Vinia Dakari* (Greece) and Catherine Rogers** (USA)
The special topic of this issue, Medicine and/in Theatre, grew out of the currently heightened interest in the interface of theatre and medicine that has grown steadily over the years and has acquired a multidimensional character. Attentive to the expanding literature on medical performance, applied theatre in health and care, theatre-based medical education, and many other areas of research and practice, the articles collected here suggest new models of interdisciplinarity organized around the concept of a “critical turn” (or “second wave”) in the Medical Humanities.[1]
Rita Charon, MD, PhD, founder and director of the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University in New York, attests to the power of story to transform medicine:
Stories in medicine are not just for recreation. . . . When I started graduate school in the Department of English at Columbia, years after completing medical school and training, I found what I had been craving: a solid, complex, scholarly explanation for the phenomena that I had been living through as a physician—listening to fragmented, chaotic stories from relative strangers while having the duty to somehow understand their significance. . . . What do I do with the paradoxes, the ambiguities, the contradictory stories from a family member, the gaps in memory, the fact that the stories changed from month to month? What do I do with my own doubt about the meaning of what I am hearing?[2]
We hope that this issue contributes to the conversation by reflecting not only on the power of story to transform medicine, but also on the power of medicine to transform story, particularly story in performance.
Departing from the point where the personal and the medical narratives meet, this fresh perspective captures the creative border-crossing among the disciplines and “[reorients] the question of experience.” It suggests we move away from a dualist mode of thinking, such as patient/doctor, humanities/medicine, or affect/pragmatism, into “a more ambiguous and risky intellectual space” of osmosis and entanglement.[3]
The theatre/performing arts manifold is itself an intergeneric hybrid that has always welcomed such entanglements. The gaze in theatre has been paralleled with the anatomical/dissecting gaze, while the experience of live theatre–the presence, that is, of living bodies–allows for ample philosophical and medical exploration. Theatre carves out a space for stories, ideas, and bodies to blend and interact in real time and with measurable effect.
More than a mere instrument at the service of medical training and therapy, “the aesthetic dimension of an arts-in-health project opens up the potential of the work from a functional transaction to a creative encounter.”[4] The dialogue of theatre with medicine probes more deeply into the essence of being and sheds light on “the existential transformation illness brings about.”[5]
Medical procedures and narratives of illness provide rich ground for interdisciplinary collaborations among theatre scholars and practitioners, medical educators, and health professionals. These entanglements fan out in multiple directions: from theoretical and creative explorations on the aesthetics of performance, to new approaches to acting and spectatorship, to ethical medical training, community outreach, and global health; from cultural capital enhancement to social impact and wellbeing.
Our selection of articles for this issue, therefore, is intended to provide a showcase of all the above: the multiplicity of disciplinary, thematic, and methodological trajectories of the theatre/medicine encounter from scholars and practitioners around the world.
Indeed, our project owes its multimodal, multivocal, and multidisciplinary character to our thirteen contributors; to their deep knowledge of their respective fields and their insightful handling of this sensitive subject matter. In his enlightening reading of the topic, Georges Banu, turns to directors as diverse as Warlikowski, Ivo van Hove, Copi, and Castellucci in order to comment on the popularity and the diversified use of the hospital motif in contemporary theatre productions. Evi Prousali follows the latest theoretical trajectories of spectators’ perceptive operations informed by neurophysiology and cognitive sciences to discuss in a most compelling way “a concept of spectatorship which moved away from interpretation, towards a primarily sensory perception.”
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Through an affecting discussion of her solo theatre piece Bladder Interrupted: A Self-Story about Cancer, Mechele Leon reflects on autobiographical performance of illness, “the toll of repeating such stories, and the desired end of storytelling.” Drawing on her own innovative performance practice, Alex Mermikides explores the dynamics of the gaze and “the ability of performance to create complex layered experiences of illness and of medical encounters.” In the same vein of creative experimentation with the intersection of theatre and medicine, Amy Chan and Natalie Cheung look into (post)dramaturgies of light emerging from the intersection of theatre, history, and medicine and evoking “reflection on and reassessment of the concepts of medicine, contemporary theatre, and its aesthetics.”
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Departing from a penetrating interrogation of Modernity in general and modern medicine in particular, Swati Simha draws on childbirth related plays originating in the Global South to appraise the potential of theatre to “strip modernity of its hegemony.” Drawing on her own family’s history of childbirth, Marcia Zanelatto offers a rare insight into the process of creating her play The Birth Machine and confronts the pressing issues of childbirth and health care ethics in Brazil. Sunday Edum turns to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa as portrayed in Tracie Chima Utoh’s play Cauldron of Death to contemplate the immense value of this HIV-themed dramatic piece as both a “dictionary of prevention mechanisms” and a “healing balm for victims.”
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Tracy Bersley proposes a groundbreaking approach to actor training through the use of neurological body maps, suggesting a new understanding of “the knowledge of and appreciation for all that our brain is doing to maintain our embodied experience and understanding of the world.” Elisabeth Hostetter and Melanie Stewart perform an edifying analysis of the pedagogical aspects of the intersection of theatre and medicine manifest in testing medical students’ empathetic capacity and “help[ing] develop interpersonal aspects of doctor/patient interactions.” Departing from the critical condition of a medical world where advances in technology threaten to obscure treatment of the human, Serge Ouaknine’s fascinating essay details his hospital-based workshop where physicians learn through theatre exercises how their attitudes, gestures, and words may influence patients to take a more active role in their own healing.
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Kearsley Stewart, Nehanda Loiseau, Jules Odendahl-James, Crissi Rainer, and Evi Alexopoulos offer an illuminating, hands-on perspective on the seminal role of the humanities and arts in global health training, research, and ethics, hoping to “jumpstart new conversations and productive collaborations” among Theatre/Arts and Medicine faculties. Finally, in a riveting account of the Social and Community Theatre project that took place at San Giovanni Antica Sede Oncological Hospital in Turin (2006-08), Alberto Pagliarino expounds on the osmotic encounter of the city and the hospital “in the context of a great cathartic ritual.”
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Our gratitude extends to our editor-in-chief, Professor Savas Patsalidis, for his attentiveness to theatre’s new challenges and ever-expanding frontiers, and to all our contributors for making possible this leap into an exciting new territory. It is our hope that this special issue triggers off yet more issues and collections discussing the theatre/medicine nexus in the future, thus maintaining the momentum of this engaging dialogue.
[1] Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, “Introduction,” in Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015), p.1.
[2] https://kripalu.org/resources/storyflow-intersection-literature-and-medicine-rita-charon
[3] Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, “Entangling the Medical Humanities,” in Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015), p. 5, 38.
[4] Emma Brodzinski, Theatre in Health and Care (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 16.
[5] Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), p.14.
*Vinia Dakari is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where she also received her BA, MA and PhD degrees in English Language and Literature, American Literature and Culture, and Theatre and Performing Arts Studies respectively. She has received awards by the Aristotle University Research Committee and the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Her current research project involves field observation and data collection and analysis on the aesthetics and reception of cancer-related performance in and beyond Greece. She has previously conducted field research at Metaxas Cancer Hospital in Piraeus, Athens. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Performing Cancer: Toward an Aesthetic of the Unpresentable,” explored the aesthetic aspects of the unpresentability of cancer in performance and its impact on spectators. Her work has been presented at several international conferences and published in peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, and Gramma/Γράμμα Journal of Theory and Criticism, as well as two edited collections. She has taught drama and critical writing courses as well as seminars on cancer narratives, cultural studies, and theatre history. Vinia is the Greek Representative for the Arts Health Early Career Research Network (ECRN) and regular member of the Greek Cancer Society’s Centre for Support, Education and Research in Psychosocial Oncology Working Group.
**Catherine Rogers is a lecturer in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She has facilitated Narrative Medicine seminars for clinicians and students at Mt. Sinai, Brooklyn Lutheran, Columbia Presbyterian, and Georgetown University hospitals; at Aristotle University Thessaloniki Schools of English and Medicine; and at conferences such as the biennial International Meeting on Well-Being and Performance in Clinical Practice (Greece). A writer and performer, her plays have been seen at Dixon Place, HERE, Manhattan Theatre Source, and Women’s Project in New York; at Cleveland Public Theatre; at Hyde Park Fronterafest, Public Domain, and Salvage Vanguard in Texas. A recipient of two Fulbright awards to Greece, she taught the creative writing and performance seminars “Performing (My) World History” and “Understanding Illness and Trauma through Narrative.” Her short fiction is published in the Gettysburg Review, her plays in Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography (U Wisconsin), Historia Calamitatum (Salvage Vanguard), and Spontaneous Combustion (Theatre Source). Her work also appears in Our Changing Journey to the End: Reshaping Death (Praeger) and Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (HELAAS). As Assistant Professor Humanities, she taught creative and expository writing at New York University. Catherine was a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas where she earned the MFA in Playwriting. She holds the MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia. Catherine is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
