Keening Workshop

Keening was a practice of communal grieving practiced at wakes and funerals in the British Isles for thousands of years, until its erasure over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Keening was led by elder women, often midwives: those who tended to the threshold between life and death. 

In the first part of the workshop, we will first learn about:

• The history of keening (in Irish: caoineadh) in the British Isles throughout history,
• The musical structure of keening and its function in the context of a wake,
• How the practice keening was erased by the same imperialist forces that have erased and continue to erase traditional culture around the world, and
• How these forces– the impulses to give voice to our grief, to grieve communally, and the church and state-sanctioned suppression and repression– live in our bodies somatically.

In the second part of the workshop, we will perform our own keening ritual. The ritual pays homage to traditional keening practices but was developed by Annie in her own grieving and artistic practice. In this ritual, we will keen together: for our personal and collective losses.

Please bring an object you would like to put in the temporary, communal altar that can hold your grief. We will have refreshments for after the ritual.