789443

research-article2018
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800418789443Qualitative InquiryBrinkmann et al.

Article
Qualitative Inquiry

The Presence of Grief: Research-Based Art

2019, Vol. 25(9-10) 915­–924
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
and Arts-Based Research on Grief sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1077800418789443
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418789443
journals.sagepub.com/home/qix

Svend Brinkmann1, Ignacio Brescó1, Ester Holte Kofod1,

Allan Køster1, Anna Therese Overvad1, Anders Petersen1, Anne Suhr2,
Luca Tateo1, Brady Wagoner1, and Ditte Winther-Lindqvist3

Abstract
The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores
the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry,
but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional
methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about
grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case
on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report
our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We
use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical
enactment.

Keywords
grief, arts-based inquiry, methods of inquiry, ethnography, ethnographies, methodologies, hermeneutics, presence

Prologue text attempts to reach a level of understanding that is not eas-

Anders: The novel she was reading is lying on the kitchen
table. I haven’t moved it, I can’t move it, I don’t want to move
it, I look at it every day when we eat breakfast, I think of how
sad it is that she never got to finish the book, she never got to
read the ending.
She always spilled coffee on the floor next to her desk. I am
cleaning the floor, but I let the spilled coffee spots stay, I can’t
clean it up, I don’t want to clean it up.
With every day that passes, I find fewer and fewer of her hairs
everywhere, they no longer gather as an annoying lump in the
shower, and I cry quietly. (Monologue from the play SAVN)
The authors involved in the creation of this article col-
laborate on a large research project called The Culture of
Grief. That project explores the current conditions and
implications of grief, especially in light of increasing medi-
calization and pathologization of this existential phenome-
non. The authors employ conventional forms of qualitative
inquiry such as interviewing, observation, and document
analyses in their various projects about children that lose
their parents, parents that lose their children, adults that lose
their partners at various stages of life, and also about collec-
tive grief practices around memorials (see www.sorg.aau.dk
for a description of the different subprojects). But the present
ily obtained through the conventional qualitative research
methods.
In November 2017, the group of authors participated as
members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical per-
formance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct.
The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic
research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided
to study both the development of the play and its perfor-
mance, and to report our impressions in fragments with the
intention of representing the experiential structure of grief
as an experienced phenomenon. Thus, one can say that
research-based art (made by CoreAct) has in this case
become arts-based research, in a process that hopefully
produces new knowledge. First, we will describe the play
and report from our talks with the creators and actors of the
performance. Second, we give a brief introduction to Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht’s (2004) concept of presence that serves
1
Aalborg University, Denmark
2
Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark
3
Aarhus University, Denmark
Corresponding Author:
Svend Brinkmann, Department of Communication and Psychology,
Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, Aalborg 9220, Denmark.
Email: svendb@hum.aau.dk
916
Figure 1. Picture from the entrance into SAVN.
Source. Photo taken by the first author.
as a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) for us in our endeavor
to look for meaning beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical
enactment. Third, we provide fragments of our impressions
from the play in an attempt to convey a sense of presence.
Finally, we discuss what we have gained concretely from
approaching grief in this manner and what can be gained more
generally in qualitative inquiry by working with theater.
The Performance: SAVN
Our encounter with the theatrical staging of grief began in
November 2016 when the first author of this article was
contacted by the two key persons, Anika and Helene, behind
the theater company CoreAct back—a year before the
actual performance premiered. At that time, it was made
public that the research project The Culture of Grief had
received a large grant from a private donor to study grief in
its current cultural context. Anika and Helene had been
researching grief for a couple of years already, gathering
stories from people in grief and using their own experiences
of loss to develop a performance play that was named
SAVN (which means longing, privation, missing, or need in
English) with the subtitle “A tribute to grief” (Figure 1).
Although we—as a group of qualitative researchers—had
not originally planned to team up with artists, we decided to
do so after this very welcome invitation from CoreAct,
partly because of the noteworthy general interest in our
research from the artistic world (we have now established
connections to several theater companies and other artists),
and partly because the production of knowledge found in
theater and the arts seemed to be an important addition to
our more conventional and linear research projects that had
already been planned. The first author had a couple of meet-
ings with Anika and Helene, and finally, a year after the first
Qualitative Inquiry 25(9-10)
contact, the whole research group—Svend, Ditte, Anders,
Brady, Ignacio, Luca, Allan, Ester, Anne, and Anna—met
with the CoreAct team before the night of the performance.
Our plan was to interview Anika and Helene first, then par-
ticipate in the performance, and, finally, after the play, to
interview both other people from the audience and also the
three other actors that have been employed to do the perfor-
mance. As we were 10 co-researchers in the same process,
we may term what happened a multiperspectival ethno-
graphic experience.
The many researcher perspectives turned out to suit the
performance very nicely, for the play actually had four dif-
ferent trajectories. Everything took place in an old building
in Copenhagen (the capital of Denmark) called Slottet (The
Castle), specifically on its top floor with many different
rooms and a long hallway, and we entered the building
under a large neon sign saying SAVN in purple capital let-
ters (see photo above). This clearly served as a context
marker, inviting the participants to understand the various
tableaus of the performance with reference to emotions of
grief and longing. When entering the building, we were
each given one of four names that were put on our clothes
as badges—Kim, Nor, Mai, or Sonni—representing four
ways of moving through the performance. There were 45
people in the audience, divided into the four groups, includ-
ing the 10 researchers who were placed in different groups.
The four-name structure meant that not all scenes were wit-
nessed by everyone in the audience, and not everyone
watched them in the same order.1 Furthermore, as Anika
and Helene explained, the artists had worked deliberately to
create fragments: intense tableaus with human beings enact-
ing grief in various ways with their bodies and voices,
accompanied by sound and music (one of the actors was in
fact a musician that moved around in the rooms, mostly
dressed like a raven, and played live music), but without
any overarching story line. SAVN is a performance without
a narrative, without a plot. This was meant to convey the
sense of loss, despair, and existential fragmentation associ-
ated with bereavement and grief (Figure 2).
The goal of the 2-hr performance was thus to make grief
present in the rooms, but without the usual temporal con-
texts that one finds in novels, movies, and grief memoirs,
for example (with beginnings, middles, and endings, or
even sequential stages of grief).
Production of Presence
If understanding a given event is about interpreting its
meaning, then how can we understand bereavement and
grief if these phenomena in fact shatter one’s world beyond
any meaning and interpretation? The artists’ suggestion in
SAVN is to convey a sense of fragmentation through intense
confrontation with feelings of loss and grief, but how can
we approach this with perspectives from the humanities and
Brinkmann et al.
Figure 2. Picture from a scene in SAVN (official material on the website: http://www.grob.dk/forestilling/savn/).
social sciences? One helpful source in this regard is the idea
of presence developed by the literary theorist Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht (2004). In his book on The Production of
Presence, he has developed a contrast between meaning and
presence (the following reworks analyses from Brinkmann,
2014). We are often taught to look for the meanings of art
works, people’s utterances, and social practices in general,
but there is, Gumbrecht (2004) says, “a layer in cultural
objects and in our relation to them that is not the layer of
meaning” (p. 54). It is this layer that he seeks to capture
when talking about presence, and it is this layer which came
to the surface in SAVN. Gumbrecht’s point is not to say that
meaning is irrelevant, or that hermeneutics (interpretation
of meaning) should be disqualified in the human and social
sciences, but it is to say that we have a relationship to the
world that is below and beyond meaning, and which has not
been given enough attention in the human and social sci-
ences. Hans-Georg Gadamer, arguably the most important
hermeneutic philosopher, pointed to this in his own way,
when arguing for greater acknowledgment of the non-
semantic and the non-interpretative. As Gumbrecht reports,
when Gadamer was asked by an interlocutor if the function
of the non-semantic features of poetry (e.g., rhyme, rhythm,
prosody, etc.) was to challenge the “hermeneutic identity”
of the text, Gadamer answered (in Gumbrecht’s translation
from the German):
But—can we really assume that the reading of such texts is a
reading exclusively concentrated on meaning? Do we not sing
these texts? Should the process in which a poem speaks only be
917
carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the same time,
a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with
which the poem confronts us. (Gadamer quoted in Gumbrecht,
2004, p. 64)
Gadamer here emphasizes the material factors of poetry and
says that poems are supposed to be “sung” (not necessarily,
of course, in a literal sense). There are vital aspects of sing-
ing and performing poetry that have little to do with mean-
ing, but which are nonetheless central to the aesthetic
experience. The prime reason that we have poetry in the
first place may have to do exactly with all these effects that
meanings themselves cannot capture, but which are gener-
ated by rhyme, rhythm, prosody, intensity, and so on. We
need poetry (in the broad sense) when we wish to produce
what Gumbrecht refers to as “presence effects” rather than
“meaning effects.” And Gadamer emphasizes in the quote
that this is not at the expense of truth. On the contrary, there
is a kind of truth about phenomena that lies in the perfor-
mance itself (e.g., CoreAct enacts tableaus of grief).
Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology is the most impor-
tant source of inspiration for Gumbrecht, and the keyword
itself—presence—refers first and foremost to an immediate
spatial and bodily relationship we have to the world and its
objects. Things, events, and episodes may literally be “at
hand” for us or, as Heidegger famously said, “ready-to-
hand” (Heidegger, 1927/1962). For Heidegger, this meant
that things primordially appear to us in practical contexts of
use, prior to any theorizations we may engage in about the
world, and prior to any representations we may form of it.
918
For Heidegger, this signals a non-conceptual relationship
that involves the body rather than an observing or reflective
mind. We know the world already with the body before we
know it through reflection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty fol-
lowed suit and emphasized even more the role of the body
in our being-in-the-world. He argued that it is our motil-
ity—the capacity of the body to be moved and move actively
in space—which is the basic form of intentionality, prior to
representational or interpretational skills (Merleau-Ponty,
1945/2002). Intentionality is here something operational
that signifies an “I can” rather than the Cartesian “I think.”
When we are engaged with our bodies in the processes of
the world, we may witness what Gumbrecht calls “the pro-
duction of presence.” He describes “the almost excessive,
exuberant sweetness that sometimes overcomes me when a
Mozart aria grows into polyphonic complexity and when I
indeed believe that I can hear the tones of the oboe on my
skin” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 97). Hearing the tones of the
oboe on one’s skin is not necessarily a “meaningful” experi-
ence in a hermeneutic sense that calls for interpretation, but
it is something felt, and it is hard to deny that such experi-
ences are of prime importance to living, sensing human
beings.
Presence is produced whenever “the impact that ‘pres-
ent’ objects have on human bodies is being initiated or
intensified” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. xiii). Interpretation, on
the contrary, is not mainly “spatial” or “intense,” but arises
out of more temporal relationships that involve trying out
different framings of situations. Gumbrecht makes clear,
however, that “every human contact with the things of the
world contains both a meaning- and a presence-compo-
nent” (p. 109). The point, again, is not to get rid of mean-
ing, but to understand the layer of presence that we too
often gloss over (in particular as social scientists) in our
attempts to go behind the present, the immediate, and inter-
pret it. This also explains why meaning is typically associ-
ated with depth while presence is associated with surface.
Interpreting the meaning of something often involves
going beyond what is available to the sensing human body
and insert it into some context or story line, whereas the
production of presence is about intensity and nearness in a
spatial and physical way. To return to the example of
poetry, so many high school students have been taught to
employ different versions of psychoanalysis or narratology
to interpret the meaning of the words in a poem, while
missing out entirely on the presence effects, that is, on the
sheer pleasure of reading or listening to the sounds and
words. Poetry, as Gumbrecht says,
is perhaps the most powerful example of the simultaneity of
presence effects and meaning effects—for even the most
overpowering institutional dominance of the hermeneutic
dimension could never fully repress the presence effects of
rhyme and alliteration, of verse and stanza. (p. 18)
Qualitative Inquiry 25(9-10)
Here, we find an emphasis on the simultaneity of pres-
ence effects and meaning effects, which lies at the core of
Gumbrecht’s theory of aesthetic experience, which, he
argues, is an oscillation between the two kinds of effect.2
Whereas the truth of hermeneutics is found in coherence of
interpretation, the truth in presence is found in getting close
to the phenomenon.
In his Methodology of the Heart, Ron Pelias (2004) has the
memorable dictum that “Science is the act of looking at a tree
and seeing lumber. Poetry is the act of looking at a tree and
seeing a tree” (p. 9). The act of looking at a tree and seeing
lumber is actually a hermeneutic act of interpretation that goes
beyond the presence and the “surface” of the tree to interpret
its possibilities (here in quite an instrumental sense). The act
of looking at the tree and seeing it as a tree, in all its presence
and thisness, is to experience it truly, as a concrete, material
entity in a non-interpretative way. To achieve this, we need to
pause and immerse ourselves in the situation, or, as Gumbrecht
puts it, “our desire for presence will be best served if we try to
pause for a moment before we begin to make sense” (p. 126).
Impressions
So, let us see what kinds of presence effects the play SAVN
produced on the qualitative grief researchers, when they
decided to pause for a moment instead of trying to make sense:
***
Svend: The whole thing feels disorganized. We are led
from one room to the next by a man dressed like a raven. I try
to connect the different scenes: Who has died? Is it the mother?
Is she a ghost now? But my attempts at sense-making break
down in the next moment. There is no story. Or, if there is, it
is a story of no-story. I become frustrated, perhaps even a little
bit angry. I feel a bit disappointed. But in one room, my feel-
ings change. I see Anders, the oldest of the male actors, sitting
in a sofa. The sofa is worn-out. Many people have probably
used it to sit and talk, take naps, watch TV, and perhaps to
make love. And Anders then turns to the large button on the
sofa pillow and touches it. He begins to caress it, and then he
embraces the whole pillow, and finally the entire sofa. His
movements are slow and gentle. It is an erotic scene, but
Anders is fully dressed, and he is all alone in the sofa. He
performs a quiet ballet in the sofa without much drama, some-
times with his eyes closed. He probably imagines the person
he loves—and has made love to in the sofa. But now that per-
son is no longer there, and her or his absence is striking.
Anders shows us love without a loved one. His body and its
movements are tuned into someone, who is gone. It is a scene
of soundless despair, and it is very beautiful. My fleeting feel-
ings of anger and disappointment disappear, and I am left with
a bitter-sweet feeling of grief. I experience a strong urge to
pick up my phone and call my wife.
***
Brinkmann et al.
Luca: I arrived late at the performance and received a
name tag; “Mai,” being then instructed to go up the fourth
floor of the building and look for someone to welcome me.
I met one of the staff and my colleagues in a group, and was
driven with the others into a room in a corridor. The dark
room was furnished as a family living room, with old-fash-
ioned pieces of furniture, and sweet music in the back-
ground. The structure of the performance appeared
immediately clear and I found it original. Bits and pieces of
experiences of people who (had?) suffered a loss and could
not fully express it in words or share it with others. Dazzled,
overwhelmed, and looking for a meaning, I was sweating
from the run to the theater and felt uncomfortable in the
warm environment. I started to observe. Scene after scene,
room after room, I UNDERSTOOD what was the message,
yet I did not FEEL particularly touched. The actors were
mimetically embodying the experience of grief, loss, and
longing for (a/someone?) beloved. They were representing
isolated individuals who were trying to get to grips with the
experience. I felt so distanced and not empathetic in that
situation, it was stereotypical to me. The idea of lonely indi-
viduals in front of a loss, trying to cope with it, seemed to
me like a tremendous cliché, (hopefully) far from reality
and from much of literature. Is it really so?
***
Allan: Entering the room is entering a mood. Or rather,
an atmosphere that sets a mood. It works. It is the wondrous
thing about atmospheres: They are not aspects of a closed-
off mind, but the quality of a room. A man is sitting curled
up on the top of a large dresser, with his upper body bent
over himself, face turned down. He is the only actor in the
room, yet it is not him that has an impact on me. What
impinges on me is the atmosphere. The dimmed light, the
loudly ticking clock which is obstructively in the fore-
ground, demanding my attention. The atmosphere is one of
familiarity, yet deprived of something. Deprived of the very
thing that gives it vitality. What is familiar is the texture of
the room, which somehow incorporates the presence of an
elderly woman whom I have never met. Yet by some synes-
thetic effect, she is not completely a stranger, she is also my
grandmother. Somehow, concreteness merges with an
abstract function (grandmotherness), to merge once more
with a new concreteness (my grandmother). It is personal. I
think this is why the room makes me enact the feeling of
loss. It is an odd feeling—I am not longing for my grand-
mother. Not longing at all (which is the title of the play).
But I feel the coldness and emptiness inherent to the exis-
tential experience. Things start to transpire in the room. I
don’t care. The man moves, sits on a sofa, and starts to
caress it, hinting that this is where she used to sit. I under-
stand the point and gesture, but I don’t care. What matters is
the mood set by the atmosphere. I understand the existential
919
state people talk about when talking about emptiness. It is
an emptiness that emerges from fullness. Only in a rich
existential texture can the absence that constitutes the emp-
tiness become manifest. Only within a rich referential unity
can something stand out as so profoundly missing. This is
the importance of things. And the clock keeps ticking. In the
particular mood I have been immersed in, the ticking pro-
duces a displacement of time. The clock is constantly tick-
ing, moving steadily ahead, yet I feel that time somehow
stands still. The discrepancy between existential and objec-
tive time. The discrepancy between what is happening in
the room, the movements, and me. Then a stranger knocks
on the door. Come on in! No one enters. Another knock on
the door. Come on in! A stranger comes in and calls the
name I have been assigned—Kim. We have to leave. As I
walk out of the door, I walk out of the atmosphere and
accompanying mood. It is easy. It was only something bor-
rowed. But I can now revisit that state. It worked. To my
surprise, it worked.
***
Anders: I am sitting on a bench with four strangers, who,
for the next couple of hours, are called Nor. I do not know
what to expect. Then, all of a sudden, the Nor sitting next to
me whispers something in my ear. I apparently have to
remember what is being said and then say it out loud to my
fellow Nors. I forget half of it. I feel very confused. But I
also feel, somewhat strangely, that I am part of a group.
Moments later we are being accompanied to a room upstairs.
Here, one of the female actors—Helene—is waiting for us.
Helene walks around saying that we have to do certain exer-
cises while we listen to slow Elvis tunes: Act as if we are
crying, walk around the room and shout out swear-words,
and so on. I feel a bit unsettled and I cannot understand
what it has to do with grief. Some of the other Nors seem to
think the same. In the next room, however, my emotions
change. Helene has switched roles. She now sits on a chair.
Her head is leaned on a small table hidden behind an old
tape-recorder. She tells a story about a loss of a loved one.
Very gently, without moving at all, she tells a story that is
deprived of beginnings and ends. We are not being told
whom the story is about. Who has died? But it doesn’t really
matter. The story is very moving. My heart is pounding and
I am holding my breath. I feel the grief in the room. A silent
grief. A loud knock on the door, followed by a voice telling
us to leave the room, cuts the story off. In the next room, a
new sensation of grief awaits us. This time a louder, more
expressive, grief is being acted out. A young male actor
jumps up and down, throws himself on the floor. He is dis-
tressed. A grief is violently tearing him apart. The violence
is almost unbearable. I want to leave the room and stay at
the same time.
***
920
Anna: Fragmentation. Cards being played in a waiting
room. Being moved to a gym, getting in touch with and
playing out emotions. An unmoving body in a house of
decay. A boy dancing, while continuously trying to stay on
his feet. A woman falling out, asking “why,” and a husband
trying to catch her and get her back onto the stage. A man
looking out of the window, talking about the practical
arrangement, and trying to keep it all together all the while
a woman is trying to get a hold on a wet dough. Frag­
mentation. Fragmentations. Bits and pieces, pictures and
scenes, monologues, and dialogues. While partly participat-
ing by taking part in the movement from one scene to
another, I felt ever so distant and as a spectator to something
that I could not yet understand. Constantly fighting for a
sense of coherence in the play, I was trying to collect and
organize my mind. My senses, thoughts, feelings, and
movements were bombarded from every corner in every
moment. Sound, smell, temperature, and movement. A
beautiful representation of overwhelming emotions or a
complete lack thereof, thoughts and unanswered questions,
the numbness and the desperate effort to hold on to life, all
being represented with so much empathy that I was still try-
ing to figure out what I just witnessed hours after the play.
Trying to grasp everything and not leaving even the small-
est impression behind, I am still working through the expe-
rience 4 days later. If this does not resemble what I have
observed, heard, experienced, and thought about grief and
longing, nothing will. Fragmentation and dissolvement.
The vocabulary does not lend enough words to describe
how grief and longing can be represented, but this play gave
me new ways of knowing of something that I am not still
fully able to grasp.
***
Anne: We did a group interview with the actors a few
hours before we were due to see the play, so I already had
some knowledge of how the play was structured. The actors
had said there had been some strong emotional reactions
among the audience in the previous days, and as I came up
to the theater doors, I had ambivalent feelings. On one hand,
I felt absorbed by and drawn toward the artistic idea and the
creativity with which SAVN had been set up. At the same
time, I really didn’t want to go to the theater on that particu-
lar evening. Did this reluctance maybe stem from the fact
that I was tired? Or maybe it stemmed from the fact that I
had just seen a new TV show about grief, which I had felt
was rather polemic? Or perhaps it came from the fear that in
this context, I might expose my own grief, loss, and
longing?
When my colleagues and I entered the theater, we were
each given a name badge. I became Sonni. My colleagues
became Kim, Nor, and Mai, and we followed different trails
through the play. In the first few scenes/rooms, I walked
Qualitative Inquiry 25(9-10)
about without being able to lock on to the drama, and I felt
unfocused. This changed when I got to the kitchen, where
Helene sits monotonously kneading the dough, staring into
space. Anders enters the kitchen. He stands by the window.
They speak to each other in monotones. Helene keeps
kneading the dough while they are speaking to each other.
The dough, which flows out onto the table and is then reas-
sembled in Helene’s hands, gave this scene a simple but
expressive symbol. The dough flows out from between her
hands, only to be reassembled by her (sometimes violent)
kneading. The intensity of the conversation matched the
kneading of the dough, or vice versa, reinforcing my experi-
ence of the conversation between Helene and Anders. I felt
the mood of the room to be tense, and intense, during their
long, monotonous conversation, with the room filled by the
repetitions and “empty spaces” in the conversation between
Anders and Helene.
***
Ditte: I was particularly struck by two scenes of the play
evolving around the same theme of what I recognize as
estranged disconnection. As audience, we are being guided
through different rooms of grief, with no plot, no story line,
or no narrative, yet in each room, an atmosphere of grief is
created. In the first scene, I am witnessing, we are in a living
room where a man and a woman are sitting at a table. They
sometimes say something; yet, it is in fact two monologues
rather than a dialogue going on between them. This impres-
sion sneaks in on me as it becomes clear—as the minutes
pass—that they are just repeating their own phrases, in fact
without responding to one another. This disconnected
togetherness strikes me as a clear artistic enactment of what
often happens between bereaved family members. They do
share being bereaved, but their grief and loss individuate
them and they tend to find themselves alone together. The
same sense of disconnected estrangement runs through
another scene that moved me, only in that scene the discon-
nection and estrangement does not touch on family dynam-
ics, but the world-relation as such, including the community
of others. At this point, most (if not all) of the audience is
gathered together in the long narrow hallway in the home
where the theater scene is set: As we stand along the walls,
waiting for what will happen next, the four actors start mov-
ing together from one end to the other. They are tied to one
another as with an invisible rope by their legs, yet they are
moving forward in a haphazardly and totally unorganized
manner, stumbling, falling over one another, banging occa-
sionally into the walls or into the audience. As audience, we
are brought into the same position as bystanders to those
bereaved—we can act as shields against the walls as they
stumble into us, or we can more or less discretely evade
from them. As they move toward where I am standing, they
appear as an organic whole of a disconnected family
Brinkmann et al.
moving chaotically forward for no other reason, than there
is nowhere else to go—with their smelly bodies, their move-
ments out of tune, their wildness—there is something hor-
rific about them. For some reason, I don’t recall their faces,
I think they were emotionless—and I am not sure if there is
loud and shrill music? It feels like there is, but I know that
when they come passing by me, I withdraw and evade and
let them bash against the wall. As we meet after the play, it
becomes apparent that we all went to different rooms of
grief—so we can’t really share the experience—again I am
as audience brought into this isolated and disconnected
place—feeling strangely disconnected, on my own, with
my own experience.
***
Ignacio: The 23rd of November had been noted down in
my calendar for months. On that day, I would be heading to
Copenhagen along with my colleagues from the grief proj-
ect to attend a play titled Hyldest til sorgen, A Tribute to
Grief. Besides attending the play itself, the idea was to
interview the actors before and after the show. As the play
would be performed in Danish, a language I do not yet
understand very well, my initial expectations were not
overly high. From the beginning, I imagined myself sitting
there watching a conventional play, about which, with a
little luck, I would be able to fathom something from the
set, the body movements of the actors and the odd word that
I might be able to understand. I never imagined that it was
going to be an interactive show, where the audience is led
by the actors through different rooms of a flat in the center
of Copenhagen. The fact that the interaction would be in
Danish drove away any expectations of a relaxing evening
at the theater. I nevertheless recall how easy it was to let
myself be carried along from the outset; to be swept up in
the music—present throughout virtually all of the play—in
the actors’ gestures and movements and, particularly, in the
ambience of each of the rooms. For better or worse, the lan-
guage barrier made me forget about the script and allowed
me to be physically carried along by the sounds, smells, and
the closeness of the actors’ bodies, on which the sweat was
visible and their breathing audible. Bearing witness to the
grief of a person close to you can be somewhat difficult and
even upsetting, given that it is impossible to put yourself in
that person’s place. In my case, seeing grief portrayed in a
play performed in a language that I do not understand was a
somewhat relaxing experience. Aside from certain gestures
and expressions that are easily identifiable with grief, I
remember, above all, certain scenes that were strangely
familiar and therefore strongly evocative. I particularly
recall a room with an ambience that was both dreamlike and
familiar, decorated as the living room of a house with its
sofa, television, telephone, cupboard, and the lulling, but
relentless sound of a wall clock. Up until that point in the
921
play, nothing had managed to evoke within me any memo-
ries relating to an experience of loss, probably because I
have been fortunate enough not to have had many such
experiences. However, the atmosphere in the room, rather
than the actors’ performance, led me to recall my grand-
mother on my mother’s side, who died some years ago, but
whose strong presence in life has left a deep imprint on my
memory. Remembering her in that strangely familiar room
made me feel calmly melancholic. Being at a play, in a flat
in the center of Copenhagen, remembering my Andalusian
grandmother who, after 75 years in Barcelona, refused to
utter a single word of Catalan.
***
Brady: We are invited into a family home to share the
different experiences housed in its various rooms. This is
not the traditional theater performance that I had expected,
where one observes at a distance a story unfolding between
different actors on a stage. Instead, we are literally in the
set, experiencing the intimacies of home life alongside the
actors. The first room I am led into is brightly illuminated
through what I feel to be morning sunlight streaming in
through the window (an effect beautifully created by fluo-
rescent lights hidden behind curtains). A woman and a man
sit down opposite one another at a table positioned to soak
up the light: the man talks about someone who has died
while the woman continues to read a magazine without
paying much attention. I have the feeling of having been in
or seen this scene before, yet it is not attached to any spe-
cific memories, places, or interactions. Rather it operates
as a kind of archetype of a kitchen, left open so as to allow
for personal projections and various images to flow from it.
In the next room, the living room, a different feeling is
evoked: it is late at night. A clock is ticking. Everything is
still and intimately present in the dark. A man talks about
his dead wife while caressing the couch. Whereas the pre-
vious room expands outward with light (and the two peo-
ple’s minds float a part in different directions), here we are
drawn into the loneliness of a person in a dimly lit room,
isolated by the night like a hermit’s hut. Finally, the garden
drew on the primordial elements of earth, vegetation, and
water to evoke nature with its cycles of growth and decay.
Branches grew out of the ceiling and walls. Water con-
stantly dripped. The ground was covered in dirt and leaves.
It felt sticky and grimy to be there. The environment was
clearly beyond human control. Nature was encroaching on
human aspirations, as the garden becomes overgrown and
death impinges on life. To summarize, the kitchen, the liv-
ing room, and the garden came alive as generative spaces
of imagination and memory, drawing on a composite image
of the familiar home through an engagement with the
senses.
***
922
Ester: The room is cold and humid with green plants,
dead leaves, plastic garden furniture, and an old telephone
on the table: the circle of organic life and the motionless
indifference of the inorganic, silent surroundings. Water
drips from the ceiling. I am freezing. The woman in front of
me, the actress, strips down to her underwear. Her legs are
bare and white. She places herself under the dripping water.
Drip. Drip. Drip. She speaks to what appears to be her dead
husband. A mixture of memories and envisions of their lives
together fill the air:
You won’t get to see our son’s Capoeira graduation, and see
how proud he gets when he receives the purple belt. You won’t
see him running again, playing soccer. Never see him coming
home drunk in the middle of the night with a tattoo and you’re
pissed and you’re arguing with him, and I agree with you. You
won’t see him as a beautiful, tall, handsome man. You will not
see him with his girlfriend. Experiencing him having a life on
his own, meet his children.
Then, unnoticeably, the focus shifts from her husband’s loss
of a life as a father to her loss of a future with him in it:
I will never get to experience your hands getting older, but the
strength would still be there when they held me tight. And you
won’t get to hold my breasts as they are hanging like two sacks,
but you love me anyway. You will never give me more orgasms.
And we won’t take walks in the mountains. And get lost. Just
you and me.
The presence of absence fills the air and hits her face, drop
by drop, endlessly, like Chinese water torture. The loss of a
singular person evolves into multiple and infinite losses of
anticipated futures. For a brief moment, I am moved by her
loneliness. Yet, at the same time, the omnipresence of the
loss she enacts transcends the singularity of this particular
loss into a universally shared condition. It evokes a strange
sense of resignation, accept, and almost indifference in me.
Everything which is ours, we will eventually lose. This too
shall pass.
The woman pauses. Someone knocks on the door. We
are moved out of the room and into the next.
After the Play
When the four groups had moved through the rooms and
witnessed (and participated in) the tableaus for almost 2 hr,
with all the enactments of grief, everyone finally gathered
in one single room with all the actors present. And here, the
actors began a discussion about how they would like their
bodies to be treated after their deaths. They made refer-
ences to different burial practices and ceremonies around
the world, and the atmosphere changed from sadness and
heaviness to humor in quite an uplifting way. The actors
laughed at their various accounts of rather surprising burial
Qualitative Inquiry 25(9-10)
practices, and the lighter mood affected us in the audience
as well:
Anika: What about you Helene, what are you going
to do?
Helene: I will have my bowels sucked out of me, with
two straws through the nose, so there are no worms that
can eat me, and oh, I’ll be like the mummies like in the
ancient Egypt.
Anika: Yes, it’s good, but I’d rather be mummified in my
favorite clothes, like in Sicily, and then hang on a knot,
close together, so I won’t be alone in death—(to Anders)
Anders, did you know, that it is about every 10th person
in Denmark who dies totally alone.
Lukas: But when you say Sicily, I think about
Madagascar, every 5 years I will be dug up, and people
will dance with my body throughout the village.
Anders: If I can’t get on a totem pole, I’ll be cremated
like the Hindus, on a fire at the river,
Helene: Yes, yes, I will also burn as the ancient Hindus
did, and then my widow will throw herself down in the
flames. (dialogue from the play SAVN)
This ending, with everyone together, created a sense of soli-
darity that had been absent from the previous tableaus,
where the actors were most often alienated from each other
(and from the audience), everyone alone with their sorrow.
Now, we were all included together with the actors, getting
a sense of conviviality and humor, representing perhaps the
only real human weapons against the inevitability and
absurdity of loss and death. New Orleans jazz was requested
by one actor, and then—after a phone rang—we all left the
room again and went to the hallway, where we heard the
recording of an old woman’s creaky voice:
When I say or think of your name, you exist
Everything ends when those who love you die
As long as they live, you are loved
As long as you are loved, you exist
This was followed by an applause after which the actors
served everyone coffee and cake, and it was possible to
stay and discuss the play and its themes of longing and
grief with the actors and others from the audience. Not a
single person from the audience went straight home, but
everyone stayed for coffee and the conversation. This
happens after every performance night and was not some-
thing created particularly for us as visiting researchers.
When we finally left as a research group, into the cold
November night in Copenhagen, we did not go directly to
bed, but went for beers at a local bar. This seemed to be
the proper way to end the evening; like a wake without a
deceased person, but with quite strong feelings in our
bodies and souls.
Brinkmann et al.
Discussion
Although the creators of SAVN are not human or social sci-
entists in a conventional sense, the performance seems to
live up to the definition of arts-based research developed by
Barone and Eisner (2012): “Arts based research is a process
that uses the expressive qualities of form to convey mean-
ing” (p. xii). Arts-based research, they continue, “is an
effort to extend beyond the limiting constraints of discur-
sive communication in order to express meanings that oth-
erwise would be ineffable” (p. 1). In a sense, SAVN is
almost pure form—bodies moving, music playing, voices
speaking—without discursive layers of contexts, stories, or
plots. This is witnessed in all fragments of impression
recounted above, and it is perhaps the only way to truly rep-
resent the breakdown of meaning associated with bereave-
ment and grief. The play articulates presence, as a kind of
meaning beyond meaning. Given the methodology of
CoreAct, we may refer to SAVN as research-based art, but
it is just as much an example of arts-based research.
In their study of the relationship between psychology and
theater, Zittoun and Rosenstein (2018) quote Artaud who
claimed that theater is the birthplace of collectively created
imaginary worlds. The audience is invited to collectively
participate in a situation that is enacted by actors. And in a
performance play such as SAVN, the audience participates
in quite a direct and intensely felt way. This makes SAVN an
ideal event for studying grief as felt and imagined. Zittoun
and Rosenstein develop a general distinction between four
ways that theater and psychology are related: (a) Theater as
metaphor: The most famous and complete use of theater as a
metaphor for human life was developed by Goffman, who
conceived of social processes through the lens of drama-
turgy. But others have also taken the Shakespearean “All the
world’s a stage” to heart to understand the doings and suffer-
ings of a social species, whose members act in exposure to
others, real or imagined. (b) Theater as a cultural experience:
This approach takes an interest in the psychological conse-
quences of witnessing theatrical performances. What does it
mean to cross the threshold from everyday life into the cul-
tural reality of the performed world? (c) Theater as a tool:
Theater has been used as a pedagogical tool and in psycho-
therapy in the form of ethnodrama or psychodrama with dif-
ferent educational effects. This, of course, goes back to the
ancient Greek idea of catharsis, that is, the cleansing of
emotions through arts, especially theater. (d) Theater as
sociocultural practice: Here, Zittoun and Rosenstein discuss
how theater can be a means for social scientists to collect
data based on the experiences for viewers, and also how
researchers can use theater as a means to present their find-
ings and interpretations. They conclude that theater is “a
complex form of guided imagination” (p. 237), and this
seems to be a precise description of SAVN in relation to the
imagination of grief specifically.
923
We find that SAVN can be approached through all four
categories: (a) As a metaphor of human life, in this case
depicting bereavement and the isolation, loneliness, and
loss of meaning that often follows. (b) As a cultural experi-
ence that draws the spectators in and gives them the same
sense of confusion that bereaved people feel. Most of our
fragments articulate an initial sense of being lost, confused,
and perhaps disinterested, but most of them also report on
how this somehow changed into experiences of focus and
intensity—what Gumbrecht would call presence. (c) As a
tool that made several of us recall loved ones who are dead,
or living loved ones whose love is appreciated and felt more
powerfully in the theatrical confrontation with finitude. (d)
As a sociocultural practice that we use to “collect data” in
the form of sense impressions and presence effects, and
which in itself is based on data gathering activities by the
research-actors Anika and Helene. This cycle of research–
performance–research—and perhaps performance again, if
one considers the present article a textual performance—
appears as a promising way of studying ineffable phenom-
ena such as grief.
If we were to unfold an interpretation of SAVN as a the-
atrical performance, it would feel like betraying it. For the
point is, as we have repeatedly emphasized, that the play
should be felt, and one should be moved by presence,
moods, and atmospheres, rather than by an intriguing story
to be interpreted. Still, as Gumbrecht would also make
clear, there is of course meaning to be found in the perfor-
mance, which is already marked by the large SAVN sign
under which one enters the building. From that point on, it
is a building of grief, and one’s impressions are of course
guided and affected by this background knowledge. But we
have chosen to report our experiences as fragments in the
hope of being faithful to the event, just as the event tries to
be faithful to the phenomena of loss, grief, and longing. We
allow ourselves to conclude that this is a valid way of work-
ing when dealing with phenomena that do not simply exist
on a level of meaning and interpretation, but which are felt
by and carried in human bodies, which is the case with feel-
ings of grief and mourning (Brinkmann, 2019).
Epilogue
Grief follows from loss, not just of a loved one, but also of
meaning. And grief easily leads to loneliness, even when
one is together with others. We knew this intellectually, as
qualitative researchers, before entering the performance
SAVN. But after witnessing the play, and taking part in it,
we know it in a different way. For we have felt it. There is
something irreparable about loss, a kind of absence which
the play made present for us, but there is also hope to be
found in togetherness. Being together, and sharing the expe-
rience of loss, will not remove grief and longing, but it will
make it more bearable. All human beings, who live long
924
enough that they lose someone they love, will experience
grief. This shatters their world and often leaves them more
alone, and makes the world more chaotic than before. But
even though this is felt individually, it is also a collective
experience. For grieving persons can be considered to
belong to a community of those who have nothing in com-
mon, to borrow a phrase from Lingis (1994). This is a les-
son to be learned from the presence of grief in our lives, as
enacted in SAVN.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors are grateful to The Obel Foundation for funding the
project The Culture of Grief on which this article is based.
Notes
1. There is thus a structural similarity between the arrangement
of the play (multiple experiential paths from assigned names)
and our research design (multiple persons reporting their
experiences and exposures). In that sense, the structure of the
performance caters to the structure of the research design (cf.
the Aristotelian notion that one’s methods of inquiry should
adapt to the subject matter, not the other way around).
2. In the hermeneutic tradition from Heidegger, there is an
important distinction between understanding (Verstehen) and
interpretation (Auslegung). Understanding refers to meaning
on a prereflective level, as the most encompassing level of
meaning defined by the as-structure. Importantly, this level of
meaning is integral to our sense of what Gumbrecht calls pres-
ence. This is evident in Heidegger’s famous statement that all
affective attunement (Befindlichkeit) is understanding and all
understanding is affectively attuned. Interpretation, then, is
an act of making explicit this preexisting level of immediate
meaning. In this sense, meaning is also present on the level
of presence, just in a non-representational mode of direct per-
ception (see Heidegger, 1927/1962, especially § 29, 31).
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Author Biographies
Svend Brinkmann, PhD, is a professor of general psychology and
qualitative methods at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Ignacio Brescó is associate professor and member of the Niels
Bohr Centre for Cultural Psychology at the Department of Com­
munication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Ester Holte Kofod, PhD in psychology, is a postdoctoral fellow in
the research project The Culture of Grief at Aalborg University,
Denmark.
Allan Køster, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the research project
The Culture of Grief, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Anna Therese Overvad is MA in psychology, associated with the
Centre for Cultural Psychology in the Department of Commu­
nication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Anders Petersen is associate professor of sociology at the
Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University,
Denmark.
Anne Suhr is a PhD student in educational psychology, Danish
School of Education, DPU, Aarhus University.
Luca Tateo is associate professor and member of the Centre for
Cultural Psychology, Department of Communication and
Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Brady Wagoner is professor of psychology at the Department of
Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Ditte Winther-Lindqvist is associate professor in the Department
of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.