Introduction

This edited collection addresses the proliferation of practices that bridge performance and medicine in the contemporary moment and which come from different perspectives – epistemological, philosophical, professional, disciplinary and artistic. As such, the scope of the volume includes but is not limited to medicine and illness as the subject of theatre and performance, the performativity of illness and the medical encounter, the roles and choreographies of the clinic; the use of theatrical techniques, such as simulation and role-play, in medical training; and modes of performance engaged in public health campaigns, health education projects and health-related activism. With a particular emphasis on performance practices, the chapters reveal the diverse approaches and discourses that emerge at the interface between medicine and performance. In other words, the contributors consider how medicine is experienced in and through performance, on the stage and in the everyday, and how performance is made in response to medicine, as exploration, resistance and critique. Throughout the book, medicine and performance are understood as equally valid epistemologies and sets of practices that intersect and overlap in different ways: medicine can be a form of performance, and performance can operate as a sort of medicine. This conjunction of medicine and performance is a particularly rich ground for interdisciplinarity, enabling debate and dialogue around prescient issues such as subjectivity, identity, embodiment, health and illness, often in the face of complex and troubling bio-ethical dilemmas, which appear as much in the current moment as in the past. The unequal relations between medics and patients, between medical knowledge and lay expertise, underpinned by professional practices, languages and technologies, can all contribute to exploitative, coercive, manipulative and prejudicial attitudes and behaviours that are also explored in some of the book’s content.