The 24 Hour Experience

Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by many, and something Michelle Dunn will be talking about in her shows Death Over Lunch and Let’s Talk About Death for the 24 Hour Experience in Ballarat.
Essentially the event is an immersive experience that begins at noon on November 21 and finishes at noon on November 22 with a show every hour covering everything from Chinese culture in Ballarat to Michelle’s shows of death.
“The topic of death is quite interesting; it’s universal, we’re all gonna die at some point but no one really likes to talk about it – so I thought that would be a really interesting topic to start exploring,” Michelle says.
The topic appealed to Michelle both for its universal nature, but also after being given a list of local organisations early on in planning for the event which featured the Bereavement Network.
“In the very beginning it was just about exploring ideas that might be interesting and when I looked down the list I really got stuck with the Bereavement Network and was really interested in who they were and what they did,” she says.
The interest soon lead to a series of meetings with the network to discover what they offer and what they’d be interested in and then Michelle’s idea took hold. In two shows she will look at creating positive discussions around death; one through the use of soundscapes from interviews she has conducted and the other through a general discussion.
“The real focus for us is about having candid positive conversations that, I guess, free people a bit and enable them to go away from the show and have those conversations in their own lives with partners and family and kids,” Michelle says.
Surprisingly, from interviewing numerous people on their experiences with death for her soundscapes, Michelle found that all were very open with their experiences. In particular, she interviewed a woman who was facing death herself.
“One of the women I interviewed recently was diagnosed with breast cancer, had a mastectomy and went into remission and last year she was diagnosed again for the second time with cancer,” she says.
“When I asked her, ‘Would you be interested? Obviously you would have thought about death to have been faced with death twice’, she said it would be an honour and a really cathartic process to be able to talk to me about this. So it’s interesting for people who are actually facing death or the possibility of dying that they are sort of grateful to be able to have a conversation about it.”
Throughout her interviews Michelle also talked with a doctor in an emergency ward, someone who has been affected by suicide and a woman who, when she was 9 years old, had a fight with her mother who had a heart attack and died during the argument. The personal stories open up the conversation, and really bring home that everyone has some story to tell or an experience with death and grieving.
These interviews will be used as part of the soundscape in Let’s Talk About Death and to open up the discussion about the normally taboo subject.
“The voices in the soundscape are really speaking things that I think will hit home to people and remove it from being, ‘Oh, I know that person’, and associating it with that person’s family. I hope that removing the visual aspects helps people connect to it on a universal level and perhaps to their own life as well,” she says.
One of the biggest things Michelle has learnt, and that she hopes audiences will too, is that by having the discussion of death it takes away the fear from the inevitable.
“The universal thing that keeps coming out of these conversations is that people who are really faced with death, whether it’s from someone they know or directly, they become much more, not aggressive in living, but really driven to live the best possible life they can,” she says.
“It’s almost if we were able to be more public in our discussions or in our grief, that grief and death becomes more accepted to be more talked about and I think life becomes more richer because of that.”
Shows are scheduled for every hour of the event, to find out more information and to purchase tickets visit 24hourexperience.com.au.
Written by Amanda Sherring
When & Where: Various locations, Ballarat – November 21-22