This book explores parallels between two ancient practices – performance and medicine – that are currently coming together in unprecedented ways on theatre stages, in arts and health initiatives, in ...healthcare education and in medical settings. This convergence sheds new light on what it means to be human at a time when the ‘concept of the human’ is being ‘exploded’ (Braidotti, 2013). It studies performance through the lens of medicine, revealing how theatre, like medicine, puts the body on display in order to understand and alleviate human suffering.And it examines medicine as a sort of theatre in which doctors, nurses and patients perform. A wide range of medical performances serve to illustrate the discussion: main stage productions such as Jack Thorne’s adaption of Woycek starring John Boyega, Clod Ensemble’s Placebo and Bryony Kimmings and Brian Lobel’s the Pacifists Guide on the War Against Cancer, but also scenes enacted in a hospital ward, a pathology lab, medical school classrooms, a simulation suite and rehearsal studios. Written from the perspective of a theatre and performance scholar, the book draws on the multiple perspectives enabled by this reciprocal exploration. Through this it addresses recent radical shifts, often provoked by advances in biomedical science, relating to human corporeality, embodiment, subject-hood and subjectivity; and it investigates resulting debates about our humanism and humaneness.
Lightwork Mermikides, Alex; Lavender, Andy; Duggan, Patrick
2022
eBook
Collection of performance texts from the experimental theatre company Lightwork, along with short essays by key participants. Geared around collaborative creation, it covers an array of approaches ...including devised, multimedia and site-specific work, providing a rich resource for those making or studying contemporary performance. 20 illus.
Performance and the Medical Body Alex Mermikides, Gianna Bouchard / Nicola Shaughnessy, John Lutterbie / Alex Mermikides, Gianna Bouchard
2016, 2016-02-25
eBook
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.
•Drama based workshops in nursing education embedded in the undergraduate adult nursing modules across all years of the curriculum.•The drama-based workshops use techniques from physical theatre, ...aligned to clinical simulation learning outcomes with an emphasis on “Care.”•Drama based workshops enhanced the nursing students self-awareness, empathy, communication skills and self-care within the context of care in nursing.
This paper provides an overview of an innovation using drama-based workshops which have been embedded into undergraduate nursing curriculum in a Higher Education Institute in the United Kingdom (UK). Drama techniques are gaining increasing recognition in nursing education particularly around the way in which they can support the learning of communication and interpersonal skills in a multi-sensory approach.
The drama-based workshops have become embedded in the nursing curriculum alongside nursing clinical simulations. The workshops use techniques from physical theatre with an emphasis on “care” that are aligned to the specific learning outcomes of the clinical simulation.
The workshops were developed across all years of the curriculum in response to student feedback which demonstrated how drama can enable students to develop self-awareness, empathy, communication skills and self-care.
The Drama based workshops have enabled students the opportunity to explore and reflect on their own interpersonal communication as well as the embodiment of care to their patients, colleagues and themselves.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
6.
The scientist center stage Mermikides, Alex
Nature immunology,
05/2013, Volume:
14, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
While rehearsing for a performance for London's Science Museum, I ask how scientists and theater artists might collaborate to produce theater that serves the science as much as the art.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper explores the capacity of theatre to complicate, multiply and extend the dynamic of looking and caring, as this is reflected in two recent productions, devised by the author. Bloodlines ...(2012-16) follows a patient undergoing treatment for life-threatening blood cancer, subjecting him to an anatomical strip-tease through the use of medical images with a “surprisingly emotional” effect (audience response to performance at the Science Museum, London). Careful (in development, since 2016) follows five over-stretched nurses as they care for their patients, putting the audience in the position of those patients. The piece allows subject positions to be blurred, so that “I and you becomes I am you” (Spiro et al. 1993).
This short article responds to two recent conferences on performance and science: the Splice Symposium (Chimera Network/University of Notre Dame) and Performing Science (University of Lincoln). ...Rather than a conventional conference report, the author reflects on a selection of presentations in the light of issue one of ISR's 'theatre and science' series.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We report a survey of audience members' responses (147 questionnaires collected at seven performances) and 10 in-depth interviews (five former patients and two family members, three medical ...practitioners) to bloodlines, a medical performance exploring the experience of haematopoietic stem-cell transplant as treatment for acute leukaemia. Performances took place in 2014 and 2015. The article argues that performances that are created through interdisciplinary collaboration can convey otherwise 'inaccessible' illness experiences in ways that audience members with personal experience recognise as familiar, and find emotionally affecting. In particular such performances are adept at interweaving 'objectivist' (objective, medical) and 'subjectivist' (subjective, emotional) perspectives of the illness experience, and indeed, at challenging such distinctions. We suggest that reflecting familiar yet hard-to-articulate experiences may be beneficial for the ongoing emotional recovery of people who have survived serious disease, particularly in relation to the isolation that they experience during and as a consequence of their treatment.
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