Dancing with Death: Grief as a Kind of Movement

Abstract This article explores how theatre and performance responded to the injunctions of isolation (as medical precaution and stigmatised exclusion) and expectations of stasis (as contained or immobilising grief), which characterised the social conditions surrounding HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, to examine their treatment in queer theatre and performance during the recent Coronavirus pandemic. In Jack Holden’s Cruise (2021), Phillip McMahon’s Once Before I Go (2021), and Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy (2021), gathering in and around dance is the means by which grief is enacted, the dead remembered, and collective life restored. How do contemporary theatre and performance guide us through COVID-19, the article asks, by moving us through histories of queer grief?