ABSTRACT
Medical spaces can appear to demand that users perform, given their front stage backstage design and the plethora of scripted roles into which patients are meant to fit. This account of Looming Futures: Waiting Room (2021), a site-specific performance by four actors and dancers, focuses on three material moments of the performance that both medicalise and theatricalise spaces or facilitate role changes in medicine: a hospital-theatre screen, rustling plastic bags and the shape of the square. Waiting Room explores how people structure their engagement with medicine in terms of performance rather than narrative in both new and traditional medical settings. The snapshot illustrates how the piece engaged participants with the feeling of the loss of control, particularly in diagnostic situations, and how it empowered them. Neumann and Baldauf show how the performance employed different locations, textiles, a collective COVID-19 test, dance and sensory modes of storytelling to expose the new ways bodies are performed and the new roles both health care staff and patients performed during the ongoing medicalisation of everyday life caused by the pandemic in the UK.
