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. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/