AND BY THE WAY THE CAT IS DEAD

What does it mean to mourn and what rituals can we find to help us express our loss? And By the Way the Cat is Dead is a solo show sharing a process of learning how to grieve. Sometimes funny, sometimes personal, sometimes poetic or musical and sometimes a bit geeky, it becomes its own ritual.

In this performance, you are invited to witness my process of piecing together fragments and attempting to build a lamentation for a friend who died many years ago. We ask, can sharing the struggle to voice our grief open up a space where we accept our collective anxieties around mourning? With this in mind, you are offered the opportunity to write something on a postcard and to send it on to future audiences.

The performance formed part of my two-year practice based research into dramaturgical and processual approaches to staging practiced vulnerability as a means of creating a space of ‘compassionate hospitality’ (Ettinger, 2005: 707).

Credits

Artist: Kate Adams

Dramaturgical advice: Medie Megas

Technical manager: Phillippa Howarth

Thanks for technical support to James Kururangi (NZ) and Hannah Rogers (NZ)

Documentation: Joshua Lewis, Phillippa Howarth.

Kate Adams kneeling on the floor writing on a piece of card, an electric bass in the background.

Thanks and acknowledgements

With thanks to ΜΠΙΠ Theatre, and to the University of Salford for their support for the development of this work.

“An extremely warm and human performance, gently approaching the core of grief that we find so difficult to attend to. Honest, tender, and moving. We may always be in need of finding ways to live with the impact of loss, and Kate Adams' performance provides one such way.”