The Exhumation of Grief
Shalmali Shetty responds to Florence Peake’s ‘Ode to the Dark: A Modern Fairy Tale’ at Hospitalfield, Arbroath
All images: Ode to the Dark, Florence Peake and Scottish Dance Theatre.
Performance documentation, Hospitalfield, 2026. Image Credit: Neil Hanna
There is someone clothed in white, laying limply along the narrow rim of a wall. They appear exhausted, or lulled into an afternoon slumber; their stillness instinctively dropping the onlooker’s voice to a whisper. Scanning the walls, more resting figures appear alongside abstract chalky plaster casts. An uncanny resemblance transpires between them. Who is emulating who?
As a small crowd, we have just witnessed the prelude to Ode to the Dark: A Modern Fairy Tale, a live performance that forms part of London-based artist and choreographer Florence Peake’s multi-faceted project Your Meaning, Not Your Materiality (spanning 2024-2027). First conceived during Peake’s residency at Hospitalfield in 2024 and presented in collaboration with Scottish Dance Theatre, this performance expands upon the exhibition currently occupying the site.
Historically, fairy tales were often invented, told and re-told during periods of famine, plague, and war as coping mechanisms to help communities make sense of survival, loss, and violence. Today, amid ongoing global wars, genocide, ecocide, contagion, and relentless grief, the need for a modern fairy tale is perhaps no less urgent; to help us hold death, process sorrow, collective trauma, and regain our footing in a broken world.
Beginning in the enclosed sanctuary, the audience are drawn through four further chapters. We wander and settle into a walled paddock lined by tall trees, overlooking the North Sea. Three figures, resembling last responders clad in red suits and protective eyewear, drag heavy boughs away from what appear to be funeral pyres, revealing mounds of earth beneath. As they begin to excavate, their measured movements dissolve into frantic distress which feel charged with an agonising mix of grief, anger and torment. They dig urgently, throwing clods of dirt high in an apocalyptic scene. Glints of silver-suited bodies break through the earth, and an alarming realisation takes hold: they are exhuming bodies.
The scene is difficult to encounter without bringing to mind the death and devastation that has entered our visual field through the ongoing violence in Palestine, as well as the haunting visuals of mass graves and cremations in India and globally during the pandemic. Such imagery raises uncomfortable questions about what it means to encounter, reproduce or aestheticise images of mass death within performance. Yet, in Peake's wider practice of making absence present, the scene registered for me as an encounter with an intensified sense of collective grief and a bringing-to-life of the accumulated losses we continue to be exposed to through images of death circulating around us.
The exhumers collapse limply as the bodies wake and crawl out of their graves on all fours, carrying the weight of their listless exhumers on their backs. As roles invert, the veil between life and death disintegrates, leaving us suspended between this world and that. Who is carrying who?
The audience retreat into the sheltered interior of the stately home. As we ascend the wooden staircase, a guide dressed again in white strikes a hand-held gong in a ritual-like scene, sending a low, metallic chime reverberating through the stone walls. Looking upward through the architectural drop, a pregnant performer in red moves on the landing above, gripping two heavy dumbbells. Her exposed belly carries the weight of impending life against the mass in her hands—a body bearing a double labour. A somatic call-and-response unfolds with each toll of the gong as they execute heavy, swinging, exhausted movements on their descent. The reverberations feel like a sonic tether bonding the invoked spirit realm to the physical world. The person follows the gong player into the darkness of the gallery beyond.
We follow on through the corridors into the Picture Gallery, its wood-panelled walls crowded with gilded frames, heavy furniture, and vaulted ceilings. In the hall stands a piano and a harp. We settle among still performers as Henry Rinehart’s marble statue of Clytie watches over us. As custodians manually draw heavy blackout drapes across the lofty windows pitching the room into darkness, it erupts with movement. Without sight, we are left to our own imaginative devices. We hear bodies slither, scramble, writhe, and heave against the carpeted floor as a frenzied chorus of sighs, gasps, and sensuality fills the void. Then, the drapes are suddenly yanked open. Daylight floods the gallery, instantly freezing the figures wherever they land: under the piano, draped over furniture, or suspended in mid-motion. In the light, we confront our projected imaginations against the frozen bodies. This cycle is repeated in immediate succession, the interplay of light and darkness turning the gallery into a flickering zoetrope. My eyes suddenly fall upon the sunflower in Clytie’s hand, the nymph who, consumed by her longing for the sun god Helios, was transformed into a sunflower forever yearning for light in her darkness, reaching towards what she cannot possess.
A harpist begins to play an eerie melody. As the audience gathers on the floor in a close circle to listen, the performance pivots—its non-verbal, movement-driven choreography breaking into spoken dialogue. Standing around the perimeter, the storytellers take turns reading fragments of a text in modulated voices against the sporadic play of piano keys. It is a fable about a witch, and teenagers unearthing treasures buried deep in a glowing hill. As the narrative unfolds, the space folds in on itself as it begins to mirror the very architecture around us, weaving the harp, the piano, and the statue into its myth.
Ode to the Dark becomes a space of nurture where grief, memory, and transformation are physically held, felt, pressed and reshaped, insisting that darkness and absence are never empty. At Hospitalfield, this offering takes on a site-responsive quality, allowing the architecture and landscape to become co-conspirators in mythic world-building. In AD 1260, Benedictine monks from Arbroath Abbey built Hospitalfield as a hospice for the sick and a shelter for pilgrims along the North Sea coast, cultivating medicinal herbs, native plants, and exotic flora in its gardens to prepare remedies for those in their care. Suspended in deep slumber across the walled garden, the performer-dreamers are perhaps embodying an act of restoration, drawing us back into the site's long-standing tradition of care and healing.
Throughout her wider practice, Florence Peake continuously treats the body as both an architectural form and a site of somatic memory. Through the use of material languages featuring clay and plaster, she renders tangible what has been lost, solidifying negative space and leaving behind ghostly impressions of bodies, fabric and life after they slipped away. Who is remembering who?
Shalmali Shetty is an independent curator and writer based in Glasgow and working between the UK and India. Her research interests include themes of archives, memory, hauntology and material culture studies. shalmalishetty.wordpress.com @shalmali9
Presented on 16 August, the performance Ode to the Dark: A Modern Fairy Tale unfolded as part of Florence Peake’s broader exhibition, Your Meaning Not Your Materiality, running at Hospitalfield until 4 October 2026.
Thanks to Hospitalfield for supporting Shalmali’s travel to attend.