IS VIRGINIA WOOLF to drown in the Ouse because of the poetry of the act – the river as a passage between life and death – or because it seemed to him the most practical method available? Probably both. Rivers have always evoked crossings of another world. The Styx of Greek mythology, the Sai-no-Kawara of Japanese folklore, the west bank of the Nile of ancient Egypt, all were envisioned as gateways to the afterlife. There is something in the constancy of water in rivers, traveling beyond sight or in the vastness of an ocean, that reminds us of our own impermanence. It’s heartwarming to portray death through such serene poetic imagery. However, we are less accustomed to dealing with the close realities of death.
Gaze out the windows of the Susan and John Hess Family Theater at the Whitney Museum of American Art and you’ll see the Hudson rolling in, oblivious to the flashy development reshaping Manhattan’s West Side. In Rivera new performance by Every Ocean Hughes which recently debuted at Whitney’s Theatre, the river has become a place of communion with the dead. River was the fourth and final part of Hughes’ “Alive Side” program: four works (a photography exhibition, a film and two performances) all drawn from Hughes’ experience as a death doula, for which she guides the people through the dying process. River completes a trilogy of performance-based plays, the first two of which radiated the politics and practicalities of caring for the deceased and their loved ones. In the final performance, Hughes leans closer to the “other” side, paying imaginative attention to the unknowns of the beyond. There are mentions of a visit to a celebrity psychic, a journey to another world in a bathtub, and a rendition of Anohni’s “Hope There’s Someone” played on a banjo.
In the theatre, three raised platforms with stairs on either side served as stages for the four performers while delimiting an “above” and a “below”. Above, performers Lindsay Rico and Geo Wyex soliloquized about those who died and the remnants of life they left behind. Wyex, playing the banjo while looking out the window, described to Rico the process of “shoring up,” communing with the dead on the banks of a river. Downstairs, things were murkier. Aaron Ricks prowled and crawled and somersaulted without speaking, a traveler between worlds. Timothy Johnson sat in a bathtub, counting and piling up change, reminding no one of another esoteric figure wandering off to the “living side”.
Hughes started this trilogy with help the dead in 2019, before the Covid killed millions, before the sudden proliferation of bodies filling freezer trucks and hospital corridors forced us to ask ourselves questions about the management of our dead. In help the dead, two performers, Colin Self and Wyex, delivered a musical lecture resembling a death doula workshop. Dressed in white aprons, Self and Wyex addressed the audience directly, describing life review (making a dying person think deeply about their life), the tools for preparing a corpse (glue, tampons, stage makeup), and the euphemisms that we attribute to the dead (“to cross”, “to kick the bucket”, “to give up the ghost”). A script was distributed to a few volunteers from the audience, who each read an introduction from a participant in a real workshop on death. help the dead is inspired by community responses to the AIDS epidemic, a situation that not only demanded militant activism but also the creation of a collective system of basic care. In the face of neglect, caring for the dying becomes a political imperative, and moments like volunteers taking on the role of workshop participants brought that imperative to life. (Conversely, an example of an improvised movement in help the deadwhen planted performers emerged from the audience to dance, felt lazily thrown.)
In the second work of the trilogy, a video installation entitled A big bag, performer Lindsay Rico speaks directly to the camera, again detailing the process of guiding a body through death. Many items needed for the task – soap, gloves, Advil, sage, bells, hairbrushes – hang from string in a small black room. (River, by contrast, cataloged the belongings of a dying loved one: thumb supports, porn, toothpaste—things suddenly and poignantly useless.) As Rico talks, she moves over the hanging stuff, the bells ring, and the bottles clash. She performs brutal and arbitrary gestures (choreographed by Miguel Gutierrez), slamming her fists into her hips and slamming the backs of her knees against the ground, a constant reminder of the materiality of the body, even when it is without function.
The practical realities for death doulas are candid and gut-wrenching: how a doula nearly froze a child’s corpse by using too much ice, or how a face settles into a relaxed expression on the second day after death. . Rico lists the books people asked to read to them in their final days—Hamlet; Eat Pray Love; The Unauthorized Biography of Liza Minnelli. It’s the kind of humorous, unsentimental touch we don’t often use when talking about dying.
Museums and galleries have long provided settings for performers to subvert dramatic conventions, but Hughes willingly borrows from theater practices. River, the work most invested in the unknown of death, also carved as closely as possible to theatrical forms, with a long dialogue scene as the centerpiece. The monologues were delivered with a mannered gravity (Rico is a particularly grounded and assured presence in both A big bag And River). In some ways, the actors’ ability to command presence was at odds with the work’s raw origin from Hughes’ own experiences as a doula. Unlike volunteer script reading, which had real liveliness, the performers recited their scripts like the professional actors they are, and there was little dynamic tension in their interactions.
Again, Hughes was not acting. The works shifted between performance modes – song, stage, lecture, monologue, audience participation, dance – to create a free form of conventional dramatic form. Such a form resembles less the act of acting than the act of caring: methodical and unadorned. Benevolent, writes Anne Boyer in the immortal (2019), it’s like washing the dishes: “It’s not interesting or remarkable work in itself, but . . . it is the work on which everything else depends. Hughes, like Boyer, suggests this is exactly why such work demands our attention.
In the lobby outside the theater, a series of black-and-white photographs by Hughes showed the rotting pilings of the Hudson. Its piers once served as a gathering place for gay people, particularly in the 1980s, when many of these pickers died of AIDS, deaths neglected by the state. As sites like Little Island turn the old waterfront into tourist real estate, Hughes draws our attention to the remaining wooden pilings, makeshift grave markers for vanished communities that some would prefer to remain forgotten. This spectral architecture lingers in the mind, acting as the most poignant link to the dead.
“Alive Side” was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art from January 14 to April 2.
