Routes of Sorrow: Floating - Phase 3, Oxford

The exhibition of Phase 3 took place in 2019, at the John Bunyan Baptist Church used by the Ark-T Centre. Phase 3 introduced three new sculptures, and a commissioned OXUS/dance collaboration called Carrying / Shedding.

The exhibition was set up at Ark-T in East Oxford, working with the then director Emmy O’Shaughnessy and the International Young Company (a theatre arts group for 10-14 year olds) liaison Lisa Bates. Several activities, which used the exhibition as a launching pad, took place. Lisa took her group to the exhibition, accompanied by Michael Rosen’s Sad Book. Together, they created their own performance, which took place immediately following the debut of the new commissioned OXUS/dance performance (see below).

For Lisa, integrating visual art with theatre arts was a first for her. Her group said they enjoyed acting, and taking on characters with different personalities from themselves allowed them to explore how to show emotions, changing from happy to sad, for example. They thought the exhibition was ‘cool’ because ‘there were lots of ways to interpret [emotions]… like candles [and] the work [particularly the bird with the broken wing]’ inspired their own performance piece.

Social Media Manager Natasha Turner promoted the exhibition and events, and secured a BBC radio interview for me, allowing me to describe this phase of the project in more detail to a wider audience.

The commissioned performance by OXUS, and dancers Kay Lynn and Macarena Ortuzar, is called Carrying / Shedding, and was performed twice and filmed once. The resultant film, by filmmaker Dariusz Dziala, was shown on a screen at St John’s College, Oxford, 2025.

Following the first of two performances referenced above, there was a panel discussion called ‘The Cast of Sorrow – Talking about the Unsayable’, moderated by Clair Crombe, a psychotherapist. Other panellists, besides me, were Emmy O’Shaughnessy, Kay Lynn (dance), and Heather Birt (OXUS).

Comments from the discussion:
• -‘human experience of grief and sorrow is – as this project expressed – multi-textured and multi-layered’,
• -‘the music composed and performed by the string quartet OXUS preceded and accompanied the dance, emerging in layers, like grief’ leading toward ‘a realization once again that sorrow is experienced in overlapping layers, the half-remembered coming through conscious memory.’
• -‘Hopefully, the Project will be widely shared. The evocative power of an image, a sound, a movement proved to be stronger than any word.’

Along with the commissioned performance, three sculptures were added to the existing artwork, further exploring the concepts of Chronic Sorrow and Inherited Sorrow: Mother Figure, Floating and Born To Be Responsible.

***Click on a film still to view the performance Carrying / Shedding. Opens in a new tab.