Autofiction in English by Hywel Dix

Author:Hywel Dix
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Pathographies in Performance: Film, Theatre and Dance

Both autofictions and pathographies are conventionally thought of as prose narratives but some performances combine and expand these categories in imaginative ways. Although Rita Charon (2008) and Stella Bolaki (2016) have done much to focus attention on the spoken and written narratives presented by patients, medical practice is as much an art of seeing, hearing and smelling in order to understand patients and their symptoms. Kristin M. Langellier stresses the performativity of the doctor–patient interaction and draws parallels with staged narrative performance: ‘Performing narrative medicine emphasizes how telling, hearing, and writing stories are constitutive acts—visceral, specific, situated, and singular—of patients and physicians’ (152). While acknowledging that close reading and narrative competence are crucial skills for practitioners to possess, Langellier raises concerns that narrative medicine risks valuing textuality over the physicality of the encounter. Autofictional pathographies in film, theatre and dance suggest that performance displays a form of embodied knowledge that is distinct from the textual self produced through prose. Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here (1994), Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy (1996) and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) each disrupt the boundary between art and life, display illness and dramatize the act of artistic creation in ways that reflect on the nature of intimacy and engage multiple senses.

Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here (1994), a two-act piece of choreography with a visual score composed of edited interviews with terminally ill people, generated a great deal of controversy and has become a major focus in the field of pathography studies ever since. Although there is nothing radical about the use of documentary footage in a performance piece, it received an excoriating review from The New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see the piece on the basis that ‘by working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism’ (n.p.). Croce claimed that Jones had crossed the line between theatre and reality and was intent on presenting victimhood and suffering as an aesthetic spectacle. The aspect to which she most took offence was the inclusion of what she assumed was real suffering (rather than survival), which she read as a forcing of sympathy, which in turn would suspend the possibility of purely aesthetic and unbiased critical interpretation. Still/Here and the critical mauling instigated by Croce invite viewers to question the relationship between life and art. Despite Croce’s claim that the performance displays the suffering of real people and her refusal to view what was assumed to be the unmediated personal experience of sickness, its scenes were artfully composed. Lisa Diedrich notes that the performance sought to mix up the boundaries of art and life as far as possible: ‘it also acknowledges that suffering represented in art is never unmediated and that attempts to communicate suffering from one person to the next often fail’ (xi). All writing is a reproduction of experiential knowledge and consequently the distinction between art and life must rest with the power and influence of the critic. Marcia B.

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