Exploring loss through fire and water: Free Falling by The Screaming Goats Collective 

By Ilana van der Merwe, December 12 2024—

“It’s okay to find the moments where you just let yourself pause. Linger in the stillness, linger in the sweetness. Let the leaves falling help you remember that you don’t have to be drowning or engulfed in the flames, but that you can find lightness as well.”

— Lauren Cowley, Canadian Certified Counsellor 

Presented by the Screaming Goats Collective, Free Falling was a highly technical spectacle featuring aerial artists Léda Davies and Holly Benedetti from Nov. 28-30. The CSpace in Calgary opened its doors to exploring themes of loss through fire and water with this collection of masterworks and a discussion thereafter hosted by Canadian Certified Counsellor, Lauren Cowley. 

Starting the night off was a 30-minute excerpt of Benedetti’s In the Fire. This work featured aerial stunts incorporating fire house aparati to tell a story of the shared traumas and losses experienced by children of firefighters. Bennedetti’s piece used projection and artificial smoke to set scenes depicting the comfort of a fireplace as well as the panic of putting out flames. Paying homage to her father, Benedetti was able to explore both his stories as a firefighter, as well as reexamine how she was impacted by his trauma as a child. 

“This project was a way for him to share some of those experiences of grief he was carrying with him. Eventually, I realized this was sort of my story too, and how I experienced his trauma growing up. This is two stories in one,” she said. 

After having the opportunity of working alongside her father to create this shared piece, Benedetti reflects on what performing this work is like after his passing. 

“I didn’t know that he was going [to pass] when he did. So, this project was a chance for us to dig in together at the end of his life. Movement, as a movement artist, was a way to further explore that [loss],” Benedetti said.

After a short intermission, the stage was reset with a suspending structure that would come to secure a collection of bungee cords. Davies’ performance of Fish at the Bottom of the Sea written by Nicole Schafenacker and directed Lizz Hobbs was highly impactful, filled with deeply thought provoking lines and sarcastic humour. Combining aerial and script provides a platform for immersive and mesmerizing story telling. Prompted by lines written by Schafenacker, audiences are left feeling like they are at a crossroads: longing and reminiscing, floating and drowning.  

This work, beside impactful spoken word, utilizes the stage in the CSpace by incorporating alluring lighting design. Using something as intangible as light as a restriction of movement as fluid as suspension holds meaning that aligns with the script itself. 

Davies also took time to address the themes of loss within her interpretation of this script.

“When we started working on the project during the pandemic we were experiencing a different kind of loss. At that time, we did not know when it was going to end,” Davies said.

After experiencing the loss of her father, Davies shared that her interpretation of the work changed once again. 

“It was not long after [my father] passed there we did this show. I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think this is a good idea’. Then, we started rehearsing… and a lot of the moments we discovered through different forms of improvisation we found on how they felt when speaking the text,” Davies said. 

Loss, as addressed by those involved in both projects, is experienced cyclically. With both projects featuring deliberate repetition, the intention behind this symbolism is to encapsulate the inescapability of grief. Playwright Scharenacker shared her insights on this observation.

“There is repetition in these works because oftentimes that is how grief happens. We come into these memories that we were not expecting to remember and that brings us back into it. It felt intuitive to write this way. It’s a sense of circular processing, with circular layers, representing this burden,” she said.  

Davies also commented on this, sharing the symbolism of repeated movement’s in her piece.

“There is something to say in grief about how it’s never the same. You might get over it eventually, but it doesn’t ever leave, it just changes with you, or you change around it. There is movement in that,” Davies said.

Director Hobbs reflected on what approaching this play in her early twenties was like, and how her introduction to grief changed her perspective on this work. 

“In 2008, I was lucky enough not to have experienced a lot of loss until after this point. I did not have to deal with harsh unexpected loss until a number of years later, which led me to reread this story. I called Nicole [Scharenacker] and was like, ‘we need to do this again because I didn’t know what the hell we were talking about’. It was interesting that the text hasn’t actually changed that much at all from 2008. I really didn’t understand what [grief] felt like at that point in my life so I don’t think I could have directed it differently,” Hobbs said.

For more information about the Screaming Goats Collective, check out their website. Access the event’s program for biographies on all mentioned contributors.