The arts have a role to play in marking significant life events including death. John Fox explains.
Over 15 years ago, the (then) Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain asked me, What have funerals got to do with theatre? As Welfare State International (of which I was one of the founding members in 1968) we were more interested in eyes on stalks than bums on seats. Our Engineers of the Imagination already did strange things: parading blazing sculptures through communities in a cacophony of hybrid Cumbrian Cuban fusion, for example. But funerals?
Yes, real ones with functional coffins; wooden ones constructed from recycled pallets, stout cardboard ones painted by artists and others fashioned from woven willow. Real coffins heavy with corpses that would decompose. Such funerals were no theatrical illusion and in funding terms were evidently on the outer limits of tick-box decency. However, we persevered.
In 1994, Sue Gill and I wrote The Dead Good Funerals Book, a practical manual connecting religion, ceremony, funerals and theatre. This book, and our training of secular celebrants (from 1995), has had a significant effect on the UK funeral industry. Now, thanks to a few pioneering practitioners, some funerals in England are less formulaic and more life-enhancing than they were ten years ago.
Soon appropriate celebrants and woodland burial sites will be commonplace. New ceremonies for funeral rites and other public and private cross-over points such as weddings, baby-namings, divorces and retirement are getting established. These can release people from the addiction of outmoded (if not discredited) religion, challenge commerce, and give people the space to re-engage, on their own terms, with the spiritual or the sacred. Unfortunately, even these ancient words have lost their meaning. Nevertheless, as we all still crave beauty, understanding, belonging, mystery, an escape from the mundane, and peace of mind (all of which used to be provided by art) this has to be an important old/new area waiting for action from arts workers.
Take one of these rites. Facing up to the inevitability of your own death and designing your own funeral ceremony can be a revolutionary act. Dangerously, our culture peddles surrogate death. Every hour through the media we are exposed to scores of gratuitous violent deaths and persuaded that as patriots we have to kill to survive. Desensitised with such propaganda, we do not challenge collateral damage. War seems inevitable and, in a free-enterprise market economy, selling weapons becomes morally acceptable.
At the same time as we are exploited with death-entertainment, without experiencing the reality of bloody killing; the majority of us rarely see a dead body. Corpses are the business of professionals. Most of us will live longer than our forebears and die in hospital. Although AIDS has changed consciousness among certain groups, generally we are conditioned to believe dying is not for us.
Our system controls us through fear but, except for life insurance, there is no mileage in bringing home the finality of death. More living. More buying. It is liberating to contemplate ones own death. Standing freely outside our own real or imagined coffin we hold hands with the ceremonies of our ancestors. One coffin we have worked on was for a woman with terminal cancer. During the last months of her life she and her family asked us to paint it for her, basing the designs on scenes celebrating her journey home from work, her hobbies and holidays.
Today, via my Artist+Time+Space Award, Arts Council England North West is supporting my research into ritual and theatre. So Sue Gill and I have started a new company, Dead Good Guides, to continue in this area and to pick up where Welfare State International left off. And, wondrously, no one has asked us, yet, to put their logo on any coffin.
John Fox was founder and Artistic Director of Welfare State International and author of Eyes on Stalks (Methuen, 2002), and (with Sue Gill) of The Dead Good Guides. He is lecturing at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London as part of The London International Festival of Mime on 20 January.