Performance as Medicine
(Potentized Objects)
- To work with inanimate objects of varying scales, particularly miniatures, in order to access and release their potentized medicinal and healing qualities in the context of performance art.
- To select and research historic and contemporary theatrical, medical, religious, spiritual, therapeutic practices that utilize natural, handmade or manufactured objects as a central tool of healing or transformation.
- To integrate aspects of those practices into my own contemplative, somatic, vocal and healing practices through performative interaction with my existing and new objects.
- To interrogate idiosyncratic issues of identity, relationship, manipulation, transgression, and the culture of things in collaboration with the objects.
- To research, study and experience practices and practitioners in related fields such as Sandtray Therapy (Dr. Dora Kalff, dec.), Embodied Dreamwork (Dr. Robert Bosnak), Expressive Arts Therapy (Dr. Shawn McNiff), Narrative Medicine (Dr. Rita Charon), Medical Clowning (Dr. Ati Citron), as well as established medical institutions currently experimenting with the healing effects of performance art.
To document both research and practice in several media including performance (Postdramatic Object Theatre, Ventriloquism, etc.), installation, drawings, photographs, video and writing.
NOTE: “The word "potentized" can be a general term used in various contexts with energetic or vibrational medicine. It refers to any of a number of methods that release the potential of a substance from its physical matrix so it can operate in an energetic field.” – FES
I wish to credit and acknowledge Art As Medicine, by Shawn McNiff as the source of my title, Performance as Medicine (Potentized Objects).
I wish to credit and acknowledge the source of my studio’s name, Physika Arts (Physika is the feminine of Physis) and to excerpt the definition that so mirrors my own sensibility:
From The Transpersonal Relationship in Psychotherapy, by Dr. Petruska Clarkson:
Physis (or Phusis) is an ancient Greek word ... used to refer to life energy as it manifests in nature, in growth and healing as well as in all dimensions of creativity. Physician or physic (as in medicine) and Physics (as in Quantum and Chaos understandings of the world) are both derived from it.
I use it as a concept to concentrate some of the most significant qualities and aspirations of my work - in honour of everlasting change, unlearning as well as learning, living as well as dying well, bodysoul, the cycle as potent paradigm for human evolutionary processes, the individual and society, relationship and archetype, the importance of nature as teacher and inspiration, the drive towards complexity, quality and wholeness, the co-existence of contradictions.
