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.
In this workshop you’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.
Our goal is to help you build something uniquely yours from the most ordinary movements—walking, simple gestures, your natural pace. What you create becomes a visible expression of your story, something you can see and feel that didn't exist before. It's deeply personal yet universally recognizable—and in witnessing one another, you'll discover you're not alone in what you carry. This shared practice offers presence when you feel unmoored, recognition of what you've carried, and a sense of forward momentum.
Results
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, NYC
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, MA
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
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.