A Blanket of Requiem

Hand-shredded blanket, white powder
30 minutes performance with Juri Onuki
Elizabeth’s Foundation for the Arts | New York, New York

“... my ritualistic process and a personal context of work can be exclusively private. What expanded my ritualistic process into a collaborative performance was my encounter with Juri Onuki in New York City the spring of 2009. In May 2009, we performed our first collaborative performance, A Blanket of Requiem. What seemed like a private ritual of one’s memory would organically twist this notion of private mourning. Similar to jazz musicians, this experimental performance explored the issues of loss, privacy, and mourning that invited aesthetic discord and improvisation. After a few rehearsal dancing, humming, and discussing aesthetics, we presented A Blanket of Requiem to a group of about twenty people. I was covered with honey, laid on a floor under a shredded blanket, and Juri danced around me in a white painted room in a white dress. If I were dreaming, I hummed a hymn my grandmother used to sing, and eventually Juri’s humming intermingled with mine, entering into the fantasy I created.”

-An excerpt from Hur’s thesis “A Requiem in the Garden”