In The Mirror Of Care

The Mirror of Care Work

The Mirror of Care Work is a project which assembles and develops knowledge of the performer within immersive and one-to-one interactions. This otherwise silent knowledge is produced with a mirror; on one side, the work of interactive performers –  on the other, the work of nurses. The project aims to investigate skillsets within practices of interactive performance by inviting in perspectives from the profession of care work. We believe the interactive performer can learn from the nurse’s ways of establishing trust and guiding a patient through a hospitalization.

The project is initiated with Performance og Filmproduktion i Vendsyssel and  happens in collaboration with the Nursing Education at UCN (DK), PAM’s Reading Edge Library (SE) and Tabloid Press (DE). It is supported by Hjørring Kommune, Den Jyske Kunstfond and Region Nord to promote collaborations between artists and the Danish health sector.

 

 

Symposium: Care work and performance – a calling or profession?

The first part of the project consists of an online symposium with interactive performers, performance thinkers, and nurses. It is curated and facilitated by Inga Gerner Nielsen and Klara Utke Acs in dialogue with Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen. The symposium will build on practice-based, contextualizing and critical knowledge regarding carework through the scope of the nurse and the interactive performer. It investigates these practices departing from the inside profession of nursing and performance practices. It will consist of presentations, performances as well as conversations, and collaborative exercises.

The exercises will be based onscore-work to produce knowledge about what happens in the interaction between performer and audience; nurse and patient. Conversations will be based on alecture on nurses’ Nordic history and their predecessor, the nun. The archetype of the nun and her initial function as a caregiver will come to serve as a common image and reference point between interactive performers and nurses. A visual and historical opening for the project’s discursive and artistic reflections on the politics and poetics of performance and care work today. Is  it necessary to feel a calling as a performer? Is it essential as a nurse?

The symposium will take place online on the 11th and 12th of March 2021. A limited number of interactive performersand nurses have been invited to participate. 

Open online forum event - Apromise of healing?

As we’ve experienced a great interest in the symposium we decided to create an additional online event, which could host more artists, philosophers and curators within the field of performance art and dance interested in discussing the aspect of care work in their practise. Care Work and Performance: a promise of healing? took place online Sunday March 14 2021 7.30 – 9 PM (CET). 

 

 

 

 

Publication  

The score-work of the symposium will produce texts that will be edited and featured alongside illustrations by visual artist Marit Benthe Norheim in a publication designed by Nat Marcus and printed by Tabloid Press.

 

 

Performance Installation

In oktober 2022 the students at at the nursing education at UCN in Hjørring came to experience a performative workbased on Sct. Hildegaard von Bingen’s health care in an immersive performanceinstallation set in the so-called nursing lab - a small ward built for the students to practice their practical skills before they move on to internships in the real hospitals. Now they got the possibility of experiencing what it means to be on the receiving end of professional care when they enter the installation as participating audiences. As performers, we will be meeting the mas members of a fictional monastery order of nuns, which has been kept active and developed into an alternative health care system despite the Protestant Reformation. The performance’s sociological narrative revolves around a breakdown of the public health care system in a depopulated countryside. To ensure care for the remaining citizens, the nuns move into the small hospitalunit.

The story allows for the encounter of two very different types of aesthetics; The danish welfare design aesthetics of the 00’s; and the catholic poetic aesthetics we will develop throughout the project’s artistic process. When speaking of aesthetics, we refer to the entire mise-en-scène of the hospital performance. In addition to a scenographic work with inserting material elements of the monastery into the hospital, we also work with the interactive dramaturgy of how the audience(as patients) will be met and interacted with during their first consultation with the nuns.

As patients the audience are asked to give into an experience of letting their bodies become material in a visual and sensuous work with Hildegaard von Bingen’s iconographic medieval image of the human body; A micro-universe, which mirrors all the elements of heaven andearth. The performance explores the proportions of the medieval body and the way it was perceived subjectively and represented visually before it was looked at as a medical object from a scientific viewpoint.

Performers: Visual artist Ann Mai Røge, choreographer and dancer Tyra Wigg, philosopher & dancer Rikke Steen Mapstone, painter Olivia Kamradt & performance artists Inga Gerner Nielsen

Photo: Christian Bast & Inga Gerner Nielsen

Drawing: Marit Benthe Norheim

Get in touch about the project : [email protected]