Filmmaker Sue Healey pays tribute to Eileen Kramer, NSW's oldest woman, through her final performance in 'Afterworld' at the Sydney Festival. The piece explores themes of death, grief, and the beauty of life's final moments, inspired by Kramer's resilience and grace.
Eileen Kramer, believed to be NSW's oldest woman, died at the age of 110 in November. Afterworld at the Sydney Festival is her final performance. 'We don't understand death, do we?' filmmaker and choreographer Sue Healey asks. 'I just don't think our contemporary life affords us rituals or ways of thinking about death.' She was inspired by the simplicity of her drawing a breath, of lifting a hand, or of drawing a line between two fingers,' Healey says.
She and Healey had worked together over 10 years on several dance films, including On View: Icons, which premiered at the 2024 Sydney Festival, and award-winning short film Eileen. Working with Kramer gave Healey an insight into the end of a life, which she drew upon to make her latest work, Afterworld, with composer and musician Laurence Pike. She quotes a 2020 edition of musician Nick Cave's The Red Hand Files, in which he writes about grief attuning people to the 'thrilling emergency' of the present. 'The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains,''I witnessed her tenacity, her grip on life, of not wanting to let go, and the slow, natural demise of her body, but not her mind — her mind was crystal-clear to the end.'I'm just so grateful to her for showing me the transition through the threshold from life to death.'She stars on screen — opposite dancers and Pike performing live on stage — as an older Eurydice, from the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice, about a man who travels to the Underworld to try to bring back his lost love. 'Eurydice was the epitome of beauty, she was the love of Orpheus's life. And Eileen was the epitome of beauty as well. Her spirit was just filled with incredible grace,' Healey says.'I still can't believe that we've lost her, but she will live on through this work,' Healey say
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