Ninio is married and has one child.

Wendy Wright B.App.Sc. (OT), M.App.Sc. (Soc.Ec.), is a pastoral care practitioner at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. She also has a private practice offering services based on the practices of mindfulness and compassion. Wendy has practiced and studied these methods for 30 years. For seven months in both 2008 and 2009 Wendy trained in the study and practice of authentic Buddhist teachings on meditation, mind, compassion and wisdom at the Rigpa Institute of Wisdom and Compassion in France.

Guided Meditation Practice (Essential Phowa) with Wendy Wright

Essential Phowa is a Buddhist practice for the moment of death. This workshop will teach you this practice and show you how we can prepare for death so that we can die with a peace of mind and even with confidence.

Wendy Wright B.App.Sc. (OT), M.App.Sc. (Soc.Ec.), is a pastoral care practitioner at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. She also has a private practice offering services based on the practices of mindfulness and compassion. Wendy has practiced and studied these methods for 30 years. For seven months in both 2008 and 2009 Wendy trained in the study and practice of authentic Buddhist teachings on meditation, mind, compassion and wisdom at the Rigpa Institute of Wisdom and Compassion in France.

Dying at Home (Planning Ahead and Preparing Well) with Kerrie Noonan

In Australia, 70 percent say they want to die in the comfort and intimacy of their own homes, but less than 20 percent do.  What, if anything, can we learn from those who succeed? What are the factors that enable home death? And what can we do to plan well-enough for our own care when we are dying?

In this workshop, Kerrie will share stories from a unique social research project on how communities care when someone is dying at home, and her own personal and professional experiences to demonstrate some key learnings over the past 20 years. Importantly, the workshop will also provide you with an opportunity to reflect on your personal experiences with dying and death and your personal values so that you can take action toward developing the know-how to plan well for end of life.

Kerrie Noonan founded The Groundswell Project in 2010 and has been working on initiating our projects and partnerships. With interests in health promotion, capacity building, social media, creativity and innovation Kerrie is passionate about the role that the arts can play in facilitating social and cultural change about death and dying.

Kerrie has worked in community development, as a social researcher, clinical psychologist in palliative care, health and community settings.

Kerrie is a fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs and a PhD Candidate at the University of Western Sydney. You can watch Kerrie present at TEDxSydney and read her articles 10 Facts about death everyone should know and Talking about Death with Children: Lessons from Sesame Street.

Living with Grief with Mal and Dianne McKissock

In this workshop Mal and Diane will share their insights on living with grief, based on their over 40 years of experience in the field of bereavement counselling.

Mal McKissock is one of Australia’s best known and respected bereavement counsellors and educators. A Certified Grief Therapist and Death Educator with the Association of Death Education and Counselling (USA), he is a member of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement. He began his career in the health field in 1965 and in 1975 was appointed as the first full time bereavement counsellor with the NSW Department of Health.

Dianne McKissock is a sociologist and well known Sydney psychotherapist who began her counselling career in 1969 as a relationship counsellor. Since that time she has maintained a private counselling practice, worked in a variety of educational, counselling and administrative roles in Drug & Alcohol Services (Dept. of Health, NSW) and as a consultant to a variety of Government and private organisations in planning and implementing educational and training programs. For the past twenty years Dianne’s special interest in counselling and education has been in the field of loss and grief, with current emphasis on the needs of bereaved children.

20th Century Poetry and Philosophy with Peter Banki, Ph.D

In this workshop we are going to depart by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s last unfinished poem: “Come you, you last one” and Maurice Blanchot’s very short novel “The Instant of my Death”, which recounts an ecstatic experience of death at the hands of the Nazis at the end of World War II. These will open the space for a discussion of four of the most influential theses on death and dying in twentieth century Western philosophy:

1. Our unconscious, which is to say, the greatest part of our psyche, does not know or believe in death (Freud);

2. Understanding that our death is possible is the condition for any authentic selfhood and historical existence (Heidegger);

3. Our relation to our death is firstly through the other, whose death has a philosophical and ethical priority (Levinas);

4. Our relation to ourselves is a priori posthumous; anticipatory mourning is the fundamental condition for any relation to ourselves and others (Derrida).

Time permitting there will also be consideration of the Zen tradition of writing a haiku at the moment of death.

Photo Credit Sarah Malevich

Developing Your Mortality Muscle with Victoria Spence

How may we ‘ready’ ourselves to meet the blow of diagnosis, dying and death? This workshop will provide practical details about what happens to us when we are in a dying, death and after death process. It will also provide a map of emergent trends and new practices in the funeral industry. This workshop will help you to meet mortality with all you have. We will get close and personal with coffins, body bags and cool beds.

Victoria Spence is a Consultant, Facilitator and Civil Celebrant. She has an extensive background in community cultural development and arts practice working across Sydney’s creative communities since 1988.

For a detailed article on her Celebrant and Ceremonial Practice, see this Dumbo Feather issue.

Read about Victoria's work in the Sydney Morning Herald

Night Soil (Live Burial) with Tom Isaacs

Tom Isaacs is a sculptor and performance artist who is interested in death as a metaphor for our current condition as well as a vehicle for a potential rebirth to new life. In his festival performance installation he will bury himself (and possibly others) under the soil to explore what Bataille called "limit-experience". His work is influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theory of the ‘Death Instinct’ and by the French philosopher Georges Bataille’s theory of ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ (Eroticism: Death and Sexuality).

Tom Isaacs