“Love is touching souls/surely you’ve touched mine/’Cause part of you pours out of me/In these lines from time to time”[1]

A Case Of You – Joni Mitchell (Blue, 1971)

 

My project aims to explore the discourses around the body, desire and medicine prompted from my own experience of living with chronic illness: Hydrocephalus, known as ‘water on the brain’. I want to look at areas such as control, visibility and what this requires of human intimacy. Drawing on my experience of being in hospital, which left me feeling void of personal defences, an itinerant performance will allow audience members to engage in a process of revealing myself over a durational period.

 

It will begin with me seated in the lower gallery of Oxford House, in a hospital gown. The aesthetics of white walls, presents a sterile environment reminiscent of a hospital corridor or clinical space, with the hospital gown as a more direct reference of being in a hospital. I will be performing a set of endurance-based exercises styled as medical regimes, each associated with Hydrocephalus. Done in such regimented fashion, they will be as absurd as they are clinical. These include sucking up water though plastic tubing wrapped around my head and spitting it into large jars, popping balloons, engaging with magnets and tying knots. There are no restrictions to the space and audience can engage as they please when I am seated.

 

After these actions are completed, the performance will move to the Scott room. I will travel to the space wheeling a trolley on which there will be a small monitor, playing a screen test of myself performing the same or similar tasks, to demonstrate a monitoring of the condition – that it is always something with me. There will be a hospital bed set up in the room. Audiences of no more than three can enter the space at one time and only at certain times. Here, I am taking the constraints and restrictions of visiting hours at a hospital and surveillance over my body. Using a microphone I will sing Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’ to each group. I would like to play with distance or a warping of the sound, developing a score in which the song is a central part of the interaction.

 

Through the materials used I attempt to draw together and discover the intimacies that emerge through using these objects and presenting myself, in a playful way. I will invite them to tie up my gown and pose them with a question that demands direct intimacy: “Would you like to feel my shunt?” A shunt is a draining device used to treat Hydrocephalus, fit behind my ear. It is jarring too however because shunt also sounds close to vulgar slang used to describe women’s genitals… alluding to a sexualisation of the sick body. I want to interrogate and call to attention notions of fear and discomfort that can be associated with being intimate with a ‘sick body.

 

[1]Joni Mitchell, A Case Of You Blue, 1971