This past event was cancelled
Crip Performance Practice: Dancing with Chronic Pain
This performance lecture explores crip practice, dancing with chronic pain, and idea of care in performance. I critically-creatively reflect on my current performance work, Pain and I, which recently premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe with the Made In Scotland Showcase. Pain and I is a diversely accessible body of work – live performance, audio piece, graphic score – that explores and celebrates the rich complexities of living with chronic pain. Pain and I is an autobiographical work that explores what it means to care for ourselves and each other in times of personal and collective pain, asking what can pain teach us?
I have lived with chronic pain for 20 years, and have largely related to my pain as a barrier to my art and research. My current practice and research is about turning towards my pain as a creative collaborator. Pain and I sits within my current Carnegie-funded research project, Ecologies of Pain, which is practice-led research that explores how living with chronic pain contains unique knowledge that can teach us a lot about what it means to relate to wider ecological pain. I am concerned with cripping performance practice, in order to rethink connections between activism, art and academia.