vigil/wake

BACKGROUND: What new arisings are possible within a performed nonfiction at the intersection between live art and the lecture? Noelle Janaczewska (2013) has claimed coinage of the descriptor "the performance essay" as her own and expanded upon its "protean and accommodating possibilities". Mary Cappello (2017) calls for new forms of colloquy that "move with others and across affiliations in the collective formation of ideas". This creative work explores new formal possibilities for participatory nonfiction. CONTRIBUTION: vigil/wake is a double bill on themes of grief and loss in which a performance lecture (vigil) meets a work of live art in the form of an installation (wake). Participants are conducted through encounters with the performer, with each other, and within themselves to perform and to collectively "essay" a work of secular ritual. This research project demonstrates how arts-based participatory practices of material thinking may construct new forms of performative nonfiction that promote community meaning-making and connection, especially around difficult issues. SIGNIFICANCE: vigil/wake was commissioned by The City of Melbourne as a contribution to a season of new work entitled Mere Mortals, staged at Arts House. Arts House is one of Melbourne's premier sites of innovative performance practice, theatre and live art. The work was given five performances as part of a program that saw it placed it alongside works by major artists including Ridiculusmus, French and Mottershead, Triage Live Art Collective, Punctum and Lara Thoms. vigil/wake garnered positive online reviews and observations that such "w/rites of passage" (Murray, 2017) may indeed enhance wellbeing and promote resilience in times of loss. The work will have an ongoing life as part of RMIT's partnership with the Melbourne Writers' Festival in 2019 before travelling to the Public Health and Palliative Care International Conference in NSW later in the year.