MOURNING AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
Across cultures, communities mourn through different songs, movements, gestures, prayers, silences, burial customs, superstitions, seasonal rites and acts of care.
These forms may differ from place to place, yet they respond to the same human need: to give shape to loss and to continue living after devastation.
Mourning is not only an expression of loss. It is one of the oldest ways humanity learns how to continue.
RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY
Like a Flower from a Grave grows from research initiated through Green Folkways Exchange, a transnational ecological folklore and performance process involving communities and partners across Ukraine, Spain, Denmark and the United Kingdom.
The research brings together songs, myths, rituals, oral histories, environmental practices and community knowledge. In each context, local participants contribute their own songs, testimonies, practices and cultural memories. These materials become part of an evolving artistic process rather than being treated as folklore preserved in the past.
-Photoroom.png)
-Photoroom.png)
LIKE A FLOWER FROM A GRAVE
At the centre of the project is a simple image: something living growing out of a place of death.
A flower from a grave.
LIKE A FLOWER FROM A GRAVE
Mourning, Ecological Memory, and Rituals of Survival after Catastrophe
Like a Flower from a Grave is a transnational music-theatre and ritual performance project exploring mourning, ecological memory, folklore and the reconstruction of life after catastrophe.
The project begins with a simple image: something living growing out of a place of death. A flower from a grave.
FROM MARIUPOL TO A WIDER LANDSCAPE
The work begins from the experience of Mariupol and Ukraine, but opens toward a wider ecological and human field.
War does not destroy only bodies and buildings. It wounds soil, water, air, memory and future generations.
The project asks:
How does a community mourn after a catastrophe too large to name?
What happens when the dead are also forests, rivers, animals, homes, languages and futures?
What rituals remain when the place itself has been wounded?
A RITUAL LANDSCAPE
The performance is imagined as a space that can hold different forms of memory at once: part grave, part garden, part ruined home, part polluted forest, part communal table and part temporary sanctuary.
Laments, folk melodies, testimonies, movement, field recordings and newly composed sound material come together to create a space for mourning and survival. Rather than representing catastrophe directly, the performance is interested in the fragile rituals through which people respond to what has been lost and find ways to continue.
FIRST PHASE · 2026
The first phase of Like a Flower from a Grave develops between August and December 2026 within the wider framework of Green Folkways Exchange.
Research and performance material will be developed across Ukraine, Spain, Denmark and the United Kingdom. The presentations emerging from this phase are not intended to be identical touring versions. Instead, each will be rooted in local research and connected to the others through a shared dramaturgical and musical framework.
The project is currently in development, with the first phase creating the material and experience from which a larger transnational performance may grow.
