GIGI'S DANCE: WHEN GRIEF BECOMES ART

When I began Here I Am, I knew it would not only be a film about love and mortality — it would also become a record of the ripples left behind. These diaries are where I share the moments that shaped me most, fragments that may never appear on screen, but live in me as part of the story.

When Rayya died, grief didn’t fall on one person alone. It rippled through everyone who loved her — Liz, her partner; Maha, her sister; Gigi, her ex-wife and her close companions Stacey and Shawn; her family, her nieces, her friends. Each carried it in their own way.

One of the most powerful expressions of that grief came through Gigi.

In the days after the funeral, she didn’t reach for words. She reached for movement. Alone in her living room, she began to dance. Her body became the vessel for what language could not contain — sorrow, rage, tenderness, and the impossible beauty of love colliding with loss.

To see her channel her grief into dance was to witness creativity in its rawest form — not performance, but survival.

In the midst of unbearable absence, her instinct was to move. To let her body breathe what words could not. That dance became more than movement. It was love made visible, a thread of connection back to Rayya, and a testament to the healing art can offer when nothing else will hold us.

I had the privilege of capturing that moment on camera. Later, it became the seed of a short film we created together — a meditation on how movement can transform grief into something alive.

Dance doesn’t erase grief, but it gives it a form. It allows it to move through us instead of hardening inside us. In that sense, dance — like music, like painting, like writing — is not only an art, but a medicine.

For Gigi, it was a way of staying connected to Rayya. For me, it was a reminder that grief is not something to “get over,” but something to create with.

Have you ever found that creativity — in dance, song, words, or another form — has helped you carry grief?

WATCH GIGI’S DANCE BELOW.