ABSTRACT
While the performance encounter of health care has been examined from the perspective of bedside manner and in terms of the training of health care practitioners, this chapter looks at the experience of illness through the lens of contemporary one-to-one performance practice. The chapter examines what the world of medicine can learn from one-to-one performances and what one-to-one arts practitioners might learn from the patient/medicine encounter. One-to-one performance has always had a critical relationship with issues of care, mutuality, shared vulnerability, and encountering the Other. Its proliferation as an art form and area of critical discourse demonstrates an ever-growing area of possibilities, particularly for the arts/health agenda. This chapter theorises that by purposefully considering one-to-one performance methods, artists and medical staff may find new possibilities for engaged practice. This chapter uses the authors’ 2019–2020 project Kicking Up Our Heels, which was created with/for 100 parents and patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
