Let’s Experience: When Your Body Knows What’s Coming
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Grief often refers to what we experience following a significant loss. Yet while we are in the process of expecting a loss, we may also experience what is called, “anticipatory grief.” This pre-grief can occur even while your loved one is still with you, or if you are about to face a significant loss or illness yourself. The Latin root of the term anticipate is “ante” and “capere,” or to take advanced measure of something. Led by J’aime Morrison – a dancer, choreographer, and widow – this workshop will offer a space to explore and express the often complex, embodied sensations involved in anticipatory grief. How can we feel such profound loss even while our loved ones are still with us? Living with the uncertainty of anticipatory loss is to exist in a liminal space. Join J’aime and a community of grievers for this special somatic exploration of anticipatory grief as we inhabit and transform this space through movement.
J'aime Morrison is a Professor of Movement at California State University, Northridge. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and was a Faculty Fulbright Scholar in Movement to Lisbon, Portugal. In fall 2023 Professor Morrison was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oviedo in Spain where she gave the plenary lecture for the annual meeting of HEAL: Health, Environment, Arts and Literature, an international research group working in the fields of Medical and Environmental Humanities. Professor Morrison recently returned from Ireland where she led workshops on ritual expressions of grief and rage at University College Cork. She has also led masterclasses in movement in Shanghai, Dublin, Belfast, London, Los Angeles and New York City. Her classes engage creative methodologies and movement-based practices from theatre and dance-making to create an expansive and inclusive space for physical expression.
As the founder of Mourning Surf, Professor Morrison turns her attention to grief and the body, specifically how grief is expressed physically and how movement is an essential part of the grieving and healing process. For the international organization Hope for Widows she developed a series of expressive movement workshops offered via Zoom throughout the pandemic and she continues to build on this work by offering movement for grief workshops. She has facilitated grief movement on retreats with Camp Widow and TwoCan Retreats, and with UCLA’s Center for Healing and Expressive Arts and Reimagine, as well as private coaching sessions. This summer she provided movement for grief at Camp Erin through Our House Center for Bereavement and in November she will lead a somatic movement workshop at this year’s Endwell Conference.
After losing her beloved husband Jim to brain cancer in 2015, J’aime began working on a short film titled Upwell, which composes a visual intersection of body movements to translate her experience of grieving, illustrating the role of both dance and surfing in her journey. The film has been an Official Selection at numerous film festivals and won “Best Experimental Film” from The Santa Barbara International Fine Art Film Festival and the California International Shorts Film Festival. Upwell was awarded “Outstanding Excellence” in Direction and Original Concept at the Depth of Field International Film Festival and the film was awarded the “Audience Award” at the Cannes International Short Film Festival.
https://linktr.ee/Mourningsurf
About the Series “The Long Goodbye: Anticipatory Grief in Anxious Times”
Election season is a heightened period of collective dread and uncertainty. Anxiety over changes in political systems are often compounded by other kinds of impending loss. As individuals, we may be caring for a loved one in hospice, managing a debilitating illness, or facing our own mortality. Shared experiences of anticipatory grief include eco-anxiety over climate change and neighborhood transformations caused by cultural displacement and gentrification. How do we transform sorrow, helplessness, frustration, and anger – as well as other feelings associated with the promise of loss – into a commitment to action?
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together in the hopes of healing ourselves and the world. We specifically support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
