Alex Mermikides

Performance and medicine are now converging in unprecedented ways. London's theatres reveal an appetite for medical themes – John Boyega is subjected to medical experiments in Jack Thorne's Woycek, while Royal National Theatre produces a novel musical about cancer. At the same time, performance-makers seek to improve our health, using dance to increase mobility for those living with Parkinson's disease or performance magic as physiotherapy for children with paraplegia. Performance, Medicine and the Human surveys this emerging field, providing case studies based on the author's own experience of devising medical performances in collaboration with cancer patients, biomedical scientists and healthcare educators. Examining contemporary medical performance reveals an ancient preoccupation, evident in the practices of both theatre and healing, with the human. Like medicine, theatre puts the human on display in order to understand and, perhaps, alleviate the suffering inherent to the human condition. Medical practice constitutes a sort of theatre in which doctors, nurses and patients perform their humaneness and humanity. This insight has much to offer at a time when established notions of the human are being radically rethought, partly in response to emerging biomedical knowledge. Performance, Medicine and the Human argues that contemporary medical performance can shed new light on what it means to be human – and what we mean by the human, the humane, humanism and the humanities – at a time when these notions are being fundamentally rethought. Its insights are relevant to scholars in performance studies, the medical humanities, healthcare education and beyond.

Performance, Medicine and the Human

Andy Lavender

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and ‘non-text’, were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker’s or spectator’s point of view. This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields – for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

Alex Mermikides

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