The Drama of Dissection

The Drama of Dissection: Performance Making, the Medical School Anatomy Laboratory and the Critical Medical Humanities

Recorded February 22, 2024.

A hybrid seminar by Dr Alex Mermikides (Kings College London) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Bio

Alex Mermikides is the D’Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health, based in the medical school at King’s College London, UK.  Her research interest is in contemporary performance and its relation to the medical encounter and to the medical humanities.  Publications include the forthcoming Routledge Companion for Performance and Medicine (with Gianna Bouchard), Performance, Medicine and the Human (2021) and Performance and the Medical Body (2016, also co-edited with Gianna Bouchard) which explores discourses of the human and the humane within medical performances. Her research also involves devising performances about medical experience with her theatre company, Chimera, as well as developing performance-based pedagogies in medical and nursing education. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Educational Supplement, Nature Immunology and on This Week (BBC Radio 4)

Abstract for the talk

For the past two years, I have been researching and developing a performance about human dissection, capitalizing on my unusual position as a performance scholar embedded in the medical school at King's College London. In this paper, this project will provide an example of how performance-making can constitute a methodology for researching medical environments and cultures. In particular, I propose that there is a strong alignment between collaborative and expressionist performance practices such as those employed in this project, and the concerns of the critical medical humanities with materiality, embodiment, affect and entanglement. Through this, I hope to persuade you that performance, as artefact, practice and epistemology, has much to contribute to current debates with the medical humanities.