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This edited collection focuses on performance practice and analysis that engages with medical and biomedical sciences. After locating the ''biologization'' of theatre at the turn of the twentieth century, it examines a range of contemporary practices that respond to understandings of the human body as revealed by biomedical science. In bringing together a variety of analytical perspectives, the book draws on scholars, scientists, artists and practices that are at the forefront of current creative, scientific and academic research. Its exploration of the dynamics and exchange between performance and medicine will stimulate a widening of the debate around key issues such as subjectivity, patient narratives, identity, embodiment, agency, medical ethics, health and illness. In focusing on an interdisciplinary understanding of performance, the book examines the potential of performance and theatre to intervene in, shape, inform and extend vital debates around biomedical knowledge and practice in the contemporary moment.>
List of contents
Introduction - Alex Mermikides (Kingston University, UK) and Gianna Bouchard (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Part 1: Performing the Medical
1. A Cabinet of (Medical) Performance Curiosities - Professor Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (University of Roehampton, UK)
2. The Diagnostic Gaze: Nineteenth Century Contexts for Medicine and Performance - Associate Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford, UK)
3. The Bluer Flowers of the Medical Theatre: Visiting with Aliens, Poppies, and Antipodean Spas - Professor Petra Kuppers (University of Michigan, USA)
4. Performing Surgery - Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College London, UK)
Part 2: Performing Patients
5. DOC: The narrative performance of expertise - P. Solomon Lennox (Northumbria University, UK) and Fiona Pettit (independent scholar, UK)
6. Cough, Bitch, Cough: Reflections on Sickness and the Coughing Body in Performance - Martin O'Brien (freelance artist, UK)
7.
Fun with Cancer Patients: The Affect of Cancer - Brian Lobel (University of Chichester, UK)
8. The Patient Performer: Embodied Pathography in Contemporary Productions - Emma Brodzinski (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Part 3: Performing Body Parts
9. Clod Ensemble:
An Anatomie in Four Quarters. Some rehearsal notes - Suzy Willson (Clod Ensemble)
10.The Pain of Specimenhood - Gianna Bouchard (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
11.On the emergent properties of death: When words fall apart - Helen Pynor (freelance artist, Australia)
12.Performing the Microscopic: beyond eye and brain - Alex Mermikides (Kingston University, UK)
13.Copy, Cut, Paste - Humans (Re-)Printed: Lynn Hershman Leeson's
The Infinity Engine (2014-) - Professor Gabriella Giannachi (University of Exeter, UK)
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Alex Mermikides is D'Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health in the medical school at King's College London, UK.Gianna Bouchard is Professor of Contemporary Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her interdisciplinary research explores the interface between medicine and performance. She is the author of Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2020).John Lutterbie was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, USA. He was the director of the International Network for Cognition, Theatre and Performance and with Nicola Shaughnessy was the series editor of the Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues series.Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance at the University of Kent. She is Director of the Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance and is leading the AHRC funded project 'Imagining Autism.'
She is the author of Applying Performance (2012), Gertrude Stein (2007) and co-editor of Margaret Woffington (2008).
