Mourning Machine

Mourning Machine is an ongoing research & performance project about the scientific, personal, political, aesthetic, and ritual aspects of grieving. It is built by a creative community which gathered to study and perform alternatives to the highly commercialized and capitalistic approaches to death, dying, and grieving that we receive in contemporary culture(s).

Since 2022 a team of artists, activists, social psychologists, librarians, media scholars, etc. has been gathering. We take turns teaching one another about grief from our disciplinary, cultural, and personal lenses, and then transform that knowledge into multimedia creations. These participatory experiences are designed to offer experiences to practice grief in communal settings. Unfortunately, in our culture(s), this is radical.

What began as an expression of the group’s needs/impulses/visions has recently transformed for the benefit of other communities and organizations. Since 2023 we have been commissioned to create the “Mood Medallion” project at PAC NYC and “Goodbye to the Way Things Used to Be” at ART/NY’s Spring Summit. In December 2024, Edge Effect will present the first self-produced version of Mourning Machine at the Segal Center, dedicated to supporters of the NYC theater community, broadly construed.

INSTIGATORS & ORGANIZERS: Nic Benacerraf (director), Jess Applebaum, Mica Baum-Tuccillo, Bea Martino

CO-CREATORS: Mollie Andron, Elvis Bakaitis, Kate Fry, Choco Garcia-Rivera, Dorothea Gloria, Chie Morita, Austin Purnell, Richard Saudek, Jacques Servin

Edge Effect is a “think and do tank” that creates participatory experiences for individuals to share knowledge across personal, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Co-founded by dramaturg Jess Applebaum and director/scenographer Nic Benacerraf, EE’s process is deeply rooted in the edge-blurring practices of devised theater. Each project unites a polydisciplinary community to study a transcendent issue of our time, who then creates original multimedia performances for new communities to deepen the investigation.