"As we grieve is a retelling of a grief ritual shared amongst friends that emerged from a practice of holding each other in our personal and collective grief, particularly now, as we are made witness to genocide in Gaza. We will bring an offering of olive branches around. We invite you to give into the branches your grief story and know that as we pass it around we all are witnessing and holding a bit of each other. As we perform this retelling, let this ritual be something we share."
As We Grieve is a multi-media immersive ritual performance piece that explores collective and personal grief in relation to genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Through mediating the creative practices of Dan Gorelick, raya marie hazell, and Marie-Terese Png, Bekah Badilla worked with each artist to create a container for a cross-disciplinary experimental work grounded in relational grief and communal support between the artists. As a catalyst, the piece centered contact with physical/sensory symbols of Palestinian land such as pomegranates, olive branches, sounds of mediterranean ocean and birds. Through poetry written by Png, grief rituals and movement exploration by hazell and Badilla, and music exploration and video/sound by Gorelick, the piece’s first public exhibit took place at the Paper Kraine theatre in Manhattan.
