Playing the cancer card: illness, performance and spectatorship

PhDPlaying the Cancer Card: Illness, Performance and Spectatorship investigates the experience of spectatorship in relation to illness, an area that has received comparatively little attention in Performance Studies. The thesis interrogates these concerns through original interviews, archival research, close textual readings of performances and performance documentation and draws on critical frameworks, primarily from performance, literary and cultural studies concerning spectatorship, illness, disability, documentation and narrative. The project analyses both my performances that exemplify being an object of spectatorship and my experiences as a spectator to the performance of illness. ! Playing the Cancer Card argues that performance, through the experiences of spectatorship that it invites, works to broker the chasm between embodied experience of illness and discourses of that experience. The Introduction reviews academic literature and examines relationships between illness and models of disability. In Chapter 1, readings of work by Sontag, Spence and Baker demonstrate how individuals may strategically reject public production of, and spectatorship to, their work. Chapter 2 analyses interviews with Baker and Marcalo, demonstrating how performance can generate tensions between artists and advocacy groups when modes of spectatorship — regarding propriety and community politics — are policed. In Chapter 3, an analysis of cancer blogs elucidates how they may redress limitations imposed by traditional narrative structures around illness, forging new relationships between the ill and their spectators. Here I also consider my performances that respond to the pervasiveness of traditional narratives. Chapter 4 examines Fun with Cancer Patients, my practice-based research project, and argues that by addressing constructions of cancer, one may create work that productively addresses spectators who both have and have not experienced cancer. In the Conclusion, I evaluate two of my projects that address illness tangentially, arguing that understanding ourselves as spectators and objects of spectatorship can expand discourses surrounding embodied experience, especially of illness

The Physical and Emotional Burden of Cancer, or, Normal, What is it Good For?

Keynote Address for Teenage Cancer Trust's 9th Annual Conference and 1st Annual World Congress of AYA Cancer Car

Proud Disclosures and Awkward Receptions: Between bodies with cancer and their audiences

This chapter will demonstrate the potential for performance to blur the boundaries between the medical and social models of disability as it applies uniquely to illness whose discourse has been historical linked to ‘cure’ and its inevitability or impossibility. The chapter draws on classic theoretical understandings of illness/cancer – by means of Arthur W. Frank and Jackie Stacey – and puts them with current conversation in disability studies (such as with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Petra Kuppers) and radical health and cancer activism/organising. By demonstrating historical and contemporary efforts to challenge the ‘sick role’ (Talcott Parsons, 1951) and the fundraising which has been built following on from this understanding of cancer, the chapter demonstrates creative and political potentials for audience/performer, starer/staree and patient/non-patient interactions in both artistic and public settings

Documenting Intimacy

Documenting Intimacy is a research initiative piloted by Dr Brian Lobel and Dr Marisa Zanotti to explore documenting one-to-one performance from the perspective of artists. The Live Art Development Agency (LADA) was invited to be a commissioning and publishing partner on the project and Alex Eisenberg (LADA) has produced the website. Project Statement We initiated a research process by asking a community of artists about their experiences with one-to-one performance and the pressures, both artistically and professionally, to document performance, and to document performance well. A number of questions arose which informed our initial conversations. These questions included: Does documenting, in a traditional sense, interrupt the intimacy which one-to-one performance often promises as its unique quality? What innovative methods can be used to capture a multitude of audience experiences? Does anyone really care about documentation or what remains after the performance? Is it purely an economic or professional pressure which demands this documentation? Can documentation be an integral piece of the performance-making process

Illness & The One-to-One Encounter (co-authored with Emily Underwood-Lee)

While the performance encounter of healthcare has been examined from the perspective of bedside manner, and in terms of the training of healthcare practitioners, this chapter looks at the experience of illness through the lens of contemporary one-to-one performance practice. The chapter examines what the world of medicine can learn from one-to-one performances, and what one-to-one arts practitioners might learn from the patient/medicine encounter. One-to-one performance has always had a critical relationship with issues of care, mutuality, shared vulnerability, and encountering the Other. Its proliferation as an art form and area of critical discourse demonstrates an ever-growing area of possibilities, particularly for the Arts/Health agenda. This chapter theorises that by purposefully considering one-to-one performance methods, artists and medical staff may find new possibilities for engaged practice. This article will use the authors’ 2019-2020 project Kicking Up Our Heels, which was created with/for 100 parents and patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital

Prospectus, August 27, 1997

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1997/1018/thumbnail.jp

Prospectus, September 4, 1996

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1996/1019/thumbnail.jp

Yellow and Red Supergiants in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Due to their transitionary nature, yellow supergiants provide a critical challenge for evolutionary modeling. Previous studies within M31 and the SMC show that the Geneva evolutionary models do a poor job at predicting the lifetimes of these short-lived stars. Here we extend this study to the LMC while also investigating the galaxy's red supergiant content. This task is complicated by contamination by Galactic foreground stars that color and magnitude criteria alone cannot weed out. Therefore, we use proper motions and the LMC's large systemic radial velocity (\sim278 km/s) to separate out these foreground dwarfs. After observing nearly 2,000 stars, we identified 317 probable yellow supergiants, 6 possible yellow supergiants and 505 probable red supergiants. Foreground contamination of our yellow supergiant sample was \sim80%, while that of the the red supergiant sample was only 3%. By placing the yellow supergiants on the H-R diagram and comparing them against the evolutionary tracks, we find that new Geneva evolutionary models do an exemplary job at predicting both the locations and the lifetimes of these transitory objects.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Ap