Body to dust to light. Let it rest
By Jasmine Grace Wenzel (21st, 22nd & 24th October 2024, Uferstudios)

I haven’t been to many funerals. As a child I refused to go to my grandmother’s burial in Bavaria, as I thought she had already left. I did not understand the concept of goodbyes to people that are unchangeably gone. Looking back, I didn’t know how to tend to my own grief, even less so to the grief of my loved ones. Mostly I missed out on the opportunity to connect with my father’s mourning. I thought that I wanted to give my goodbyes in stillness, by myself, returning to a place I had dedicated to my grandmother when she was still alive, when she was waving us goodbye from the little garden door when Papa and I used to visit her. We would wave until our car would take a turn and we wouldn’t see each other anymore. 

Stardust was an invitation to take part in eight rituals, in the passage of time that we all share between birth and death and to reflect on the bonds and changes we carry within us. Bringing my own thoughts on dying and death to the three performances of Stardust, essentially brought me to what binds me to life in the most meaningful way (love) and how I personally move from questions to taking action (from emotions to strategic struggle). Each of them offered a meditation of a single performer dedicated to their loved ones, to those who passed away, to the ones left behind, or to the matter that is no longer human but still part of this moving world. Concretely, I participated in the performance rituals Das Wasser am Morgen, Das Wasser am Abend by Hilla Steinert in the element of water, in Ritual of Contingency by Lee Mun Wai on fire and in Skin to Dust by Vera Shchelkina on dust. The eight performances were held daily in the evenings and followed a rhythm that moved from earthly elements, bodies, the physical world (earth, water) to their material dissolution (fire, dust) and finally to their transcendence (passing through white, red, black and clear light). Holding a personal account for a dignified post-mortem ritual, every performance bore witness to how their meaning and bond towards death transferred. Between things, people, beings, presence and absence. Into dust, light, or a peaceful nothing. 

The venue as container of all performances was calm and dressed in previously used white clothes. Separated into three levels, the space allowed visitors to sink deeper in: the entrance of the ground floor was designated as living space, a staircase led to pass the transitory space down to the performance stage on which visitors could sit on big cushions, the dying space. Reflections on dying and what it essentially means to live were written on pieces of clothes hanging from the living space into the dying space. Visitors were invited to write their own eulogies and add them to a growing veil between the living and dying space. It seems like the longer your life, the more complex and yet lighter the eulogies become, sharing survived losses, the presence of illness, and many changes of selves. In the end, nobody wants to regret anything. The veil became a pre-mortem dedication to our own death and was part of the space until it was collectively torn into tiny pieces at the end of the eight days.

Das Wasser am Morgen, Das Wasser am Abend by Hilla Steinert was a flowing exercise of goodbyes and of holding life in its fragments, reminding us of constant change. She retold stories and memories of her loved ones. While Hilla dispersed tissues in the room, a big one in the middle on the ground of the stage, she offered tissues to people. They were intended for tears, running noses, and also to soak up the water of the central ritual dedicated to her father Tillman whose grave, she told us, was beautifully decorated with stones. These stones were also part of the performance, pieces to be taken away by the visitors. Hilla introduced a bowl broken into two pieces. For the central ritual, two visitors were invited to join in holding the pieces of the clay container together. Hilla would then pour water into the bowl which turned the visitors to water bearers. Under her guidance, the two water bearers were asked to disperse the water on the big tissue on the floor until it was fully soaked up. At the end, visitors were invited to close their eyes, dance with their arms, with the water within and around. This last part was dedicated to her friend Fe, who was finally invited to let go and to fly away. 

While enjoying the thoughtful ritual and the beauty of it, I caught myself and my own thoughts sometimes flying away from the ritual. I felt a resistance building up within me and a difficulty settling in the space. I asked myself what I was missing. The moment I cannot relate to the forms of participation at hand, I turn into a spectator. The performer Hilla was my elder and the room was filled with people with white hair. This I appreciated a lot, since I often frequent spaces filled with peers of my own age group of people in their 20s to 30s. Still, I felt a hint of anger coming up and a bit of disappointment which is a familiar feeling when I am a guest in cultural spaces that are dominated by a homogonous crowd of white visitors. A wish came up: an egalitarian wish for a dignified resting space, a witnessing of a peaceful farewell as a universal human experience. Essentially, I was missing the political dimension of death. We don’t die and mourn the same way. Too many deaths are human-made and made to be forgotten.

Over the years, I watched several funerals on my screen, not just recently during the COVID-19 lockdown period, but because my Philippine family is spread out all over the globe. We live, work, dream, take care of each other, love, and die in the diaspora. Distance became our middle ground, and our rituals of mourning changed. How do we die, if not on our ancestral home grounds? Who will carry us to the grave, if we are individually dispersed and rituals of death are supposed to be held communally? How do you deal with the chronic illness of a loved one as an individual, when there are not many family members to take turns or turn to in the physical and emotional intensive care work? Who looks after you, after your body has become sore from cleaning people’s homes, raising your employers’ children but having no one who will grant a reciprocal care to you in return when you become an elder? It gets more complicated when your legal citizen status is not existent. How can you access terminal health care without thinking about deportation, once they decide you are healthy enough to leave? What if the dream of return during your lifetime turns to the wish of getting buried on your distant homeland, yet you are forced to live and then die in separation?

Lee Mun Wai’s Ritual of Contigency with the element fire consoled me again. Maybe also because burning paper money was involved at the end of it. Mun Wai expressed his wish to communicate across realms together with the visitors and with his deceased partner Michael in cross-cultural negotiations between Christian funeral traditions and the Taoist ones he adapted for Ritual of Contingency. For Mun Wai Christian heaven simply was too far away. According to his personal upbringing and culturalization, death was understood as incidental and from the perspective of the collective, a reminder that the gravitational center and grief of the passing is still respected but will never change the whole social space of the collective. Incense and golden paper money was passed around and became part of the ritual to connect with loved ones in the afterlife. In the end of the ritual, we were invited to gather at a fireplace outside of the building and to throw our rolled paper money in, to send a comforting wish and material well-being to the underworld. The smoke, smell and traces of ashes filled the space, being indicators of time and a visceral reminder of Michael’s and other loved one’s transitory presence in the space. 

Skin to Dust by Vera Shchelkina was a meditation on dust and the cyclical, participatory practice of sweeping dust on the floor that could be taken up by anyone in the space. A person started to sweep the dust on the floor, painting rhythmical circles with the brush. From off-space, the voice of the person sweeping the space led us into the performance, telling us that they were recorded 12 days before the performance, having lost 700 million skin cells since then. They would guide us through the journey of the ritual, the routine of shedding skin, creating more dust, and simply the sweeping. Skin is a membrane that faces the exterior world as a medium. While I was meditating on skin as an interface through touch, to loved ones, the narrator would carry on, the sweeper would continue to sweep the dust in cyclical forms, making and destroying the circles. Skin cells, the narrator would disclose, are born by multiplying, dead by shedding and dissolving. We, the visitors were invited to touch our hands, feel the ridges of our own or another hand while being reminded that we are a never-ending source of dust in the process of constantly letting go and dissolving into particles ourselves that will be swept away. 

Remembering, transferring meaning and a practice of dedication are the common threads that run through all the three rituals I experienced in Stardust. Whenever I have learned a specific skill that means a lot to me and that I had found in a certain person and attributed it to them – like the love for swimming or floating effortlessly on water – I too would never forget who I owe it to while doing it (give thanks). For me, a dedication means translating memory into physical and spiritual practice. Even if the person who once was and who I once loved dissolved from this material world, the meaning wouldn’t pass away while practicing the movement and skill I have received through them. Swimming has ever since been a meditation on grief, movement and joy for me.