Morning time

There is a timeless space between night and day — the blue hour. Loss and death touch every life, yet mourning finds little space in the everyday. Grief manifests in the body, unfolds in stages, and can turn into illness or melancholia. Across cultures, professional mourners, mostly women, have embodied lamentation, guiding the bereaved through rituals of crying, singing, beating, shaking, and dancing. Pain is shared and grief becomes work. In ‘MORNING TIME’, Emi Ogura and Belle Santos create a public space for mourning, using dance as a language beyond words. They explore historical and contemporary forms of grief — both personal and professional — while questioning its possibilities and limits. How to hold space for diffuse, political and ambivalent mourning processes? How to touch the un-mournable? The performance itself becomes an ongoing act of grief work. As the dark night fades into the blue light, ‘MORNING TIME’ transforms the loneliness of loss into a shared lament.