Performance and the medical body / edited by Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard.

Date:
2016
  • Books

About this work

Description

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 and scientific 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.

Publication/Creation

London : Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.

Physical description

xv, 249 pages : black and white illustrations ; 22 cm.

Series

Contributors

Contents

List of illustrations -- List of contributors -- Acknowledgements. Introduction / Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard. Part 1 Performing the medical : A cabinet of (medical) performance curiosities / Jennifer Parker-Starbuck -- The diagnostic gaze: nineteenth-century contexts for medicine and performance / Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr -- The bluer flowers of the medical theatre: visiting with aliens, poppies and antipodean spas / Petra Kuppers -- Performing surgery / Roger Kneebone. Part 2 Performing patients : The patient performer: embodied pathography in contemporary productions / Emma Brozinski -- Fun with cancer patients: the affect of cancer / Brian Lobel -- DOC: the narrative performance of expertise / P. Solomon Lennox and Fiona Pettit -- Cough, bitch, cough: reflections on sickness and the coughing body in performance / Martin O'Brien. Part 3 Performing body parts : The pain of "specimenhood" / Gianna Bouchard -- Clod ensemble, An Anatomie in Four Quarters rehearsal notes / Suzy Willson -- On the emergent properties of death: when words fall apart / Helen Pynor -- Performing the microscopic: beyond eye and brain / Alex Mermikides -- Copy, cut, paste: humans (re-)printed: Lynn Hershman Leeson's The Infinity Engine / Gabriella Giannachi. Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages [228]-242) and index (pages [243]-249)

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    CUT.AH
    		Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 1472570782
  • 9781472570789