Making Grief Move: Staging Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

About the event

‘Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project’, writes Max Porter in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. But how do you translate such a viscerally poetic book into movement?

In this panel, members of the creative team behind BEYOND WORDS’s new dance adaptation reflect on the challenges and discoveries of bringing Porter’s story to the stage. They’ll explore how dance, gesture, rhythm and stillness can express what grief often does to language, and how embodied storytelling can hold the messy, shifting reality of loss.

Director and choreographer Helen Calcutt is joined by Creative Producer Callum Holt, dancer Katie Albon, and academic advisor Dr Lesel Dawson to discuss turning private grief into shared experience, and what art can offer as a space to feel, witness, and move through pain with honesty and hope.