Loss, Great Grief, and Preservation: Brandy Leary’s Suspended

Abstract:In 2017, Toronto-based physical theatre artist Brandy Leary performed choreographic research as part of the Arctic Circle’s Summer Solstice Expedition, a multidisciplinary voyage of invited scientists and artists who developed work during their travels in and around the Svalbard archipelago, located in the Arctic Ocean. I focus on one such performance, entitled Suspended, in which Leary hangs precariously off the side of a boat and above a (melting) ice floe. Leary’s explorations were influenced by the Norwegian eco-scientist Per Espen Stoknes’s concept of “Great Grief,” a public grief based on ecological loss due to climate change, as well as the loss of her husband before she embarked on the residency. I read Suspended as a performance that sutures public and private processes of grief. Because Svalbard is home to the Global Seed Vault, a repository of seeds intended to preserve the world’s plant biodiversity, Suspended also connects forms of self-preservation in the face of ecological loss with larger cooperative efforts toward ecological preservation via the saving of seeds. Both Suspended and the vault as endeavours compel us to collectively care about and act toward futures where our relationships—to ice, to the environment, and to each other—are radically changed.