The Art of Grieving: How art helps us live our best lives
Join Sheila K Collins, PhD, Cynthia Winton-Henry, and members of the InterPlay-based Wing & A Prayer Pittsburgh Players for this interactive 90-minute exploration of grieving as a life-long art. Looking to art and artists for inspiration, we’ll use InterPlay, a creative approach that involves the folk arts of dance, song, storytelling, and stillness to center our connection to impermance and death. Cynthia as a shrine-maker will share whimsical, sorrowful physical markers to honor love and grief. Participants will be invited to share snippets of their own stories and what they have been learning about the art of grieving through this unprecedented time. This is the fourth and final session in this summer's series. You are invited to join whether or not you have attended the previous sessions.
Dr. Sheila K Collins PhD is a dancing social worker, grief advocate, and author of Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and Rituals that Heal, Stillpoint: A Self-care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, and Time to Breathe, and Reclaim Joy, and an upcoming book, The Art of Grieving, She directs InterPlay Pittsburgh and the InterPlay-based improvisational performance company Wing & A Prayer Pittsburgh Players.
The co--founder of InterPlay, Cynthia is also a shrine artist. Her artistic process includes creating small memorials to commemorate important people and times in her life. If you’ve ever put flowers on a grave, set a table for guests, placed a photo in an important place, made an altar, you are a shrine maker. Like soul collage, shrine-making is an active, creative way to center our everyday and transcendent connection to death. With life and emotions rapidly speeding by, a shrine can be a holy stopping place to bow, reflect, and connect even for a moment.
InterPlay is an active, improvisational, creative approach to unlocking the wisdom of the body. As an international social movement, InterPlay is dedicated to enabling ease and balance in human relationships across cultures and between people of different generations and backgrounds. Its practitioners have found that creatively playing with serious issues in community often gets us further than simply working on them.
