Abstract
Context
Involuntary Dances was the first in a trilogy of works looking at the relationship between epilepsy, notions of control and drug research. It dealt with ‘illness’ or with the bodily state of being in a seizure. Footage from Involuntary Dances integrates a second touring work entitled She’s Lost Control, which takes the audience through the experience of having an epileptic seizure. A third and final work (EEG) is currently in development and is to be performed in 2013 (both projects were funded by the Arts Council of England and commissioned by Dance Digital).
As a result of receiving the Arts Council Interact Award in 2007, I undertook a four-month research residency at the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. The Interact Award allowed artists to further their research within a collaborative industry setting and it was the result of an identified need for increased investment in research and development opportunities for artists (http://www.interact.mmu.ac.uk/placements/profile.php?artist=26). The aim was to broker otherwise unavailable opportunities for artists to carry out research and develop skills and expertise within innovative industry.
I spent my time at GSK investigating conceptual and physical interfaces between medical research, epilepsy, movement and dance. My intention was to enquire on the scientific and artistic currency of creating a performance artefact that would place itself simultaneously in the fields of artistic and scientific research.
Description of the work
Involuntary Dances was a live art durational work presenting epilepsy as performance, which took place in the Autumn of 2009. To present my ‘involuntary dances’ to an audience, I threw a 24 hour ‘performance party’. The party incorporated various audience-participation activities such as quizzes, structured improvisations, etc. During this party I put myself through a series of experiences (consuming coffee, alcohol or chocolate, dancing under strobe lights, etc.) which were likely to lead me to having an epileptic seizure.
The role of documentation in this work was key. Indeed, because for health reasons it would be dangerous to repeat this experiment more than once, I devised a multi-modal documentation of the event:
I was wired to cameras which constantly recorded my descent into the point of seizure. Members of the audience were encouraged to record the event on their mobile phones.
My motivations for making the work
As an artist, one of the things that I am interested in is autobiographical work: work which explores who I am in relation to the culture I live in. Epilepsy is part of who I am: it is part of my body, my identity, the way my brain works. So one of the reasons why I created this work was as an exploration of this aspect of my identity.
Another reason concerns epilepsy as an invisible disability. If I don’t reveal to someone I suffer from it, most people in my life will never know. They will know that at times I might leave a meeting or an event and spend more than usual time in a toilet, and that I will come back looking tired and may give an excuse and leave. But they might never know that this means that I just had a seizure. As a performer my work is about ‘exposure’, but as an epileptic I constantly work very hard at ‘hiding’ my condition. For once in my life I was interested in exploring what it would mean for me to ‘expose’ my epilepsy instead of hiding it away.
As a dancer my body is about control. I have spent years training it so that I gain ‘mastery’ or control of it. However, there are these episodes in my life where I don’t have any control over what my body does – the movements it does (hence the reason I call these episodes my involuntary dances). Another facet of the work is this exploration around control: I may not be able to control what happens during an epileptic seizure, but this work was an attempt to take control of the conditions within which an epileptic seizure happens.
As a dancer I am used to watching myself from the outside: dance training involves constantly looking at yourself in the mirror, and I am also aware of how I look when I perform when I watch myself on video. However, there is this ‘black spot’ in my representation of myself (to myself). I don’t know what I look like when I have a seizure. I have asked people to describe it to me, and I have seen other people having seizures, but I don’t know myself in that state. The work sought to explore this as a form of self-knowledge.
Avoiding becoming a ‘spectacle’ and avoiding becoming an object of voyeurism is part of living with epilepsy. This is the reason why I (and many other epileptic people) seek to have their seizures in private, even though this actually increases the risk to us. The work did not avoid voyeurism because to avoid it would mean to deny that it is an inherent part of every epileptic person’s experience. Instead, the work’s structures invited the audience and the performer to engage in a voyeuristic contract, with a view to asking questions around cultural conventions that lead many of us to make the decision to ‘look away’ or ‘look at’.
The fact that I invited people to film the seizure on their mobile phones and the fact that there were cameras filming was a comment upon a YouTube phenomenon, where you can find footage of epileptic seizures, some of which were filmed and broadcast without the person’s permission. My work appropriated this phenomenon, and by doing so hoped to raise awareness and questions around this problem.