5-week online course
Wednesdays, April 20, 27, May 4, 11, 18
8-10 pm EST/NewYork City time (5 pm - 7 pm California time, 1 am - 3 am London time, 2 am - 4 am Paris/Amsterdam time)

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

In this 5-week (10 hour) online workshop taught by Tony Wolf via Zoom, 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 mortality 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).  

Participant Feedback from Past “Art of Ritual” Courses

I loved this class. The best part for me was the variety of ways we explored rituals – both existing ones and ideas for creating our own.

Overall a very interesting and well put together class! Awesome!

Very much appreciated the material that Tony so generously sent out in between classes so that we came prepared to the class with some shared references. A kind of flipped classroom model that worked really well.

The group dynamic was great with a mixed group of people with different backgrounds.

Timely topic with a caring and engaged teacher.

This course takes you on a deep exploratory dive into the art, science and culture of death and dying ritual and leaves you with the inspiration and resources to continue on your exploration indefinitely into the future. 

I really enjoyed the preparatory materials setting the stage for some of the content during the actual class.  It feels good to come into the class prepared like that … it felt less like a lecture that way and helps with an overall feeling of being engaged and connected to the material.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

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 their deaths, 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, the Spiritual Naturalist Society, Atlas Obscura and Reimagine. In October of 2021 he convened and participated in the inaugural Memoria Symposium, a discussion between six artists working in the media of memorial and memento mori ritual.  

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

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