5-week online course
Each class will run 1.5 hours
Dates: Wednesdays August 25, September 1, 8, 15 and 22
Time: 8-9:30 pm EST/NewYork City time (7-8:30 pm Central time; 5-6:30 pm California time; 1 -2:30 am London time, 2-3:30 am Paris/Amsterdam time)

Note: all classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time.

In this 5-week (7.5 hour) online workshop taught by Tony Wolf, we will explore the rich creative field of death-positive ritual.

The intangible culture of death ceremony became increasingly bureaucratized throughout the Industrial Age, as hospitals, businesses, religious institutions and civic authorities overtook what had previously been intimate, participatory experiences.

During the 1960s and ’70s, however, the intense questioning and experimentation of the counterculture movement spurred a radical shift in the mortality paradigm. “Suddenly”, in cultural terms, it became possible to imagine new ways of life and death.

This course explores an emergent, dynamic and positive response to the existential problem of death denial, centered on the simple philosophical premise of “mortality sapience”; that by remembering death, we can learn to seize the day.

In that spirit, artists, designers and activists are now working to change the mainstream narrative through the media of end-of-life, funerary, memorial and memento mori ritual. Some are the work of individual creators, like Itaru Sasaki’s “telephone of the wind” in Otsuchi, Japan, or of loose collectives, such as the massive All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Some take place at the cutting edge of ecotechnology, like the laying-in ceremony of recomposition (human composting) funerals. Still others are emerging organically as experiential folk-culture, such as the popular practice of creating street shrines.

By acknowledging death, honoring those who have passed and reminding the living to appreciate their lives, these new rituals serve to connect us, simply and profoundly, as mortal human beings. Taken together, they comprise an emerging praxis of ceremonial innovation.

This course synthesizes two major theoretical tracks via historical and contemporary case-studies, thought experiments, readings, art prompts, documentary viewings and discussions:

Seeing the Changing Face of Death
By understanding how and why the concept of death is shifting, we are able to respond creatively to the challenges of impermanence, grief, healing, celebration and legacy.

The Making of Meaning: Ritual as Transformative Technology
By studying experience design theory, we learn the foundation and potential of ritual as embodied, meaningful symbolic practice.

Projects and Presentations
Over the course of the workshop, you’ll be invited to undertake a deep-dive study into a thanatocentric ritual of your choice, and/or to conceive and design an original ceremony. Your project(s) can be presented via whatever media you choose during the final class session (or thereafter, as your schedule allows).

New Zealand citizen and US resident Tony Wolf is an author, producer, teacher, antiquarian and creator. His interest in memento mori philosophy dates back to the early 1990s, when he lost one close friend to suicide and another to a motorcycle accident. Dissatisfied with the culturally sanctioned responses to death, he subsequently devised a series of memento mori ritual events for arts festivals in Wellington, New Zealand and Bellingen, NSW, Australia.

A veteran of the education and entertainment industries, Tony served as the Cultural Fighting Styles Designer for the Lord of the Rings feature film trilogy (2001-2003). His novels include the popular Suffrajitsu trilogy (2015) and The Life and Fantastical “Crimes” of Spring Heeled Jack (2020) and he has co-produced and directed the independent documentaries Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes (2011) and No Man Shall Protect Us: The Hidden History of the Suffragette Bodyguards (2018).

In recent years, Tony’s Way of Life and Death essays and video lecture presentations have been featured via Morbid Anatomy, Atlas Obscura and Reimagine.

Tony lives with his wife Kathrynne in Chicago, USA and blogs at alt-death.com, a curated compendium of the changing mortality narrative.

Images: Vanitas Shrine (Tony Wolf); Burning Man 2012 (Ashley Steel); Red Paper Lanterns (Yuri Samoilov); BLM Memorial Shrine in Rogers Park, Chicago (Tony Wolf)