A timely local performance contemplates life and death
Julie Rada didn’t set out to make a performance-installation for our coronavirus-infected moment. Even so, it’s hard not to think “Memento Mori” (opening Thursday) arrives right on time and, unnervingly, on point.
The title comes from the Latin, meaning “Remember you have to die” and the piece takes inspiration from psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ influential mapping of the five stages of grief in her 1969 book, “On Death and Dying.” A quick refresher: The stages are denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. And who among us hasn’t cycled through a few of them on a weekly, daily, minute-by-minute basis recently?
think it’s important to say that this piece wasn’t developed explicitly as a response to the coronavirus or Black Lives Matter or ... the explicit fascism coming out of our government,” Rada said via video call. “It’s not intended to be a response to that. But I also think it would be disingenuous for me not to acknowledge that existential thoughts are on everybody’s minds. There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty. Actual fear about people’s own lives or the people they love.”
Death is, as she said, “perpetually relevant” — and “pretty universal.”
“In my personal life, I’ve had some proximity to death. I mean a lot of us have,” she said. “I’ve been really interested in being a death doula [a midwife of sorts] who ushers people in and out of the world.”
The idea came to her while she was starting out doing prison work, which remains her full-time gig. When an inmate who had taken one of her workshops died, she said she started “thinking about what it means to age and die in prison,” about how the doula role could work in that environment. “To give people that comfort and that support, dying in one of the scariest places.”
While the compassionate “why?” of “Memento Mori” preceded the coronavirus crisis, the “how?” of it demonstrates the ways local theater artists are creating workarounds to the ongoing, fragile state of things when it comes to gathering. As if to underscore this, Thursday evening also brings another edition of #ArtFindsUs’ mobile, community-courting performance and visual art show to the Art District on Santa Fe and nearby streets. And Boulder’s
The Catamounts recently announced the company’s next show, “The Rough,” will take place at Westminster’s Legacy Ridge Golf Course (Aug. 7- 30), where patrons will watch from golf carts. Fore! indeed.
“Memento Mori” will unfold in the storefront of the Savoy in Curtis Park. Audience members
— intentional or happenstance — can view the 80-minute work through the windows of the 1889 red-brick building, home to Theatre Artibus.
Rada and the Grapefruit Lab (of which she is a cofounder), have a collaborative relationship with married, artistic partners and Artibus co-founders, Meghan Frank and Buba Basishvili. (Frank family members own the Savoy building.)
“Our company and Grapefruit Lab felt like we had a lot in common,” Frank said of the creative fit. The two companies have done projects together, among them “Recipe,” an immersive piece about Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, food and place that traveled through the Savoy space back in January.
“When Julie mentioned that she was interested in activating one of our window spaces, we thought that was a great idea,” Frank said. “In fact, we had been thinking along the same lines and were in the process of sending out a call to all sorts of artists to create a COVID space for performers to perform and keep everyone safe.”
Naturally, “Memento Mori” comes with its own Charon. While alternating performers Wayne Breyer and Rick Mireles won’t be ferrying audience members from the sidewalk at Arapahoe and 27th across the River Styx, they are set to help answer questions. Rada anticipates — and is ready to welcome — the stray “Hey, what’s happening here?” quandaries.
It will be interesting to see how much of the solo perfor“I mance — which doesn’t have a script but does have a sound design — is legible to observers from the sidewalk, both physically and metaphorically. The installation — brown leaves strewn across the floor, red flowers hanging from the ceiling, a stack of white, china teacups — is lovely and evocative, to be sure.
But Rada admitted, “I don’t know if people looking at it will actually know that and say, ‘Oh, you’re in the bargaining phase.’ ”
Then again, not fretting about one’s grasp of the full piece is built into the experience. People can wander by, can stand and watch for a spell — mindful to the rules of social distance — or bring a chair or blanket, although upright likely offers the best vantage point. And, even then, this stages-of-grief-without-a-stage experience is likely to be as tricky as it is wonderfully intriguing.