Eileen Kramer stars in Afterworld by Sue Healey and Laurence Pike at Sydney Festival

“We don’t really understand death, do we?” asks filmmaker and choreographer Sue Healey. “I just feel that our contemporary lives don’t offer us rituals or ways of thinking about death.”

Healey had been contemplating this question long before her collaborator, dancer Eileen Kramer, passed away in November at the age of 110. “Kramer inspired me through the way she simply breathed, or lifted her hand, or drew a line between two fingers,” she said.

She and Healey collaborated for over a decade on several dance films, including ‘On View: Icons’, which premiered at the 2024 Sydney Festival, and the award-winning short film ‘Eileen’. This collaboration with Kramer gave Healey a profound understanding of life’s end, which she has incorporated into her latest work, ‘Afterlife’, a collaboration with composer and musician Lawrence Pike.

She quotes a passage from musician Nick Cave’s 2020 ‘Red Hand Files’, where he wrote that grief makes people more attuned to the “thrilling emergency” of the present moment. “The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence becomes a kind of feverish commentary on what remains,” Cave wrote. “That’s what Eileen taught me,” says Healey.

“I witnessed her resilience, her clinging to life, her not wanting to let go, and the slow, natural decline of her body, but her mind was always clear until the end. She wasn’t afraid of death, she was fascinated by what the experience would be like. I’m so grateful that she showed me that transition from life to death.”

‘Afterlife’ opens next week at the Sydney Festival and is Kramer’s final performance. She appears on screen as an older Eurydice, opposite live dancers and Pike on stage, a character from the Greek myth ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, which tells the story of a man who travels to the underworld to try to bring back his lost love. “Eurydice is the embodiment of beauty, she’s the love of Orpheus’ life. And Eileen was the embodiment of beauty. Her spirit was incredibly gracious,” says Healey.

“I still can’t believe we’ve lost Eileen, but she will live on through this work,” says Healey.

Born in 1914, Kramer first saw the dance troupe of Jewish Austrian immigrant Gertrud Bodenwieser, one of Australia’s first modern dance companies, when she was in her 20s. This inspired her to start dancing. She joined the troupe in the 40s, which led her to move overseas and perform professionally in countries including India, France, the UK and the US.

When publishing her book ‘Life is Letting Me Dance’ in 2023, Kramer said she “fell in love with dance immediately”. However, Kramer stopped dancing in the 60s to care for her late husband, Israeli-American filmmaker Baruch Shadmi. After his death, she returned to the stage as a dancer and choreographer in her 80s, joining the Clover Performance Collective before moving back to Sydney at the age of 99.

In Sydney, she met Healey, who became one of her key collaborators. The choreographer speaks highly of Kramer and her impact on Australian modern dance, calling her resilient, witty and honest. “She wasn’t the best dancer, and she was the first to tell you that. She was a lyrical, soft dancer, not an athletic dancer… but it was her spirit that was important. It was her beauty that was important,” says Healey.

During the last period of Kramer’s life, Healey would visit her every day. They would talk about myths and the underworld, themes that are incorporated into ‘Afterlife’. Kramer would also talk about her experiences with the Bodenwieser Ballet, where she learned an expressionist style of dance – which was very different to the post-modern style Healey was trained in. “We didn’t use our facial expressions or emotions to show drama. It was a very stripped back, abstract way of moving the body,” Healey explains.

“Kramer came from German expressionist dance, where everything was driven by emotion. So, I loved learning about that side of dance history, because it’s not like that now. I had access to history through Eileen. To understand the past through collaborating with her was such a precious gift for me.”

‘Afterlife’ began with an improvised album Pike created during the COVID lockdowns, which he then recorded with the Sydney Philharmonia Choir in a 19th-century gothic church. Pike describes the album, ‘The Undreamt-of-Centre’, released in 2024, as a musical reimagining of a requiem mass, a ritual performed for the souls of the dead. “A requiem is a musical ritual that’s been around for centuries, and people have interpreted it over and over again,” he explains.

When he first performed the album with the choir, Pike found himself emotionally moved: “It really resurfaced some of the feelings I had at the time, which I had previously suppressed.” His requiem grew out of his thoughts about the sonic potential of the form and how he could subvert it – he wanted to mix choral vocals with improvised solo drums and electronics. It also grew out of thinking about Greek mythology, inspired by modernist poet Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, which he read during lockdown, and his own experiences of grief.

“I was thinking about the myth of Orpheus at the time, and its relationship to this whole concept of death, the threshold of death. Then, my wife’s parents passed away, one after the other. I never thought I’d be so close to home, creating a requiem in terms of personal loss,” he explains.

Pike and Healey met through a mutual collaborator, New Zealand jazz pianist Mike Nock. After talking about collaborating for years, Pike brought ‘The Undreamt-of-Centre’ to Healey. She knew immediately that she wanted to turn it into a dance work, where she could play with the “powerful imagery” of Orpheus and Eurydice. “Pike’s music is extraordinary. It’s otherworldly. It’s full of ecstasy and drama. You don’t need to understand the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to understand his lament for his love, but you can feel it,” she says.

Now, working with Healey and the dancers on ‘Afterlife’, Pike’s music feels different. “It feels more like a joyous thing to me now,” he says. That joy extends to the work as a celebration of Kramer’s life and work. “In Australia, maybe we don’t respect legacy enough. We create on the shoulders of the people who have come before us, who have laid the groundwork for us to be able to do this, like Eileen,” says Pike.

For Healey, ‘Afterlife’ is a way of processing her grief at losing Kramer, as well as the grief of her parents’ deaths during lockdown, when Pike first approached her with the album. “I’m creating a sense of crossing, of transition, of thresholds, of letting go, and ultimately of transcendence – how art can help us understand what that threshold might be.” ‘Afterlife’ is showing at the Neilson Nutshell at the Sydney Festival from January 7-11.