Category: performance, play, entertainment

Princess Diana’s Funeral, Played and Replayed

19 December 2023
death, mortality, the deadfilmfuneral, commemorationfunerals, cemeteriesmedia, technologymemoriesmetaphor, symbolpassageperformance, play, entertainmentpolitics
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The year 2023 is about to turn into 2024. The Crown, a televisions series treatment of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, is currently playing on Netflix. The series includes two funerals, one for Princess Diana, the other for her deceased lover, Dodi Fayed. The funerals occur in season 6, episode 4. The current media…

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Consuming Ritual

19 August 2023
bodyfilmfuneral, commemorationgender, sexualitygesture, posturepassageperformance, play, entertainmentrites of passage
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  Sacred Rites and Rituals, a forty-five minute film produced by FilmRoos for A&E’s Ancient Mysteries Series helped shape public attitudes toward ritual. These attitudes are now echoed by other media presentations of ritual. I was one of the scholarly consultants for the film and know the process that lies behind the production. I kept…

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The Barn and the Lab

9 February 2023
dialoguesethicsillnesslandmetaphor, symbolperformance, play, entertainmentreligion, spiritualityritual, festivalthings, objectswater
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                                   Community Restoration and Ritual Experimentation                                                 Ronald L. Grimes and Susan L. Scott   Below is a conversation between Susan Scott, founder of the award-winning Walkerton Water Stories Project (WWSP), and Ron Grimes, Director of the Ritual Studies Lab. Susan, a writer, and Ron, a ritual studies scholar, contemplate the possibilities for ritual…

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Rockin’ the Coffin

23 October 2020
death, mortality, the deadfilmfuneral, commemorationimagination, creativitymetaphor, symbolperformance, play, entertainmentquestionsritual, festivalthings, objects
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How does creativity help us cope? What role does the imagination play in allaying our age-old fears of loss and separation?  Filmmaker Cailleah Scott-Grimes leans into these questions in the short doc she’s made in collaboration with her father. Rockin’ the Coffin, a contrarian’s guide to the good death, was made possible by the CBC’s Creative Relief…

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Troubling the Waters

26 April 2020
bodyhealinghumormusicperformance, play, entertainment

Preface The United Nations declared 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons. “Troubling the Waters” is a play I wrote to mark the occasion and enable students to study ritual and performance by exploring a story in the Gospel of John. Since the characters are caricatures of students in the course, I have removed…

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Playing for Change

10 February 2020
musicperformance, play, entertainmentritual, festivalvideo & audio

Maybe you know about Playing for Change. “PFC is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music. The idea for this project came from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. Creating Songs Around the World inspired us to unite many of…

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Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy

26 September 2019
ecology, environmentessays, articlesperformance, play, entertainmentritual, festival
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An Incantatory Riff for a Global Medicine Show Prior to publication, this was a script for oral performance. Publication required the decorum, the civilizing influence, of those speed bumps we call paragraph breaks. Even though the original script was not written as poetry, it looked like poetry on the page. It looked that way to…

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