Grief Works Performers

Chantel Jurcevic Cabrera

Chantel Jurcevic Cabrera was grown up by the inner-city streets on Gadigal land, the rivers of El Tigre, Argentina, and as part of the Latinx community of inner Sydney. She currently works in the public mental health service as a family lived-experience worker and advocate, cultivating and sustaining critical perspectives on madness. Alongside this Chantel immerses herself in movement and somatic practices. Her budding artistic practice is the somewhere-inbetween integration of queer-latinx, somatic-grief, death-written, film-movement, absurdly open to the more to be revealed. 

My dad Jon was simultaneously the most glorious and abject person I know, and through his death I inherited a large modern-day sarcopahgus filled with the taxidermied and preserved remains of his beloved dog, Brutus. Grief Works offers me a space to channel, dialogue with, and embody this part-gift-part-death narrative, and the wild love and grief that is the legacy of Jon.

SistaNative:

Sēini Fale’aka Taumoepeau + Tempest Fale’aka Taumoepeau

Tempest Taumoepeau (She/Her) Artivist: Skatergirl on rollerskates, Video creator & T1D Warrior. With her deep love for slime-making, roller-skating, illustration & puppy-dog training, Tempest is a pre-teen-maker who shares her joyful creative content on Instagram and TikTok. A Skatepark regular, a leader in school politics and Type1 Diabetes youth advocate, Tempest is passionate about family and her Tongan & El Salvadorian heritage, exploring inter-disciplinary visual and kinaesthetic forms in mixed-media, film and performing in the moving image, her maiden art exhibition at 8 years of age was at Belconnen Arts Centre in 2018.

Sēini ‘SistaNative’ Taumoepeau (She/Her) ARTIVIST: Orator & Songwoman with an Intersectional Oceanic-Pacific lens & First Nations focus. An emerging Elder, Sēini’s career spans 30+ years as Performance Artist, Presenter/Broadcaster & Creative Industries professional. An Indigenous woman of the Mōana & direct descendant of Ancient Polynesian Celestial Navigators & Chiefly lineage. With energy medicine in her presence, Faivā (performance of space) & Tauhi Vā (relational space) is her praxis, Talanoa: Talk-Story, Cosmology, Human Potential & Technology her central axis. With harmony & rhythm aesthetic, Sēini works first the invisible & intangible, then exploring ideas of connectivity, hōhoko (genealogy), ritual, ceremony, communication, relational inter-sectionality & displacement across Tā Vā (Time-Space).

Grief Works offers us, as fefine faivā (girl/women who perform space) an opportunity to collaboratively investigate our combined ancestry, our heritage of passing/sharing of our Mother & Grandmother’s name ‘Fale’aka’ and the spectrum of ways in which we reflect our heritage in our everyday inspirations and activations through presence: Skating & Song.

Peter Banki

Peter Banki is a procrastinating scholar who curates festivals. With Victoria Spence he founded the Festival of Death and Dying (2016–2018). He has also written a book on forgiveness and crimes against humanity. He is currently director of Erotic Living, a school which helps adults to confront the unknown by curating spaces of permission. 

Grieving is like a work, like writing a book. Come grief unwork me - the death of my parents!

Emma Maye Gibson

Emma Maye Gibson (AKA Betty Grumble) is a Warrane/Sydney based performance artist. Largely through the avatar/war mask/love letter/critter of Betty Grumble she engages her body as a medicinal site of performative catharsis, often in a genre smash of ritual physical theatre, cabaret, performance art and multi-media. She has her Masters in Fine Arts and has presented work at Darwin Festival, Brisbane Festival, Vivid Festival, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, The Sydney Opera House, Glastonbury, Edinburgh Fringe, Griffin Theatre, The Bearded Tit and festivals around the world. She is currently touring the offering Enemies of Grooviness Eat Shit, a work about Grief, Pleasure & Justice. 

My offering is a meditation on the love and loss of two close mentors and sisters. In working with Grief, I bow to their death transcendence and the ways in which their art and wisdom have fuelled community, legacy and me. I am creating prayer portals for these Goddesses of mythic pleasure and protest. Candy Royalle and Elizabeth Burton lay bare their bodies, hearts and lives, then invited myself and community so generously and intimately into their dying. I thank their bodies and our bodies as we dance, make and witness in their honour.