Performing Specimens: Contemporary Performance And Biomedical Display

by Gianna Bouchard, Nicola Shaughnessy (Editor), John Lutterbie (Editor)

Overview

Through an examination of examples from performance, museum displays and popular culture that stage the body as a specimen, Performing Specimens maps the relations between these performative acts and the medical practices of collecting, storing and showing specimens in a variety of modes and contexts. Moving from an examination of the medical and historical contexts of specimen display in the museum and the anatomy theatre to contemporary performance, Gianna Bouchard engages with examples from live art, bio-art, popular culture and theatre that stage the performer's body as a specimen. It examines the ethical relationships involved in these particular moments of display – both in the staging and in how we look at the specimen body. This is a landmark study for those working in the fields of theatre, performance and the medical humanities, with a specific focus on the ethics of display and the ethics of spectatorship, emerging at the intersection of performance and medicine.

Among the works and examples considered are 18th-century anatomical waxes from the Museo di Storia Naturale la Specola in Florence, Italy, and their contemporary version in the Bodyworlds exhibition of 'plastinated' corpses; organ retention scandals; current legislation, such as the Human Tissue Act 2004; the work of performance company Clod Ensemble and Stein|Holum Projects, the performer and disability activist, Mat Fraser and live artist, Martin O'Brien, alongside visual artists Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy , artists Peggy Shaw and ORLAN.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350035683
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	01/09/2020
Series:	Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Gianna Bouchard is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Birmingham, UK.
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).

Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance at the University of Kent. She is Director of the Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance and is leading the AHRC funded project 'Imagining Autism.'

She is the author of Applying Performance (2012), Gertrude Stein (2007) and co-editor of Margaret Woffington (2008).

John Lutterbie is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, USA. He is the director of the International Network for Cognition, Theatre and Performance.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 Staged Specimens in the Museum and Gallery
2 The Ethics of Specimenhood
3 Performing Resistant Specimens
4 Queering the Specimen
5 Self-Experimenting Specimens
6 Future Specimens
Notes
References
Index