Between flowers and trumpets, theater maker Sacha Muller practices his own farewell: ‘As if I am alone on a boat called cancer’

Sacha Muller (42) has a red clown nose on his nose. He sits on a wooden plank carried on the shoulders of his theater company. One actor wears a yellow hat, another a bowler hat. A clarinet and a trumpet sound through the street. Flowers stick out of baskets and coat pockets. It looks like a carnival parade.

Then Muller’s voice sounds through the headphones that have been distributed to the audience. “This is my farewell,” he says. “At least, this is how I imagine it.”

It is a rainy afternoon in Amsterdam West. The Processiona theater project initiated by Adelheid Roosen (theater collective Female Economy) and directed by artistic director Katrien van Beurden (international players collective Troupe Courage), continues through the neighborhood. Past porches and parked bicycles, past people who put down their shopping bags to get a better look. Children point, cyclists slow down.

‘Death sits next to me in bed’

In 2019, Muller was diagnosed with cancer. Lymph node cancer, he later says, “A form of cancer that will never go away.” If the disease grows in a dangerous place, it should be treated again with chemotherapy. “I am terminally ill. I have already received a final bill, but there is no date on it yet.”

At the moment he feels “very fit and strong”. But death is no longer abstract. “He sits next to me in bed. He walks behind me in the supermarket. I just don’t know when he will strike.”

Through the headphones, Muller tells how he told his theater group. That he is terminally ill. Not afraid of death, but afraid of saying goodbye. “Sacha, we are going to practice that together,” they said.

That’s what’s happening this afternoon. Muller practices his farewell in the middle of the city. “I practice the last two and a half hours of my life with this procession,” he says. “Together with people who have practiced for years how to relate to death.”

By this he refers to his fellow players: people from Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, among others. For them, grieving is an experience that has become fixed in the body.

Born with death

After walking for a while, the procession stops at a tree. People form a semicircle. Actor Mustafa Staiti (40) climbs up between the branches. He did that too as a child, he says: climbing olive trees in Jenin, where he grew up. Upstairs the world seemed brighter. Downstairs there were checkpoints, guns, violence. “Death is no stranger to me,” he says. “I have lost so many people.”

Muller met him in 2013, when his theater collective visited Palestine. The two became friends. “He is my soulmate,” says Staiti. When Muller told him he was going to die, he was in shock. But there was something else too. “This is the first time I have seen a normal death,” he says. “The first time that I can really say goodbye. That I can hold someone, share sadness, have time to process it.”

Then: “In Palestine we are born with death and have to learn to live with it. You are born with life and have to learn to die.”

Learning to deal with grief and mortality, in other words, is the idea behind it The Procession. Roosen wanted to bring the funeral procession back into the streets after her theater life friend George Groot died. “And I was that theater lifelong friend for Katrien,” says Muller, about artistic director Van Beurden of Troupe Courage.

There is breathing space everywhere in the performance, inspired by the Italian theater form Commedia dell’Artewhich emerged in the sixteenth century as a distraction from pandemics, war and crisis. As soon as a story threatens to become too heavy, Joe Sinduhije (29), a former student of Muller, blows air into it with a megaphone decorated with flowers. Over and over again he shouts: “Karibu!” – Swahili for ‘welcome’.

The boat called cancer

The procession starts moving again. Two boys on fat bikes look curiously at the group. “Nuisance!” they shout, half joking. They first keep their distance, circle around the procession and drive a bit forward. Then they connect anyway.

The group stops again near the water. There is a small boat moored there. Muller steps in. While the rest remain behind on the quay, he slowly drifts away.

From the boat he addresses his mother (represented here by a meter-high doll), who died at the age of forty-four. “How do I do this, mom?” he asks. “Dying? And why is it so lonely?”

With the voice of the smallest boy in him, he continues: “I wish so much that you were here. That you could hold me. That I could cry on your lap.”

He looks briefly at the people on the shore. “I feel like I’m on a little boat at sea called cancer.”

Friends, theater makers, the public and curious passers-by stand on the quay. People who have known him for years and people who only saw him for the first time an hour ago. “I was afraid people would drift away from me,” says Sacha. “But they are standing here, on the quay. With hands that know how to carry.”

Funeral of man who is still alive

The procession continues towards the Jerusalem Church. Along the way, everyone receives a plastic flower. Only later does it become clear what it is intended for. A few hours earlier, most people were still strangers to each other. Now they walk together to the funeral of a man who is still alive.

Inside it smells of wet coats and flowers. Muller is carried inside on his wooden plank, accompanied by chamber choir Cappella Amsterdam and reed quintet Calefax. From that plateau he looks around the room, in his eyes a fear that seems to fall outside the game. The actor has made way for a little boy who loves life far too much to leave it behind, but is now in the middle of saying goodbye.

The farewell is loving. Friends sing, pray and read poems. Sometimes it gets confrontational. Bird sounds fill the church. Singers dressed in black sing lyrics to him that frighten him. Then it becomes too much for Muller. He tries to run away.

His friends catch him. They put their arms around him and take him back to the place where his coffin will lie. Mustafa doesn’t lose sight of him for a second.

Has he already planned his real funeral? Not entirely, says Muller, although he has thought about it a lot. But when the time comes, it may look like the procession. “I want there to be dancing, to laugh and to have room for tears.”