“Nights of Grief and Mystery,” an evening of music, storytelling and poetry with author and activist Stephen Jenkinson and recording artist Gregory Hoskins, will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, at Vashon Center for the Arts (VCA).
That evening, islanders will have a chance to experience a production that has traveled the world in recent years, delving deeply into the idea of reverence for life, amidst the endings of things — widely referencing personal, historical, environmental and cultural passages.
VCA’s website listing for the production includes testimonials from audience members worldwide who have found “Nights of Grief and Mystery” to be a deeply moving and profound experience.
“I know from my work as an author that it is very tricky to intertwine story-telling or reading with music,” wrote Oddný Eir, from Reykjavik, Iceland. “But this event proved the impossible. I looked around by the end of the evening and saw us all there in wonder and uplifted spirit, yet deeply rooted in our inner archives.”
Other audience members called it a “heart-wrenching, funny, brilliant show,” and a “beautiful and unraveling intimate night.”
The production is shaped by the life work of its creators.
Jenkinson, a storyteller and theologian, is the noted author of four books, “How It Could All Be,” “Money and the Soul’s Desires,” “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and the Soul,” and “Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.”
He was also the subject of a 2008 feature documentary film, “Griefwalker.”
The film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, detailed Jenkinson’s former work as the leader of a palliative care counseling team at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. In this position, Jenkinson sat at the deathbeds of more than 1,000 people, observing, he said, “a wretched anxiety and an existential terror.”
That experience, as the film relates, led Jenkinson to make it his life’s mission “to change the way we die — to turn the act of dying from denial and resistance into an essential part of life.”
In 2015, Jenkinsen teamed with Hoskins, a Canadian singer/songwriter and recording artist Gregory Hoskins to fuse their separate works into “Nights of Grief and Mystery” — evenings they describe as “part concert, part lamentation, part ribaldry, part poetry, part lifting the mortal veil and learning the mysteries there.”
According to Jenkins, the concepts explored in “Nights of Grief and Mystery” can be summed up in the production’s name.
“Night. That’s the rest of the day. The part that the light forbade,” he said. “And grief, well that’s the rest of the heart. The part that joy just couldn’t take. And mystery? Well, mystery is the rest of the story. The part that the teller couldn’t say.”
For Jenkins, it seems not as important to detail what the production is about, but rather, what it can do to those who see it.
He described the production as being “a little on the dangerous side, as far as the status quo goes” and spoke to the way that delving deeply into life’s mysteries and his acknowledgment of grief had changed him.
“We can do something about the way things are just by the way we carry ourselves,” he said. “Until you see the real thing, you always have an ‘out’ clause. You can always just slouch at the threshold to the doorway of your life and say ‘screw it, who cares?’ But once you see the real thing, you have no way out. Something about that holds you to another standard that may not have been available when it was just an idea.”
“No one knows the etiquette of a night of grief and mystery,” he added. “It undoes you in a way you’ve secretly been hoping for.”
Purchase tickets for “Nights of Grief and Mystery” at vashoncenter forthearts.org.
