School of Dying
Please know that School of Dying does not provide any grief counseling or psychological help.
We birthed the School of Dying as a space to study the tied realities of our human finiteness to our momentary aliveness. Daily life, psyche and art interest us deeply in this relationship. In a way School of Dying exists to celebrate the psycho-sensual study of being alive, of becoming ourselves in light of death.
It's not always easy to acknowledge curiosity, fear and denial about death and 'loosing ourselves'. Why do the realities and imaginations about dying seem surrounded by such taboos and inequalities in our society and health care systems?
Do you have a specific reason in your life or art that fuels your interest in death and in the unknown? If you are like us — looking for a deeper relationship to the subject of dying — we would like to offer this space to you with some sensitivity, humor, 'not knowing' and pragmatism.
It takes courage to take part in experiencing our life and death as a creative process. Countless questions arise, like ones related to the mystical and the unseen, to our attachments to who we are, to loss, to the staging of our burial practices, to our physical transformations, the daily dissolvings and creatings, or to our sexual numbness and aliveness.
With open ears for your desires, offers and projects, School of Dying will facilitate workshops, events, forums and performances. We also gather and share resources and feature a program for performing artists called 'process as guide'.
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May the School of Dying grow as a communal life school!
A L E X A N D R A M A S E T T I
lives in Vienna and is a member of the world wide Death Café Community. She is organizing the Death Café Vienna.
In her daily life as a licensed psychotherapist she accompanies people on a part of their path. In relation to grief and death, sometimes that togetherness extends to the end of someone's life.
M E L A N I E M A A R
works in performance, scenography, dance, teaching and Somatic Sexology between New York City and Vienna.
She guides people in exploring art-life processes, sexuality and relationships in the midst of the theater of our lives. Through movement, symbolic embodyment, and our psycho-sensual selves our 'beingness' and our 'dissapearance' can reveal a voice of it's own.
All images on this site are by ©Melanie Maar
Except portrait Alexandra by Monika Kolarz,
portrait Melanie by Christian Schröder
School of Dying is a registered non profit organization.