Dr Leah Cotterell and Narelle McCoy
The Delicate Art of Talking about Death in the Graveyard
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| Dr Leah Cotterell (l) and Narelle McCoy (r) |
‘Whistling Past the Graveyard’ is a 70-minute site-specific performance designed by Cotterell and McCoy for cemetery spaces. It combines multiple strands of research and memoir using the powerful communication forms of song and story.
Spanning four productions over five years, ‘Whistling Past the Graveyard’ has been presented to around 450 patrons in the programs of the Anywhere Festival in Brisbane and the Moreton Bay region. The first production in 2023 was developed in collaboration with the Friends of South Brisbane Cemetery community organisation. With their support, Brisbane City Council permission was granted. This required an extensive process of risk management and site inspections that took many months of liaison.
‘Whistling Past the Graveyard’ proved to be highly successful in exploring community morés around grief and mourning as a means of destigmatising conversations about death. But unexpected complexities emerged when Cotterell and McCoy sought to transfer the production to cemetery locations in the Moreton Bay region in 2024. Drawing on this case study, community concerns about performance in cemeteries will be discussed, including the potential sensitivities that may arise in negotiations between artists, historians, community groups and cemetery trustees.
In their conference presentation Cotterell and McCoy will share their experience and excerpts of their performance to frame insights on how artists have negotiated such sensitivities, locally, and in other Western cultures. Models of practice will be identified and the conference attendees will be asked to reflect on, and share their own perspectives on the cultural practice of performance in cemetery spaces.
About Leah and Narelle
Leah and Narelle are the researchers, creators and performers behind the successful 'Whistling Past the Graveyard' musical project in South Brisbane Cemetery and other venues (2023-24), and this year's 'Confessions of a Funeral Singer' show celebrating funeral music in modern Australia.
On the way from her first gigs in community theatre in the 1980s to her 2020 Doctor of Musical Arts, Leah established a national profile as a jazz singer before diverging into song writing projects and the production of musical works featuring gifted collaborators at premier venues. A ‘Women in Voice’ regular, Leah has brought her warm soulful voice to many styles. Her musical memoir 'The Pleasure of Sad Songs' was the subject of a 2015 'Conversations' interview on ABC Radio National. Leah was awarded the 2022 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
Narelle is a writer, musician, academic, archivist and researcher. She is a lecturer and Fellow at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, as well as presenting at international conferences on the topic of the Irish wake ritual, death and Irish mythology. She currently lectures in popular music, music theatre and music history. Narelle was awarded the 2020 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
On the way from her first gigs in community theatre in the 1980s to her 2020 Doctor of Musical Arts, Leah established a national profile as a jazz singer before diverging into song writing projects and the production of musical works featuring gifted collaborators at premier venues. A ‘Women in Voice’ regular, Leah has brought her warm soulful voice to many styles. Her musical memoir 'The Pleasure of Sad Songs' was the subject of a 2015 'Conversations' interview on ABC Radio National. Leah was awarded the 2022 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
Narelle is a writer, musician, academic, archivist and researcher. She is a lecturer and Fellow at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, as well as presenting at international conferences on the topic of the Irish wake ritual, death and Irish mythology. She currently lectures in popular music, music theatre and music history. Narelle was awarded the 2020 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
