Performance

An evening of artistic interventions on the relationship between performance and knowledge in the lab, the clinic, and the public realm.

This event will showcase the work of artistic researchers who explore topics at the intersection of science, medicine, and the human. 

Alex Mermikides will present a lecture, featuring the work of her theatre company Chimera which makes collaborative theatre about medical experience. The projects include Bloodlines (2012), a 'mutated' multimedia lecture-stroke-dance performance that tracks the diagnostic and biomedical story of a young man diagnosed with a deadly form of blood cancer, Careful (2017), a dance/theatre performance which places its audience in the care of five over-stretched nurses, and Anatomy of a Doctor (2025), a performance about living tissue donation and education, reminding us that our future doctors learn from the dead.

Lucie Strecker and Mariella Greil will present a performative intervention: Shaken Grounds, Porous Zones: Where Body and Landscape Tremble, focusing on the body’s innate capacity to tremble as a way of releasing stress, tension, and trauma. The performance foregrounds the interweaving of physiological and psychological processes to offer embodied insight on the seismic landscape of an ecologically, politically, and economically shaken world community.

By bringing these projects together, we wish to have a conversation about using performance as a method for critically investigating science and medicine and to foster the dialogue between artistic practices and historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives. 

The event will conclude with a panel discussion between the artistic researchers moderated by Prof. Dr. Lara Keuck and event organizers Dr. Michele Luchetti and Dr. Sasha Bergstrom-Katz.

This event is generously supported by the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

left image: Shaken Grounds, Shifting Skies, 2025, performance: Mariella Greil, Sylvia Scheidl photo: Victor Jaschke. © Shaken Grounds

right image: Careful, 2016 by Chimera in the Darwin Ward, Kingston University performers: Archana Balal, Helena Rice, Viviana Rocha, Dominique Vannod and Thalia-Marie Papadopoulos. still from recording by: Anna Tanczos.