First Fridays Dance: Marie Goeminne

Each first Friday of the month Café Belcampo presents an evening of dance. This month: The Lost Art of Grief – Marie Goeminne

The Lost Art of Grief
A small project on big emotion

This intimate dance performance tells the story of two women, who try to meet and carry each other. Together, they look for a ritual, a dance, a ceremony of the heart to express their grief. Raw and fiery physicality is interspersed with fragile intimacy. The audience becomes both witness and part of these contradictory and big emotions that can be suddenly found and shared by one another in one common heartbeat. In her sixth choreography – The Lost Art of Grief – Marie Goeminne examines her fascination for sorrow and the human experience of sorrow. In search of the beauty and diversity of this intense feeling, she tries to create awareness about the connecting, liberating power this emotion can entail. Marie was inspired by the work of psychotherapist and soulactivist Francis Weller. In his work, Weller encourages us to embrace The Lost Art of Grief, as he calls it.

The Lost Art of Grief emerged from a personal experience, in which Marie Goeminne lost her child in an advanced state of pregnancy. For the first time in her life she experienced deep sorrow and mourning. This wound opened up a new, unknown but also wonderful place in herself. Looking for ways to express, experience and integrate this experience, she was challenged to show herself at her most vulnerable in this fast-paced, successful and heroic world. From this confrontation grew her desire to lower the threshold that surrounds the expression of grief and to make its beauty and deep regulating, healing function visible.

Marie Goeminne (1977, BE) is a choreographer. She creates performances at the intersection of dance, philosophy and the visual arts. In her work, Marie allows herself to be moved by our most intimate and vulnerable tasks and qualities. With a pronounced sculptural form language, she highlights themes that people don’t talk about easily.

Marie studied at the EDDC in Arnhem (European Dance Development Center, Artez). She is certified in Biodynamic Massage Therapy. Her knowledge about