Altar, Tender: Sitting with devynn emory’s can anybody help me hold this body

Abstract

This essay explores choreographies of grief and collectivity, embodiment and tenderness. It focuses on the work of devynn emory, a Lenape/Blackfoot choreographer, dance artist, acute care and hospice nurse, who in spring 2021 premiered a film, deadbird, and created a series of public grief altars collectively titled can anybody help my hold this body. I write from the perspective of a participant in the project, as an altar tender who sat with emory in New York City, the first stop on the tour. As such, I gesture towards the intimacies of loss as an embodied practice and on Indigenous relations with kin across thresholds of time and space. emory’s work situates the collective holding of space and the socialization of grief as part of an ongoing relationship with land, ancestors, spirits, and desire. Reflecting on the practice of holding space for both my own and other peoples’ grief, this essay lingers in the intimate choreographies of emory’s work, attempting to respond in kind with a braiding of queer, trans, and Indigenous enactments of care and reciprocity.