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"Science is culture" Donna Haraway |
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glass bodyREFLECTING ON BECOMING TRANSPARENT This provocative event slips between testimony and reflection, emotion and medicine, flesh and technology to contemplate our abiding fascination with what lies under our skin. In today’s culture the screen replaces touch and the naked eye. When it comes to our insides becoming digital spectacles, how do we feel about the sheer thrill of becoming transparent? Scientific and artistic portrayals of the human body overlap throughout anatomical history, with knife, brush and hands all shaping images from dissected corpses. With the invention of the X-ray, for the first time in human history, we could see into the living body. GLASS BODY plunges the spectator into the depths of obstetrics ultrasound technology to provoke questions about our interior visibility as a lived experience. Physical transparency is a key issue in this beautifully assembled and gently suggestive blend of live performance (by Marie Gabrielle Rotie), poetic text, sound and image inspired by its creator Anna Furse’ experience of ultrasound technology. Less than half an hour long, it’s a small, thoughtful gem of medical, cultural and artistic enquiries Probing and intelligent, and the intimacy of the experience creates a dreamy spell that gets under your skin so that long after it has finished you have a heightened awareness of your own body The overlapping of art and science worked well….throws up all sort of disturbing tangents Rotie's silent and enigmatic performance presence is beautifully played; the interplay of screen images (flying birds, babes-in-the-womb, X-rayed limbs, playing children) and live actions (the laying out of a set of child's clothes, the pulling of a string of DNA-like beads from the mouth, the ritual washing and cleansing) are lovely images that work in harmony A wonderful piece of performance art, that represented the emotions we see on a daily basis GLASS BODY Website - opens in new browser TIME OUT Preview London March 8-15 2006 RADIO PROGRAMME: Honest, searching writing and inventive, insistent sound Anna Furse’s evocation of the wide-ranging emotional ride embarked upon by a woman seeking fertility treatment really is a haunting mix of modern medical sounds with poignant, poetical and deeply personal language
GLASS BODY FRAGMENTS – a video/digital installation, was commissioned by THE BERNIE GRANT ARTS CENTRE for The Gathering , March 2008 |
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YERMA'S EGGS 2001/3
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An ongoing cultural project on infertility awareness seeking ways in which as an artist I might engage the public with the transformative potential of Reproductive Technologies (A.R.T) and how they urge us to re-consider ourselves biologically, socially, spiritually and ethically. Myself the mother of a child born from I.V.F. and author of the book Your Essential Infertility Companion (Thorsons Harper Collins 1996,2000) I am working from embodied experiences, using my factual research as the background for creative explorations of different interconnected themes. I aim to get under the skin of the subject matter and confront material emotionally, viscerally and poetically, so that the spectator might identify with the infertile perspective a rare opportunity in these days of media sensationalism... |
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THE PEACH CHILD 2001
Written and directed with financial support from an Arts Council Award for the Little Angel Theatre, Japan Festival 2000/National Children's Theatre Festival UK 2000. Multi media puppetry show for children based on the ancient infertility folk tale Momotaro. |
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GORGEOUS 1999
Commissioned by Theatre Centre, this monodrama explores eating disorders and body image via a monologue in which Alice, a 15-year-old from the 19th century, travels in time as well as through her own body. As Alice shape-shifts through 100 years of culture, she becomes disordered by the pressures on a young girls' psyche. The original production toured the UK and to Malaysia and the Philippines for the British Council. A US production is in repertory at the New Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. It is currently being translated into Hebrew with a view to production in Israel. Published by Aurora Metro: Theatre Centre Plays Volume 1 2003. |
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AUGUSTINE (BIG HYSTERIA) 1991
Time Out Award winning play/production on the celebrated hysteric patient of Jean Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Freud studied with Charcot and observed his famous and spectacular public performance-lectures on ‘grande hysterie' attended by artists and intellectuals as well as medics. He subsequently returned to Vienna to launch his own practice of hypnosis and ‘ talking therapy ‘ which evolved into psychoanalysis. Designed by Sally Jacobs and with music composed by Graeme Miller, this work toured the UK and Russia. It has been translated into Czech and staged in the Czech Republic, Canada, Denmark and the USA. A short version was adapted for the Television Documentary ARE WOMEN MAD? Channel 4 1994. This is fresh, exciting and heart-breaking drama. Be tempted. This is an evening which speaks to us of ourselves In this poetic and powerful drama, we see the hysterical woman, the male voyeur, the male listener a triangle that would become paradigmatic in the psychiatric history of women…..an innovative performance that is also a critique of the psychoanalytic appropriation of women See also: A Spectacle of Suffering, The Visual Narrative Matrix, Southampton Institute 2000 |
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