LIVE. LOVE. NOW. A new solo show by Sandra Delgado

I had always feared death. 

And then my grandmother died. 

She was making rice, a ritual she had performed thousands of times in her life. I saw her moments after she passed, peacefully laying on the linoleum kitchen floor, raw grains of rice scattered around her. She had always told me that she didn’t fear death and by the expression of her face, I knew it to be true. That image of her stayed with me for years and became the inspiration for the very first piece of theater I ever created, para mis madres, a music-filled meditation on what happens to you in your final breath. 

Fast forward twenty years, and within the first year of the pandemic, I lost three of my elders and just as many friends. The fear of death, my loved one’s death, and my own mortality started haunting me. I didn’t know what else to do but take my grief and choke it down, convincing myself I was ok until I found myself alone in the desert, months and months later, screaming out their names to the night sky. I’ve shared the story of that cathartic night in the desert in my music project, The Sandra Delgado Experience (also brought to life by a 3Arts 3AP campaign), and my telling culminates in a communal act where the audience is invited to share the name(s) of people that have made their transition. It feels risky to go there with an audience who is there to hear music, but afterwards, it’s what everyone wants to talk about. “The thing I needed that I didn’t know I needed.” It illuminated for me how ill-equipped we are as a culture to talk about loss and grief and how desperately we want to and need to. 

LIVE. LOVE. NOW. asks us to recognize that death is a natural and inevitable part of our lives and to find freedom, wonder and peace in that reality. This show aims to normalize conversations around end of life, death and grieving and provides audiences with concrete tools for navigating this process that they can carry with them and share with loved ones. Communal rituals, informed by global death and grieving practices, ancestral veneration, and living in the now, will encourage people to get to know and trust each other, get vulnerable, share truths and celebrate being alive. A sonic landscape will meld the modern with the ancient with echoes of Latin-American folk music. Interactive projections that I (and potentially the audience) can physically play with will explore the micro and the macro, from the warmth of the womb to the expansiveness of the cosmos. 3AP funding will support a period of intense study, research and interviews, including my training as a death doula and the resources and time to conduct first-person interviews with death-adjacent workers, such as oncology nurses and hospice workers, as well as people who want to share their grief story and how grief taught them about living. The show will premiere at Collaboraction, my long-time artistic home, in our new space in Humboldt Park.

In these turbulent times, experiences that connect us to each other and connect us to ourselves are essential. Through LIVE. LOVE. NOW. I want audiences to discover their own pathways to joy and peace in the midst of the difficult, and to celebrate our lives, here and now.