Guided by Another Through Grief: a response by Daisy Donaji Matias
Image captured by Ricardo Adame
Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief and Joy
Performed & facilitated on September 20, 2025 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Director/Choreographer: Helen Lee
Assistant Directors: Hannah Marcus, Tuli Bera
Performance Guides: Airos Medill, Ali Claiborne-Naranjo, Anniela Huidobro Castro, BelleAime Robinson, Christina Chammas, Cristal Sabbagh, Ed Clemons, Hannah Dubner, Harlan Rosen, Kezia Waters, La Mar Brown, Surinder Martignetti, Madelyn Loehr, Madison Mae Parker, Najee-Zaid, Sara Zalek, Silvita Diaz Brown, SK Kerastas, Sophie Minouche Allen, Surinder Martignetti, Xiaolu Wang
Performance Guide Assistants: BelleAime Robinson, Madelyn Loehr, Surinder Martignetti
Vocalist: Haruhi Kobayashi
Electric Guitar: Nick Turner
Viola: Scott Rubin
Composer: Wilhelm Brandl
Text: Helen Lee, J. Ruth Gendler, Rumi
Food provided by TXA TXA CLUB
Plant Medicines provided by Helen Lee from the teachings of Alex Williams at First Curve Apothecary.
Medicinal Herbs provided from the gardens of Amanda Maraist, Isabella Romero, and Sara Zalek.
Dried Flowers provided by Dayna Larson
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Silvita is a few inches shorter than me, something I notice as we dance, hug, and guide each other through walks. It feels like a radical act of love for the whole of humanity to jump headfirst into such intimacy with a stranger. Silvita is my performance guide for the day, tasked with guiding me through the series of somatic healing and meditation exercises that make up this iteration of Helen Lee/Momentum Sensorium’s Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief and Joy. Silvita is from Puebla, the state which borders my father’s home of Oaxaca, in the south of Mexico. She tells me she read what I had written in the Google Form. We had each written, in three hundred words or less, our grief story. My own feels, at times, self indulgent compared to the loss I sense through the bodies of others — under eye bags, tears which roll down faces, those that well, but remain in the eyes. No one close to me has yet died. But I feel the impending loss beginning to threaten. My maternal grandmother is ill. She was diagnosed with Double-hit Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer. I signed up for the performance in the wake of this news. Despite her still being very much alive, albeit sick, grief has already begun to seep in, threatening my joy. My own knowledge of performance and embodiment have brought me to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with the intention of transforming some of this grief into joy, or at least an openness to life in all its phenomena.
Following our conversation, Silvita leads me to one of the many chairs which line the walls of the museum’s atrium. Helen Lee gives a brief announcement about the significance of the piece, of their desire to make public space for a practice as private as grief, and then the music begins. The musicians, who are performing on vocals, viola, and electric guitar, set the atmosphere of the room. The vibrations serve to bring me into a calm mind-state, reorienting my body to the new space I find myself in. Across the way, I see someone I know. I give them a gentle wave, so as to recognize their grief while acknowledging that we are here for ourselves today. I am reminded of the function of relationality in worldmaking, even when it is worldmaking as personal as building anew in the wake of loss. Silvita whispers to me that I should stay where I am, before departing. I suddenly feel alone, and a bit vulnerable. Already my understanding of my own body in this space has become tied to her presence, a bond performatively enacted when she announced herself my guide. As the performance guides start to dance, the aching in my throat begins and I feel myself holding back tears. I look across the way at another participant who is crying. The guides form a cocoon, bringing participants into the center of the atrium as they flow around them, their bodies curving inwards toward each other and the grieving. Taking these few chosen ones away from the group, into a space of liminality and transformation, evokes Arnold van Gennep’s theorization of the rite of passage. As we participants pass through the phases of this performance, hidden away here in the museum, new possibilities emerge. If we’re lucky, we’ll reenter the world, shaped anew.
Silvita approaches me at my seat and pulls me into the center of the atrium, where we dance. She tells me I can close my eyes. I do, and am met with fear. As she literally guides my body, pulling my arms this way and that, I attempt to keep a simple rhythm with my feet that matches hers. I fear that I am not doing that which she is urging me to. I recognize this fear as founded in the very bifurcation of mind and body which I work so hard to subvert as a scholar of embodiment. After all, not only am I embodied, but I am embodied in relation to others. To turn myself over to the guidance of another is to accept one of the most fundamental aspects of my embodied condition –– intersubjectivity. But these feelings of doubt continue to reemerge. Rather than pushing them down, I attempt to release them, as though in guided meditation, when you’re instructed to acknowledge a thought and let it fall away. Each time I do this, it becomes easier. For a moment, I recognize the sameness of it all: mind, body, and other, but then the dance comes to an end. Silvita asks me if I would like to participate in Sky Dance, the line dance choreographed for the performance. I tell her I do. Not all of the performance guides are trained dancers, but Silvita is. She stands in front of me and somehow manages to count off the rhythm and instruct me through the movements at the same time. I follow, as all around me other performance guides and participants go through the same motions. I observe these many private intimacies become one public, collective intimacy. And then we are dancing. In the unlikely space of a museum’s atrium, we are pushing back against individualist notions of self-care and cultivating a mutual care ethic which is tangible in the laughs and cheers of delight which echo through the space. Once the music stops and our dancing comes to an end, punctuated by applause, we return to the commons.
In the commons lunch is served. The meal is three courses, each meant to evoke a sense of contemplation of past, present, and future. When I was nineteen, my dad was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a rare and incurable cancer of the plasma cells. Multiple Myeloma, like Double-hit, responds best to immunotherapy. My father underwent an autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant. It saved his life, and he has been in remission ever since. That was seven years ago. When I write it out now, it sounds so simple, but it was not. It was horrible. I was still a child at just nineteen, and I didn’t understand how life could have changed so quickly. Just nine months prior he was climbing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. Now he looked so small in his hospital bed. I think about this as I eat my beets and yogurt with my hands.
For the next part of the meal, I am meant to remain in the present. Silvita instructs me to eat the next portion of food, a tiny serving of broccolini over mash, using chopsticks with my non-dominant hand. This task proves successful in keeping me in the present moment, as I struggle through the dish. Eating in these unexpected ways draws attention to my reliance on techniques of eating which have been transmitted to me socially through the performances of those around me. Within the cultural context of the United States, we are not taught to eat yogurt without utensils nor are we skilled enough with chopsticks to pass them off to our nondominant hand. Such simple changes are a reminder of the embodied nature of knowledge.
Finally, we make our way towards the future, represented by a fruit salad. The time had arrived for me to contemplate that which I needed little assistance in contemplating. I blame my anticipatory grief upon my forward lookingness — an unfortunate side effect of my anxiety. Or maybe it is the other way around, my anxiety is a negative side effect of my forward lookingness. Either way, these feelings are the embodied effects of my anticipation of change. I explain this predicament, and how ridiculous it makes me feel, to Silvita through a cardboard tube, after we finish eating our dragonfruit and papaya. I need no help in this task. I know the future holds grief, if I am lucky. By this, I mean the obvious: the only way I will avoid grief would be through my own premature death. If I am lucky to live long enough, I’ll watch my elders, and maybe even one day my partner die. She advises me that it is natural to look toward the future, but our best hope for happiness is to remain present. I am reminded of my therapist. She too tells me such things. Both women occasionally switch into a Mexican accented Spanish that rings out clear and familiar, to offer me their most earnest advice. Silvita tells me that grief feels like it will never go away, but then one day it does.
Outside, we make bouquets of medicinal flowers and greenery, some of which are fresh and some dried. I hold my finished bouquet a few inches from my body to admire the striking mix of life and death. We sip herbal medicinal tonics made from linden, skullcap, lavender, rose, hawthorn, lemon balm, and elderflower. Each sip feels ritualized following my lesson in mindful eating. Silvita takes me out onto the concrete of the terrace. I close my eyes and she once again guides me, moving me through the outdoor space with light taps and occasional whispered instructions. Again, it is hard to let go at first, but then my attention is reoriented to this lack of sight, and it is meditative. As I walk blindly through the outdoors, I am reminded of my own proprioception, the sense which orients my body in space even without vision.
Finally, it is time for our walk to the lake. About fifty of us embark on a silent parade from the museum grounds to the lakefront. Like the mindful meal that preceded, I recognize the Buddhist roots of this practice. Both eating and walking meditations are intended to ground us in the present moment through careful attention to the embodied processes of everyday actions. The walk is less than ten minutes and feels even shorter, despite the silence. Tourists dodge us, their eyes lingering on the performance guides in their shirts of handpainted botanicals, likely wondering if we are members of a silent protest. As we walk through the underpass which delivers us across Lake Shore Drive, our steps reverberate through the space of the tunnel. These sounds wash over me as I am pulled into a new mode of attention by my own focus on the meeting of the insoles of my feet with the earth. And then we emerge back into the cloudy light, and we are standing before Lake Michigan. I am handed a milkseed pod, full of seeds attached to fuzzy floss which carries them upon the wind. I am told to envision letting go of my grief as I release each seed over the space of the lake, instructions I interpret as a somatic visualization exercise. We all stand before the lakefront, but the wind is blowing West and the seeds blow back towards us and the cyclists and pedestrians on the Lakefront Trail. Silvita and I giggle at the failure of the ritual, as the fluffs cling to our clothing and hair despite our best efforts. Then it is time for a different kind of release. We are invited to scream, altogether, out over the space of the lake. It should be noted that the part of Lake Michigan we stood before is known as “The Playpen,” a no wake zone where the party-minded rich coast their yachts for a day of drinking and socializing. So there we stand, fifty of us, screaming out our grief at Chicago’s drunken elite. Despite the one hundred feet of water between us and the boaters, a clear response rings out.“SHUT UP!” We can’t help but laugh at the anger that feels so foreign to us after our morning of meditation and wellness. We walk back to the museum grounds, our own liminality and joy protecting us against the frustrated shouts of cyclists and the glares of commuters. Back on the lawn of the museum, light rain falls as we join hands in a circle. Helen thanks us and asks us to pass the pulse. We take turns squeezing the hands of the people next to us until we lose track of who was next and laugh and hug and say goodbye, before reincorporating into the world, transformed.
Two days later, on the morning of my twenty-seventh birthday, I receive a follow up email from Helen. “Hope you were able to rest yesterday. There was a Solar Eclipse last night and today is the Fall Equinox. This is a time of transition and change.” I hold on to these words as I look at myself in the mirror, a year older and beginning to show the subtlest signs of age. The many performances that constitute my life continue to compound into years, and with them comes loss and endings and grief but not without love and renewal and joy. As I learned from Helen and Silvita, change is inevitable but the way it manifests is dependent upon our ability to let go.
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Daisy Matias is a Oaxacan-American writer and interdisciplinary scholar from Richmond, Virginia. Daisy thinks about how people enact shifts in attention to transform their worlds from the way things are to the way things should be. As a PhD Candidate at Northwestern University, Daisy is writing about Indigenous Latin American artists and healers who use contemplative practices to transform embodied subjectivity. Daisy holds Bachelor’s degrees in Art History and Gender Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern. Daisy lives on the far north side of Chicago with her partner and her bunny.
