Grief Encounters

This work blends together spoken word, song and movement. The work sits between a ritual and space of conversation, a gymanfa ( a gathering / assembly) a wake, and a celebration of life, loss and the ambiguous nature of absences that live within us.

Somehow our losses are hidden, in a world that is lost in progress. This is a time to wonder about grief as an act of remembering what matters. Somehow hope lives in the cracks of the recognition that loss is a generative force for living.

There will be questions, and conversations, and dancing and tea and cake.

At it's heart, Grief encounters is an experiment in making space for the fragile. It's a reflection and admission of the porous nature of what it is to be human and to lose the things we love. We live in the traces of time. So gently GRIEF ENCOUNTERS offers a space to sit together next to a pile of absences and speak and dance into the beauty of it all.

Cai Tomos

This is a conversation

It’s a way of being together

A way to say something

To share something

A kind of ritual

The kind that kids do without thinking

A kind of remembering

Yes, a remembering

It’s about joy too

Of course it is.

It’s about a longing

And searching for a way forward somehow

It’s a song

And a prayer

A meditation on loosing it

And

It’s a dance

Definitely a

Dance

My name is Cai and I am welsh artist. I go by the pronouns ( he/him) . My work in its essence is about movement, in all it forms. I tend to move between different art forms that reflect different aspects of my practice, but at the core I’m interested in the imagination, and its relationship to our bodies. Im interested in healing and health too, and how the arts help us to find what we often don’t know we were looking for.

The arts give us a way to speak our own language that often has no words, but it’s our own unique way of expressing ourselves in the world. I'm interested in community, and how the arts support togetherness, a way of being together that is a force for good.

I believe in transformation. The extraordinary and every day ordinary transformations that the arts can support us with. I feel the creative spirit is in everyone, it may come out in dancing, cooking, poetry, organising your kids pack lunch, drawing, helping your neighbour or gardening. In a way I’m interested in what makes us feel alive. My work involves being with others and looking for that aliveness in whatever small or Large way it shows up.I have worked in Care homes, theaters, psychiatric Hospital, living rooms of peoples’ houses, street corners. I work one to one with people in hospital in bed, by work I mean, we find ways of being together where curiosity has the space to emerge as it want to.

We humans are interdependent creatures, we need each other, for our individual and collective growth.

We come in so many shapes and sizes and different ways we see and experience the world, both our joys and pains. The arts more than anything help us listen, and by doing that, by really listening, we share something of our common humanity, of being together in the world in that moment, and it’s these moments that help us find and create meaning as we go on through our days