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In collaboration with Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, Graveyard Shift proposes a new way of interacting with the space of the cemetery by activating it through sight, sound, and movement.

There is a reason why only the air of the non-living can make a balloon rise.

It’s a wonder how an unencumbered breath wrapped in rubber can make a wish come true.

They don’t tell you that right before a loved one is buried, circular holes are perforated around the shoulder point of each casket so those that have suffered can join hands.

It’s a secret linkage like those of paper angels streamed together at Christmas.

Each hole cut in us over time is a very precise step in the procedure of construction.

You are not just a paper tattered by holes, you are an angel holding hands, surrounded by many.

Here on hallowed ground soil becomes clogged with tears, sorrow, and embitterment.

It’s not fair the way a blade of grass can carry on while us humans wrestle with the mirage of justice.

The real miracle is the turbulent downpour on a summer’s night.

Only acts of nature have the potency to clear away the debris of human emotion.

while you danced in a rushing river of rain, and locked arms with the person next to you.

Wet bodies swayed into each other, lightly caressing.

We were living maggots breaking down heavy shit in the dark night, arriving hungry and leaving full.

We were learning how to dance through loss.

We were all holed paper that night, becoming the accordion of love.

500 of us made something new in a torrential reality.

The echo of laughter reverberated through the soil, and flowers pushed up, reminding us of awe.

Grief is just love you can’t give to someone anymore.

Graveyard Shift: Circuit des Yeux

Cemeteries, to most of us, are no place for the living. Cities of the dead, emporia of the departed, they’re where we go for funerals—or maybe to seek macabre thrills or conduct business best done in private. That’s certainly how many Brooklyn residents have long viewed the 478 verdant acres of the borough’s largest graveyard, the Green-Wood Cemetery: a place for odd visitors seeking the graves of Leonard Bernstein or Jean-Michel Basquiat. But a recent surge of cultural programming in Green-Wood—of which 

, a series of public performances launched with Pioneer Works in 2019, is a part—recalls when the cemetery meant something more.

On a typical summer’s day in 1850, decades before Prospect Park opened, Green-Wood would feel every bit as bustling as the city’s flagship green spaces do today. Visitors would stroll along winding pathways, or take joyrides on horse-drawn carriages through the wider roads. A few would be dressed in traditional all-black Victorian mourning attire, paying respects to recently buried loved ones; some would enjoy leisure time by paddling around a pond in rowboats. Green-Wood was so popular, in fact, that the cemetery published maps guiding people to points of interest, like its architecturally spectacular monuments, including the French Gothic revivalist tomb of martyred debutante Charlotte Canda. Early etchings of Green-Wood landscapes depicted these cemetery-goers exploring the space. Later on, their activities would also be captured in stereograph photography.

At Green-Wood, meandering pathways were intentionally designed to feel labyrinthine: turning the visitor into a wanderer, it was felt, facilitated better contemplation of death.

In the mid-nineteenth century, cemeteries like Green-Wood were much more than burial sites; they offered tranquil time away from the noisy streets of fast-growing cities. Prior to the 1830s, urban cemeteries across America were built into the courtyards of churches. But the Industrial Revolution transformed empty public space into factories and warehouses. Roadways and bridges proliferated. Towns morphed into dense urban centers and land was bought, zoned, and redeveloped. As they did, churchyards exhumed the bodies buried beneath them to address concerns over public health (at the time, people believed that even long-dead corpses could contaminate a city’s water supply) and to free up land. After exhumation, decedents were moved outside of the city to what became known as "rural cemeteries."

The first of these was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a town outside of, but not far from, the burgeoning city of Boston. Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery opened in 1831, and it wasn’t long before most major American cities had one (or several) cemeteries sprawling out over rolling hills just beyond their edges. It was Mount Auburn that inspired the founding and design of Brooklyn's Green-Wood, which was incorporated in 1838 in a region of King’s County that was still pastoral and undeveloped. At Green-Wood, meandering pathways were intentionally designed to feel labyrinthine: turning the visitor into a wanderer, it was felt, facilitated better contemplation of death. (The pathways were never too winding, though—here, as in most graveyards, the paths are designed to lead you back to the main gate.) It was designed, at a time of radical change in the built environment, to glorify the natural world and return city-dwellers to nature. Ponds offered tranquil beauty and fun outings in rowboats; these ponds were also prime real estate for wealthy patrons who planned future interments by their shores. (Though cemeteries were open to all as public places, class disparity meant that only the wealthy could afford to be buried inside rural cemeteries. Potters’ fields—graveyards with modest headstones and little to no maintenance—were designated burial grounds for the lower classes; some of them, like Washington Square Park in Manhattan, were turned into public squares.)

Rural cemeteries were built for utilitarian ends, but became cherished social spaces which inspired our grandest public parks: when Manhattan’s Central Park opened in 1858, its famous designers cited Green-Wood as a principal influence. In fact, the layout of parks like the National Mall, Lincoln Park in Chicago, and Griffith Park in Los Angeles—and the very concept of outdoor public space with greenery split up by winding paved roads—were all inspired by cemeteries. The peaceful, leafy landscapes that allowed urbanites to reconnect with nature were not prioritized by city planners until after the need for rural cemeteries emerged. The proliferation of parks and urban green space in the late 1800s helped pull many people away from graveyards—a harbinger of a larger cultural shift which unfolded across the 20th century and which opened a vast gulf between the world of the living and the places and rites reserved for the dead.

Artists have the unique ability to address difficult topics with beauty and candor, and so are singularly suited to help shift the current attitude toward death and dying.

In recent years, though, that gulf has begun to close thanks to cemetery directors like Green-Wood’s president, Richard Moylan. Since the 1990s, when Green-Wood’s space for new burials began to grow scarce, Moylan has led a push toward using the cemetery for activities other than funerals. Green-Wood has begun to take up its previous role as a community and social space, with exhibitions, lectures, end-of-life literacy programs, and festivals that offer people ways to reconnect with their mortality in a gentle, beautiful, and not-so-intimidating way. 

 series that I helped launch in 2019 grew from these same efforts. 

—which since then has included four performances—has sought to question conventional attitudes toward death by bringing people to Green-Wood for artistic experiences which, I hoped, might help people confront our culture’s widespread wariness of death and dying. It has long been clear to me that if people could simply spend time amongst gravestones and mausoleums, that would improve how we relate to our mortality. This is a pretty common idea among death educators and end-of-life literacy experts, but perhaps less so for an arts worker. But I launched 

with the conviction that better relationships to death can be fostered through larger cultural changes as well as in modern funerary practices. Artists have the unique ability to address difficult topics with beauty and candor, and so are singularly suited to help shift the current attitude toward death and dying.

Neither of the two artists who performed at the first 

, musician Yonatan Gat and multi-media visual artist Kim Brandt, were discouraged or confused by the request to make work for a cemetery. They embraced the backdrop and intuitively understood the profound nature of the commission. Any kind of performance art is inherently ritualized work, and the cemetery is already a particularly charged space. This is why these performances have worked—and especially so when the artists have responded to the space in unique ways. When, in 2019, Yonatan Gat shared our stage at Green-Wood with the Medicine Singers (formerly the Eastern Medicine Singers)—an Algonquin Drum Group from Rhode Island—the group performed music they’d never sung in public: ceremonially specific songs for funerary and memorial rituals, meant only to be sung for the dead and in a place occupied by the dead.

More than one hundred years after the industrialization of death in the West, Americans have never been further from their own mortality. But the imaginative recasting of cemeteries as public spaces can help move the culture back toward a more embodied and mindful relationship with death. Like Green-Wood, Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles is now popularly known for strange and glamorous events (such as ritual memorial parties at Valentino’s grave on the anniversary of his death) as well as a place for concerts, film screenings, and literary talks. Similar developments are happening by gravesites across the country. And as they do, communities with strong roots in traditional cultural practices have also continued to carve their rituals around interacting with the beloved dead into modern American cemeteries. In Green-Wood, for example, there are 

 (buildings that house cremated remains) that are occupied mostly by Asian Americans. Their families tend to the memorial sites and gather on a regular basis to venerate their ancestors as they always have. In places with large Mexican American populations, cemeteries are frequently packed on weekends with picnickers sharing meals amongst the graves—most especially during the month of November, with its lively celebration of Día de los Muertos.

The human need for a relationship to death is deep, stretching back further than the built world. As we continue to reckon with what cemeteries once were, what they are today, and what they could be, old rituals will continue and new ones will emerge, and as our relationship to death and dying improves, a new cycle of harmonious living will unfold. ♦

Bethany Tabor is a writer and public engagement specialist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She writes about art’s influence on placemaking, identity, and society. In 2019, she created and produced the series 

 together with Pioneer Works and the Green-Wood Cemetery.

The Graveyard Shifts Again

August 2019. I was invited to perform at the Cemetery long before the pandemic started.

You can't really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. And that's a good thing to think about. We know more about living. But we all die.

I have thought about death as long as I can remember, first as a child and later as an artist. It is hard to know about death because by the time I die, I might not know what is happening. When a death is completed, I will not be here to feel my non-existence.

In many pieces I perform the act of dying. I thought that performing was my practice of dying. But the practice of dying is not dying. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying.

The pandemic has made death closer to us, but not in a way we can attend to other people’s dying. My mother died before the pandemic. She had a good death. I am sorry for the people who die when so many people also die.

But we also learn about death by missing the dead.

 The Green-Wood Cemetery is now my working place. Every day the ups and downs of the landscape, the shadows of trees and graves that the setting sun casts, and the names on tombstones—some faded, some new—become more familiar.

Personally, I knew no one among the 560,000 dead the cemetery holds. I did not know how my body would relate to this particular, large-scale cemetery. That changed once I began working in the cemetery.

New dirt is brought in, a new grave is dug. New dead are placed among the older dead. Mourners arrive. Flowers are placed, wilt, and are cleaned up. This is a working cemetery witnessing a new surge of the dead. I breathe in the air of the dead, the fall, and the flowers. I pronounce the names of the people buried and cremated there, some a short time ago, many a long time ago. I tell myself that we should not forget those whose graves were never built.

Usually, my rehearsals are no more than a process of choreography, a preparation toward the performance. It is not so in the cemetery.

Dancing with no audience, I am aware that my walk into the site is not the practice of approaching the audience. I am walking among the dead. I imagine myself on a day when the audience 

 be here, only to realize that the graves would be so much closer to me than the audience members. While the sun shifts shadows, leaves have already been changing colors. But the dead remain dead, a sure existence of their non-existence.