Publisher's Synopsis
Health studies and performance studies have too rarely walked hand-in-hand despite their mutual interest in the practical relations between human bodies and their environments. This issue of CTR features the work of artists, health researchers, and theatre scholars collaborating at the intersections between performance studies and health and traversing the professed boundary between different ways of knowing. The lived, experiencing body stands at the centre of these inquiries, which raise a number of provocative questions of interest to theatre and health practitioners alike. Can performance be a site of healing? Are we still invested in the ideal of the ?tortured artist? or can artistic creation begin from a place of pleasure rather than pain? Who defines what kinds of emotional relationships are ?useful? in the context of medical education? How do social identities get constructed around expectations of health? Do representations of illness in the social sphere build expectations of how we should experience it? What ethical blind spots arise in research-based performance? These inquiries are anchored by an investment in the potentialities of performance to make visible what is otherwise made socially invisible in subjects and bodies defined by health issues. The projects in this issue seek, each in their own way, to inspire changes in relationships and priorities among participants who are enabled by performance to imagine different modes of engagement and new possibilities for action around health and health care.
