Don't Cry, Emily : September 3-5

September 3 - 5

Come join an intimate ritual / performance by Katrina Goldsaito about the ecstasy of grief, sisterhood, suicide, and lime soda.

It is very much not for everyone, but maybe it is for 18 of you. 

When Katrina Goldsaito met her crying newborn sister, she climbed up onto the hospital bed and said, “Don’t cry, Emily.” Her baby sister stopped crying, and the name stuck. Emily killed herself 28 years later, and in the 13 years since, Katrina could not stop writing a book about her death that was maybe never a book at all.

Maybe it was a story meant to be sewn out of lettuce. Or a book with spores in its leaves, so that after reading, you bury the pages and it is returned to the earth, sprouting mysterious plants. Maybe the book is a boulder inside of a book.

You are a part of this: 

The ritual / performance can only happen with the presence of all 18 of you.

You are invited to wear indigo (or any shade of blue), the color of the early evening sky, of cornflowers, of tsunamis, of protection.

To know:

🧿 Seating is on the floor on cushions. Please reach out when you purchase your ticket if you need a different seating arrangement. 

🧿 Arrive 15 minutes before we begin, as this 90 minute experience begins promptly.

🧿 There is no late seating.

$42 for a ticket : the same number of hours it took us to get from Cambodia to Seattle

$108 for a ticket + a Katrina-made aizome (indigo) hanging, hand-printed in katazome rice resist.

3 September 6:00
4 September 6:00
5 September 2:00 and 6:00 

The ritual-performance includes discussion of suicide and grief.

Katrina Goldsaito is a composter of grief.

Her award-winning books and performances wade through the depth of human experience to make space for presence and connection.

Her book THE SOUND OF SILENCE was called  “An illustrated serenade to the art of listening to your inner voice amid the noise of modern life.” by Maria Popova and was named a Book of the Year by NPR, People Magazine, Brain Pickings, The Boston Globe,  the Huffington Post, and won the Northern California Book Award. The Atlantic named it one of the 65 Best Essential Children’s Books of the century. It has been translated into French, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Vietnamese, and Mongolian. 

Her new book WHEN CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALL is a contemplation on loss. 

ReachYou, her augmented reality collaboration with Jonah Goldsaito connects participants with their grief: mundane or profound. Its world premiere was at the Tribeca Festival, and continued on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan. 

She has performed at the Huntington Theater Company, the Volksbuhne Theater, the Penumbra Theater, the Maine Shakespeare Festival, the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Joyce Soho, among others and is a founding member of the New York NeoFuturists and UnionDocs.

With her intergenerational family, Katrina lived nomadically for a few years, and has written travel journalism for many publications including National Geographic, NPR, and the Christian Science Monitor. 

Akilah Scharff-Teoh (ceramic sculpture) is a first-generation Caribbean-American artist and creative technologist based in Western Massachusetts, where she explores the joy and toil of liminal existence. Studio Feeler, her art practice, is a combination of self-actualization, meditation, spiritual embodiment, and ancestral quest-making. While ceramics is her primary focus, Akilah’s quest-making intersects with photography, textiles, and collage. Themes around duality are recurrent in her functional and sculptural forms.