Hope Springs Eternal

Performing Grief, History, and Resilience in Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery

Abstract

Columbia Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Boulder, Colorado, receiving its first interment in 1870. It is also a hub for live performance, hosting at least two significant promenade productions in recent years. In this paper, I explore Monica Weller’s 2020 MFA Dance thesis project, The Liminal Heart, and Historic Boulder’s 2022 edition of Meet the Spirits, both performed on the grounds of the cemetery in the month of October. In The Liminal Heart, Weller and her fellow dancers offer a devastatingly personal meditation on grief and loss, inspired by the untimely death of Weller’s husband; the performance featured a collective memorial audience members were invited to contribute to, and—for many—marked the first live performance they’d attended since the appearance of COVID-19. Meet the Spirits, by contrast, is a biennial dramatization of some of Columbia Cemetery’s most famous occupants, played by amateur actors, and timed to coincide with Halloween. Equal parts historical interpretation and family-friendly haunted trail, the popular event serves as a fundraiser for a local historic preservation organization, and seeks to draw attention to their ongoing preservation of the cemetery.

While very different in tone, The Liminal Heart and Meet the Spirits share surprisingly similar objectives: to rebrand the cemetery as a vibrant and welcoming communal space for the living, and to nudge the living and the dead into closer contact and more meaningful conversation with each other. In this article, I argue that both performances transform a static, sporadically visited cemetery into a dynamic, living memorial and meeting space, posing interesting questions about if and how we may ethically and lovingly (re)animate our dead.