CANADIAN performer and former palliative care counsellor Stephen Jenkinson will bring his Nights of Grief and Mystery show to Newcastle.
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The Harvard educated cultural activist uses performance to question the understanding of grief and what it is to die in a show which incorporates poetry, lamentation, song and readings from his book Die Wise. He will be joined on stage by multi-instrumentalist Gregory Hoskins.
“It’s a lot of fun, although the title doesn't suggest mirth, necessarily,” Jenkinson said.
The performance speaks to “sorrow” and “wondering aloud” with a focus very much on how we die.
“There is a bardic impulse that runs through the whole thing [show],” he said.
“It’s partly poetic, partly operatic, partly theatrical and partly hortatory, to use a good old-fashioned word.
“People in your part of the world, hopefully, will find something in what I have found and been troubled by and entrusted with, that is in someways familiar and perhaps inspiring.”
Jenkinson no longer works in the clinical field of palliative care but said in his show he attempts to be “utterly faithful” to what he witnessed while working in the “death trade”.
“I translate that into something that might be useful,” he said. “If we don’t begin with the remarkable poverties around how we are dying, we are very unlikely to recognise them when they visit us and we are more than likely to go along with it as the cost of doing business in the modern age.”
“What I am pleading for is there is such as thing as ‘our time’, it’s an idea that is antique now, that you can actually dial it [death] in for when it suits you.”
“Dying is first and foremost a mystery, not a problem to solve.”
Jenkison said books on death and dying were very popular in Canada.
“By that measure you would assume we are on the upswing,” he said.
“I contend that we have probably never had more death literature around, and for all of that good dying should abound, if that is the measure of it. But I think what is happening is what happens with every subject that hits the front-page and stays there a while, is that an information drunk culture grows accustomed to it with alarming repetition.
“I think it’s desensitisation that is going on.”
While not apposed to euthanasia, Jenksinson sees the push for legislation as a sign of death denial.
“I would suggest as an alternative to what is going in there is: euthanasia is the prescription for bad dying that a death phobic culture writes for itself,” he said.
“In other words, this deep advocacy for euthanasia, which I do understand – the over medicalisation of death and the prolongation of death, I understand it – but I am suggesting that with the legalisation of euthanasia, what we have is the fundamental dilemmas around dying and our understanding of what life is remains absolutely unchallenged, unrecognised.
“This is a solution that maintains the death phobia while promising to fix it. Euthanasia is used as a tool of seizing control of one’s own demise, as if we’re equipped to do that, as if we are able to do that, as if we have the ability to do that to exert domain over the end of our life.”
Jenkinson will also conduct one and two day teaching events he describes as a “trial by fire”.
“An expose of what has become of pretty much the western world as far as dying is concerned,” Jenkinson said.
“Also our understanding of what constitutes dying is fed on what we feed on during the course of our lives.
“If anything it is a relentless realisation of what passes for normal and sane and healthy and life affirming, none of which seem to be present when the dying comes around.”
Jenkinson will perform A Night of Grief and Mystery at 48 Watt Street, Newcastle, on March 14. Tickets available at eventbrite.ca