lay me to rest
On November 22, 2015, I performed Lay Me To Rest, a funeral event on the Kansas City Art Institute campus. Students, faculty, and friends were invited to the service and instructed to bury my live body with blankets made by my maternal family members. The ceremony opened with a video of me saying goodbye and asking the guests to “Do what I can’t: make me comfortable.”
The performance was informed by a collaboration between me and several of my peers. Over the course of a couple of months, we worked on casting a mold of my body for saccharine in sessions that involved me undressing, laying very still on a table, and them handling me as if I was an inanimate object. Though we started each session by talking to each other, there was always a point where I couldn’t talk anymore for the sake of staying still and they worked with each other as if I wasn’t there. This became my point of reference for considering my own death: the transition into being a specimen, splayed on a table, vulnerable and intimate, but still being conscious. There was a profound experience in knowing that I was being handled as if I was an object, but I was also being handled with respect and care because my peers knew that I would feel everything that they did to me.
The choice to perform Lay Me to Rest on the Kansas City Art Institute Campus also came from my casting experience. In the years before the ceremony, I formed my most intimate relationships with the other people on campus and they knew me the best. The KCAI campus, like most academic institutions, has also been witness to crises regarding student mental health, self harm, and suicide. In these instances, questions always arise about students’ agency and autonomy: when are students’ actions considered harmful, and when does the institution step in on their behalf? Lay Me to Rest addressed these questions by working with the ambiguity of whether or not a funeral is healing or depressing.
The ceremony was an exercise in emotional communication between the guests and the performing body. Because instructions were delivered through a pre-recorded video, and because they were interacting with a “corpse,” the guests had to make decisions based on their understanding of my “comfort” from previous interactions. The outcome of the performance relied on their decision making: I stated that once the video ended, I would be in their hands, and the audience was left with my body next to a grave and a set of blankets. They responded to my instructions by dressing the grave with layers of blankets, then lowering me into it together and covering my body completely. Certain members of the audience stayed with me – I heard some crying or breathing – and a few spoke words to the grave before leaving. Lay Me to Rest used sensory restriction as a way of enriching the interactions between all participants, which was evidenced by the intensity of the emotional response at the event.
