As I took my seat on the floor of Black Temple Gallery, my first thought was that Jamie would have absolutely hated this. I could see him, grunting as he sat on the floor and whispering to me, “Jesus wept, darl. We’ve paid to be sad on the floor.”
I can almost feel his cheeky smile radiating in the room. His big warm hand on my back. I smile to myself.
I’m in Hobart to see Community of Grieving by Zosia Hołubowska and Julia Giertz, as part of Dark Mofo. The show started life as a radio broadcast in 2020 in response to Covid-19, before morphing into a live experience at the 2021 Unsound festival in Kraków. It is, ostensibly, a place for people to come together and grieve. To reckon with their loss. To heal.
Jamie, my fiance, died unexpectedly at the end of last year. The past six months or so have been spent dealing with his sudden absence. My experience of grief has been mostly solitary, so I feel a bit exposed as people file in and take their places on the floor.
Four figures enter, shrouded in white. The performance is so far silent, apart from the sound of a woman unzipping and removing her boots. Their wooden click clack echoes as she places them on the hard floor. She proceeds to meditate for the duration of the performance. “Get her!” I hear Jamie whisper. “Isn’t she cold? Put your low, sensible heel back on, love!” I laugh to myself.
They look like ghosts, the performers. They hold each other. And then they take their places: three behind microphones, one behind a synth desk. They start singing, beautifully, their voices layering indiscernibly with the slightly warped, recorded voices of the score. They stutter, crackle with static. The singers wail. Scream. The voices are embodied and disembodied; alive and perhaps dead.
The ghostliness of the scene feels instantly recognisable. Grief, I think, is a lot like a haunting. I expect to see Jamie in the kitchen by his beloved coffee machine before work, or in his spot on the couch when I get home at night or lying next to me in bed in the morning. Every time he isn’t there it feels like a jump scare. The rhythm of reaching for him every day, of longing for his touch, the routine of picking up my phone to call him when I leave the office is a memory that I can’t seem to shake out of my muscles. It’s hard to know where the real and the imagined ends a lot of the time.
Community of Grieving changes suddenly. The singing stops, the music becomes hard and industrial. Discordant. The singers begin to spin and twirl. Their bodies break down, slowly twitching and contorting as the music glitches out. They bend, squat and then their knees buckle, perhaps under the weight of everything. They crawl and find each other in the darkness. Because we’re sitting on the floor, I crane my neck but I can’t really see anything. Everyone around me is doing the same.
I give up on engaging with anything visual in the show and close my eyes. I think of Jamie and feel the weight that settles on my chest when I stop distracting myself. The weight, I’ve learned, is everything I have felt and still feel for Jamie: the love I have for him, the desire and longing I have, the anger I have at him for leaving even though I know he wouldn’t have left if he could have helped it. The guilt I have because he passed away on my watch and that maybe, if I paid closer attention, there was something, anything, I could’ve done to save him. And I don’t know where to put all of that. I don’t know if I ever will.
The music stops. I open my eyes and the performers enter and bow. It’s over. We clap.
I get up from the ground, slowly, and stomp my feet to get the feeling back. I don’t feel a lot of closure leaving Community of Grieving, or catharsis or even emotion. I feel mostly neutral, even though there were parts of the show that were exceptionally beautiful.
I step out into the night and feel the shock of the icy Hobart air on my cheeks as I walk with my friends to a bar up the road.
“Let’s get a drink, darl,” I hear Jamie whisper. “I need it after that.”
I wish Jamie was here. No show, I think, is going to change that. Or fix that. Or help me understand it. But I feel happy and alive and that’s enough to get me through the night.
