Grief Houses was a puppetry walkabout project commissioned by Nunhead Cemetery for their pilot 'Nunhead lates' event. Along with three collaborators, I directed and facilitated workshops with performers, exploring how grief manifests physically and translates into movement and sound. I taught performers the skills to express themselves vocally, deprioritizing singing or sounding 'nice' to create a soundscape that responded to puppets, emotions, sensations and the space.
We curated the material that emerged in rehearsals into five ‘moments’ that performers could improvise around and slide between. This helped create some structure to imrpovise around and meant we could cover a whole spectrum of emotions, from joy to grief.
One of our target audiences was children, and I watched them engage creatively with the puppets, mirroring different emotions at each other. Some adults fed back that they ‘felt like kids’.