Dancing Through Grief

Dancing Through Grief moves with grief as a physical, relational, and improvisational practice, exploring how dance can create spaces for sensing, sharing, and holding experiences of loss. Emerging from the lived experience of losing a parent and unfolding through encounters with diverse participants and communities, the project expands beyond a singular experience of bereavement to engage the many ways loss is lived, remembered, and shared across bodies, relationships, places, and communities.Grounded in an evolving practice-led methodology, the research unfolds through dance improvisation, participation, facilitation, performance-making, writing, photography, and audiovisual documentation. Through the interconnected artistic sub-projects When Birds Sing of Loss… (2024), Mo(u)rning Soil (2025), and Bodies in Memory (2025), the inquiry moves across diverse socio-cultural contexts, inviting collective and individual encounters with grief through movement and artistic practice. These processes culminate in the final artistic work Everything Lasts Forever (2026), which brings the project's questions and experiences into a shared performative encounter.Central to the PhD project, and this exposition, are two events and one companion text. Invitation to Artistic Result offers documentation of the performance Everything Lasts Forever (2026) through video, photographs, and program notes. The second event is a live reflection gathering, Holding What Moves, which took place in Stavanger (NO) on the 22th of May 2026. The recorded documentation of Holding What Moves is accompanied by a multi medial reflection text. It contains an introduction and four chapters and is gathered under the title Dancing Through Grief: A Holding Companion. This Holding Companion contains artistic materials, process documentation, writings, images, videos, and reflections from different phases of the research.Dancing Through Grief contributes to artistic research by demonstrating how dance improvisation can function as a methodology for engaging existential concerns and by offering embodied, relational, and collective approaches to living with grief. keywords: improvisation, dance, practice, practice-based research, grief, collective, memory, community, time, contemporary dance