How to Celebrate Death
Life is a Festival #37: Klaudia Oliver (La Calaca)
Photo by Varial
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Can we “undrown” ourselves from painful loss through a celebration of death?
From Jazz Funerals in New Orleans to dancing ghosts in Japan, there are many traditions that celebrate death. None is more famous than Día de Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, which now exports marigolds, sugar skulls, and Catrina face paint throughout the world.
On today’s podcast I’m in San Miguel de Allende with Klaudia Oliver, co-founder of La Calaca, a festival built on local traditions and modern participatory arts. During the conversation we explore what it means to dance with death from mourning to remembrance to humor. Klaudia explains how to create an ofrenda, a traditional Día de Muertos altar. We speak of tourism and appropriation from barbies to Coco. To close the podcast, I am honored to share the acoustic version of How Strange, a celebration of death and life by Feathered Sun.
However painful, it is the impermanence which makes life profound.
TIMESTAMPS
:02 An ofrenda, an offering or a Day of the Dead altar.
:10 The story of the traditional Catrina icon
:15 Steps to your own ofrenda
:23 Why death is present in my own life at the moment
:32 Death and plant medicine and the blessings of impermanence
:40 Cultural consumption and cultural appropriation
:51 How to undrown yourself from a sudden, painful death of a loved one
:58 Dancing with the dead from Jazz Funerals to Obon, the Japanese festival of dancing ghosts
1:06 How Klaudia thinks about her own death
1:14 If we are a species in hospice, what can we learn and how can we learn from our individual deaths?
Graphics Designed by Andy McErlean
Theme song ““Peculiar Colors” [Manjumasi]“ by dj atish