Release the Grief
The art of expressing grief and loss through movement
In this workshop, you'll move toward what you've lost—not away from it. You'll discover how to stay connected to your love, carry it with presence and dignity, and find relief not by resolving grief, but by honoring it through your body. You'll leave with a practice that grounds you, renews your sense of connection, and offers a way to be with loss when words aren't enough.
We'll do this through simple, embodied movement—no experience required, no pressure to explain or analyze, no need to perform strength or resolution.
MARCH 12TH WORKSHOP IS NOW CLOSED
This workshop is for you if...
You're tired of being told to let go, move on or find closure.
Therapy speak and healing journeys feel inadequate, performative, and/or exhausting.
You need relief that doesn't demand resolution.
You want to feel less isolated in what you carry.
What we’ll explore
• how to let your body articulate what your mind can’t resolve
• how walking and gesture can shift emotional weight
• how a personal story can take shape as a living image you can move with, not just think about
• how to transform isolation into connection (with what was lost, with your own body, with others)
How the workshop unfolds
3 sections
Walk
Propelled by love rather than loss, a meditative practice of stillness in motion creates a new internal relationship with what is absent. Here you find your natural pace and presence–establishing a feeling that what was lost is a guide, not a wound.
Gesture
What you carry internally begins to find external form. Through deliberate bodily shape, the intangible becomes visible.
Integration
Walking and gesture converge, held together by music as a subtle organizing force. Each screen becomes an intimate stage. What begins as your solitary story remains yours, yet ceases to be yours alone. In witnessing one another move, we recognize ourselves across the distance. Something shifts—a release, a shared understanding that we are not isolated in our grief, our loss, our longing.
What makes this different
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No experience required. No pressure to explain your story. No expectation to "be strong" or reach any particular emotional destination.
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Just your natural pace. Your body's wisdom. And a guided structure that helps the invisible become visible—not for analysis, but for recognition.
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Through three simple elements—walking, gesture, and music—you'll create something that didn't exist before: a living image of your grief that you can return to, that grounds you, that reminds you: what you carry is not a burden. It's evidence of love.
Results
Nobody would be joyful or otherwise emotionally resonant without expressing it in or through the body—grief is just another one of these deep emotions that needs to find an expression. I strongly recommend Jil's workshop as a tremendous help in getting this to the surface.
—Dr. Oskar Aszmann, Professor, Medical University of Vienna, Austria
Participating in this workshop freed me from invisibility. I felt I could, for the first time, hold my feelings and experiences gently and place them with love. The workshop showed me how to place my truth outside my body and mind, yet still within my awareness.
—Martha Smith, Wellfleet, Massachusetts
I found the "Release the Grief" workshop to be a profound experience in moving through grief in its many forms. You are no longer alone while you physicalize your individual journey alongside others in this unique workshop.
—Karen Bernard, Artistic and Executive Director of New Dance Alliance, New York City
The "Release the Grief" workshop Jil offers will leave a lasting impression on your imagination. The rich symbolism she explores can be experienced deeply by participants of all generations.
—Sylvain Bleau, Producer, Cinedanse, Montreal, Canada
Jil's visionary grapple with loss and grief reflects a kind of deliberation that is reminiscent of the marvelous grounding in mortality found in The Roses, a series of late-life poems originally written in French by the great German-language poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. This workshop is highly recommended!
—N.M. Hoffman, Poet, New York City
Photo: Adrian Buckmaster
I am a multidisciplinary visual and performing artist. For over a decade, I’ve been developing Widow, a recurring theatrical figure who explores grief, beauty, and transcendence through deliberate, embodied gesture. My work emerges from a deeply personal process—blending autobiography, concentrated presence, and meticulously crafted movement.
Widow has appeared across a series of live performances, films, video installations, and in print. These works have garnered not only critical acclaim but multiple international awards and have been presented in theaters, cinemas, museums, galleries, and concert halls worldwide—in contexts spanning contemporary dance, performance, art film, and visual culture.
Born from an autobiographical and imaginal process, Widow has evolved into a symbolic language—one through which others can explore their own stories, using movement and image rather than explanation.
From this, the workshops emerged: a participatory, embodied form of creative expression now shared across the U.S. and Canada.
$97
90 minute online workshop
60 minute practice + 30 minute Q & A
Thursday, March 12, 2026
1:00pm (EST)
This is a small group workshop.
MARCH 12TH WORKSHOP IS NOW CLOSED
You will need to have at least 12 feet in front of your device for the walking exercise.