Medical performance and the ‘inaccessible’ experience of illness: An exploratory study

© 2016 Medical Humanities. All rights reserved. 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

Brilliant theatre-making at the National: devising, collective creation and the director's brand

This article assesses the health of collective creation within British devised theatre in the early part of the twenty-first century. Using the Royal National Theatre as a case study, I argue that while devising has recently enjoyed increased recognition and acceptance, this ‘mainstreaming’ has come at the cost of its identification as a collective practice. Documentation on the creative practices of Théàtre de Complicité, Katie Mitchell and the War Horse (2008) company will demonstrate that devising's shift from the margins to the mainstream of British theatre has resulted in an increasing separation between an ethos of collectivity and a quest for innovative theatrical product

The scientist center stage

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

Careful

Dance and theatre preformance and artist led workshops designed to enhance nurses' delivery of compassionate care