July 26, 2022

At 1:52 AM, my father died. The wake began at noon the following day. At 4:00 PM, his body was placed in the family tomb at the Araçá cemetery in São Paulo.

What followed were days of bureaucracy at banks, notary offices, insurance companies. Days that turned into weeks, months. No invitation to any rite of passage from one reality to another. From daughter to orphan. All paradigms suddenly changed. No time or space for processing. Nothing. I don't come from a family with religious beliefs. I'm an atheist, a materialist. I didn't see, immediately, any satisfactory path to processing the greatest pain I've ever felt in my life.

Two days after my father's death, I began to use the clay of that grief as material for my work. I started down the only path that seemed possible to me for this elaboration. My temple is the theater, my liturgy is artistic research, my prayer is dramaturgy. And this is the seed of this performance.

Death is, for us Westerners, perhaps the last insurmountable taboo. We don't talk about it. We don't know how to deal with it. However, it is also the only inexorable certainty. In a historical period in which wars, collective tragedies, violence, epidemics, and pandemics are reported in real time as never before, and in which the cultural industry capitalizes on these themes with sensationalism, everyday death has become a veiled subject.

The process of death has been sanitized and bureaucratized. Advances in science and medicine have prolonged our lives, but have also changed the way we die. People no longer die at home, but in hospitals, places where the aim is to conquer death, often prolonging the inevitable. Funeral rites are increasingly quick, standardized, and industrialized – with the boom in commercial cremations.

The overvaluation of youth prevents us from remembering that we die. We, Homo sapiens sapiens, always forget the last sapiens of our kind. We are humans who not only know, but know that we know. For many historians and anthropologists, the birth of human culture as we understand it is linked to mourning.

Death inspired the first human rites, the first hieroglyphs, the first stories told around the campfire. The birth of philosophy, religion, and art. Working through grief inaugurates who we are, and by renouncing it, we renounce an essential metaphysical anguish. Not talking about death doesn't ward it off; it only makes it more frightening.