Laurel Hill Cemetery’s weekend festival of mourning gives another face to death

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There are only two things we can expect with certainty, as Ben Franklin famously said, and one of them is death.

But the inaugural Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival, this weekend at Laurel Hill Cemetery, suggests death may not be what it used to be.

“This death festival brings together brilliant artists who are asking really deep, visionary questions about what it means to die right now, in 2025, in the dominant culture that we live in,” said Annie Wilson, one of the organizers.

The inevitability of death is, of course, absolute. That will not change. But Wilson says how we experience death and grieving is subject to changes in culture, medical technology and the funeral industry.

“Funeral directors, health care professionals — their jobs are to work through systems to support us. They are really good at their jobs,” Wilson said. “Sometimes in that professionalization you lose the intimacy and connection of having loved ones involved in somebody’s death that are so meaningful.”

What is a ‘good death’?

Wilson and a cohort of organizers pulled together five artists, mostly dancers, in whose work death appears. The four-day festival, which started Thursday, also features workshops and panel talks centered on aging, dying and grieving.

Eiko Otake, a Japanese performer based in New York City, will stage a site-specific version of her ongoing dance project “A Body in a Cemetery.” She takes audiences on a short walking performance through the south part of Laurel Hill East, concluding at a London plane tree.

Underneath the canopy, she unfurls a banner printed with a close-up image of her mother’s face surrounded by cut flowers. She died in 2019. Otake had prepared the flowers in her mother’s casket before burial and took the photo, later blowing it up on a woven polymer fabric. With slow and deliberate choreography, Otake sprinkles fresh dirt over her mother’s face.

“She got a good death, the way I define it,” Otake said. “She wasn’t killed. Nobody was violent to her. It was unhurried. She died of age and relatively without much pain, so we could take time to see her dying and be together. As sad as I was, I felt like, ‘Wow, this is a good death.’”

Otake has performed iterations of “A Body in a Cemetery” previously in Brooklyn, New York; Durham, North Carolina; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. They are part of a larger “A Body” project, wherein she creates solo, site-specific dance works based on relationships she builds with specific locations.

“I am learning about the place. I hope through my performance people see the place a little differently,” she said. “It’s unusual that they see something in a cemetery. It changes the sense of a cemetery as a public space.”

The festival includes workshops on topics like green burial, shrouding, healthy grieving and “Imagining the Future of Dying.”

David Brick, a co-producer of the festival and artistic director at Headlong Dance Theater, said the processes of dying and grieving are both intensely personal and communal. Their rituals knit society together.

“If there was one goal of the festival, it would be a place where death becomes a very special but ordinary thing to contemplate,” he said. “It’s not something to be feared or reviled, but a place where our deepest values can manifest more fully.”

Approaching death with generosity

Another artist featured in the festival is Germantown native DonChristian Jones, a protégé of Otake. His dance piece “The Politics of Mourning” is in part based on a 2018 academic essay by Lissa Skitolsky, “The Politics of Mourning in the Neoliberal State.” It examines death and loss felt by communities who are often targeted with violence from wider society.

“It had much to do with Black American plight, Indigenous genocide, mass incarceration, and what it means to be a queer, Black or Indigenous marginalized body in America,” he said. “It has a lot to do with preemptive mourning and ongoing, unending grief.”

Jones’ dance is also inspired by his own father, who died in 2024. Jones said he and his family cared for his father in home hospice as his body became weaker and smaller, unable to feed and wash himself.

He positions himself at the entrance of Laurel Hill Cemetery’s Receiving Vault, a historic building that was used before the advent of motorized backhoes to store bodies in winter until the spring thaw allowed graves to be dug once again.

Jones begins by sweeping the entrance to the vault and welcoming audiences inside. His choreography includes stylized gestures of cleaning walls and using a washtub.

“I’m thinking about washing this building as metaphor for washing my dad’s body,” he said. “Washing and feeding — the most intimate practices I’ve ever experienced — it was the closest I’ve ever been to him. The dichotomy of how sad and loving it was, it’s indescribable, the greatest privilege I’ve ever had.”

“It felt like my greatest opportunity to perform,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking: How can I do this most generously?”

The inaugural Death and Arts Festival will have performances in both Laurel Hill East and West cemeteries with Brooklyn-based dancer Mayfield Brooks, Philadelphia-based cellist Mel Hsu and Philadelphia-based dancer Shavon Norris. Producers of the event intend to make the festival biannual.