Performance and the Medical Body
Performance and the Medical Body
Alex Mermikides
Gianna Bouchard
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.
Available
2016
978-1-4725-7078-9
Study
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
Alex Mermikides
Alex is the D’Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health, based in the GKT School of Medical Education. The D’Oyly Carte position aims to enhance encounters between patients and healthcare professionals through embedding arts and humanities in medical education. Alex contributes to teaching and curriculum development in the Values-Based Clinical Practice theme of the medical degree programme. Alex’s research interest is in contemporary performance and how it relates to medicine. Her recent publications include Performance and the Medical Body (co-edited with Gianna Bouchard) and Performance, Medicine and the Human and she is currently working on the Routledge Companion for Performance and Medicine. Her research also involves devising performances about medical experience with her theatre company, as well as developing performance-based approaches to communication skills education. Her work has featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Educational Supplement, Nature Immunology and on This Week (BBC Radio 4).
Gianna Bouchard
Gianna Bouchard is Head of Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her interdisciplinary research explores the interface between medicine and performance. She is the author of Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2020).