Going “Down to the Roots” to find Healing Through Theatre

Within what Bryan S. Turner calls a Western “ideology of able-ism,” the sick body will continuously fail to adhere to a society that celebrates aestheticization as an essential element in the process of belonging within the greater community. Furthermore, the introduction of chronic medical conditions to the human body can cause a rupture in the mind’s perception of the body and its abilities, therefore damaging one’s sense of “self” and the understanding of the self’s positioning within societal spaces. This certainly held true in my own personal experiences as someone struggling to accept the effects of multiple chronic illnesses on their own life. As a theatre practitioner, my sense of self had always greatly relied on my ability to perform. Yet, as my physical health continued to decline throughout the years, my frustration with my body’s inability to operate in the way it once had began to negatively impact my self-identification as an artist and the way in which I identified with the greater world around me. When these feelings began to emerge during my time as a Master’s student at University College Dublin and the Gaiety School of Acting, I looked to the concept of embodiment to better understand the disconnect I felt with my ailing body and my inability to rectify that body’s changes with my greater sense of identity.

Essentially, the onset of chronic illness can create a distance between the sense of self and the body, two entities that cannot exist without each other.

Repairing the Self-Body Connection Through Art

According to Turner’s research on embodiment—which he qualifies as the effect of “corporealization,” or “the mastery of body techniques… which produce and give ‘a body’ its place in everyday life”—the body and the self exist as separate entities. Turner goes on to write that while embodiment involves the process of “becoming a body, it is also the project of making a self.” While he believes that the self and body exist separately, he acknowledges that each symbiotically influences the other in the social process of embodiment. In this vein, a person’s sense of self can be greatly affected by the body’s status as a separate entity within shifting social spheres in which said process takes place. If the bodily entity falls ill or suffers trauma and is, therefore, no longer able to practice the previous expectations of its social embodiment, the self’s view of the body can begin to take on a negative perspective. In her 2013 essay, philosopher Havi Carel asserts that this “bodily doubt” stems from the loss of the “taken-for-grantedness” that accompanies the possession of an able body and the belief that such a body will continue to work fully within its past capabilities. As Carel’s “bodily doubt” infiltrates the psyche and the process of embodiment begins to break down, the interconnected self of those who live with chronic illness will suffer injury to the former sense of identity, both socially and metaphysically as experienced before the onset of illness. As a disrupter to Turner’s qualification of embodiment, “[chronic] illness presents specific interactional problems in which the individual must negotiate a new set of everyday practices that can manage the tensions between the self, the experience of embodiment, the biological changes, and the medical appropriation of the body.” Essentially, the onset of chronic illness can create a distance between the sense of self and the body, two entities that cannot exist without each other. As this separation pervades life’s experiences, people suffering from unexpected chronic conditions may begin to “[experience] the body as being beyond the self,” to borrow from the writing of endurance performance artist Martin O’Brien; this phenomenon further limits those experiencing such from undertaking the full breadth of interconnected human embodiment, both within their own existence and in their social, communal relationships.

Upon gaining a better understanding of my own struggles with “bodily doubt” and its effects on my identity as an artist, I began to wonder if theatre, both as a practice and as a spectatorial event, could serve to heal this metaphysical wound in the lives of people with chronic illnesses. Could witnessing or participating in such an intrinsically physical art form like theatre aid in healing the self-body connection for members of the chronically ill community? Could it repair their relationships with the world around them? In an attempt to answer these questions, I looked to the work of American choreographer Anna Halprin and her utilization of dance as a healing art and practice for those who are terminally ill. By embracing Halprin’s work and recontextualizing its usage in theatre practice, I hypothesized that a theatrical piece, developed with the intention to guide an audience through the healing process, could begin to mend the relationship between a spectator’s body and sense of self, particularly for those who have suffered deconstruction due to the onset of chronic illness. Furthermore, I believed this work could begin to revitalize the relationship between chronically ill theatre spectators and society at large through the inevitable communality of witnessing theatre.

First, the subject must utilize movement-based art to reflect internally in order to identify the object of their metaphysical suffering.

In her 2015 guide to healing, Returning to Health: with Dance, Movement, and Imagery, Halprin reminds those who witness her work that to heal is not to cure. Healing is a process open to any who wish to undertake it. It can allow the subject to achieve a togetherness with their body and the world around them; a cure is a clinical event. Furthermore, within a clinically mediated culture that has been indoctrinated with the Cartesian belief that the mind and the body exist as separate entities, Halprin writes that “[the] mind, the heart, the soul, and the spirit is the body, not separate from it,” and that we must “return to our bodies” to begin healing.

Halprin’s teachings reflect this journey through a prescribed process: first, the subject must utilize movement-based art to reflect internally in order to identify the object of their metaphysical suffering. This allows them to undertake a confrontation with their darkest internal conflicts. Halprin argued that it is through physicalization of the moving body, which functions as a conduit for expressing this reflection, that the subject will feel a great sense of “release.” Halprin believed that once this initial process has been explored through the witnessing or experience of physical movement, the subject can begin to embrace the healing version of themselves, the version that can rediscover “a deep sense of the real connection between [the] body and the world around [them].”

This journey of self-reflection and re-embodiment is recharacterized in the “down to the roots” healing process theorized by chronic illness autobiographer Sarah Ramey. In her memoir The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, Ramey reflects Halprin’s same process of healing by first looking inwards, but she instead asks chronic illness sufferers to visualize this venture as a journey downwards into the underbelly of the self, much like Alice into Wonderland or Persephone into Hades. Using this journey below as a literary metaphor for looking inwards to the most calamitous parts of the self, Halprin’s teachings are supported by Ramey’s advocacy for the “necessity of an inward gaze, an inner process and passage, an internal reckoning, and especially a willingness to work with dark material.” It is in these darkest parts that one must explore Halprin’s confrontation; Ramey qualifies this part of the process as “the Search,” which requires “slowly sifting through the rubble, through information... It is the dogged gathering of lost bones, lost wisdom, and the lost self—the search for that which has become hidden, veiled, or cut off.” Once “the Search’’ has been completed, Ramey writes that the downward traveler will experience the “the Return,” or a resurrection qualified by “[a] claiming of the body, a realignment with the psyche, and a partnership with the dark, wormy dirt itself.” Just as Halprin writes of the newfound ability to better accept living with illness after embracing the dark and reclaiming her body through dance, Ramey’s downward process will allow the witness of these artistic movements “to learn how to work with life—including the demons and darkness—not against it, not transcending it.”

Ramey’s theories additionally reflect Halprin’s conviction that by repairing the self-body connection, the subject can also begin the process of healing their relationship to their communities and the Earth as a whole. In an essay written for Halprin’s Returning to Health, Dr. Mike Samuels writes that art with the intention to heal can do so by “freeing the artist’s own healing energy and resonating with their body, mind, and spirit” in a dual process that can also release the viewer’s emotional energy and make them feel connected to the performance at hand. Through spectatorship, Ramey reminds us, the artist who creates such work has the “job of...strengthening others as they go through their own difficult, painful descents” in search of the essential self in order to find their own eventual release from identification with suffering. This refinding of the “interconnection” that enjoins all human beings through the shared practice of healing art serves as a secondary beneficial outcome to both Ramey and Halprin’s prescribed processes of healing.

Using Theatre to Heal in WOMI

How, however, can a piece of theatre best heal the disconnect between the self and body that so often burdens the lives of those struggling to live well with chronic illness? As part of my research practice, I approached this question by creating a piece entitled WOMI (which is an acronym coined by Ramey that stands for “Woman with a Mysterious Illness”). I made the decision to physically represent the experiences of a central female character as she moves through the steps of a healing journey after the onset of an undiagnosable chronic illness. Also known as WOMI, this character would be played by actress Freya Blendell in the 2022 showcase of this piece at Smock Alley Theatre By recreating Ramey and Halprin’s processes onstage, I hoped those witnessing such visceral events would begin to experience WOMI’s journey intercorporeally, enabling them to personalize the same steps towards healing within their own “self.”

Before I could begin to depict WOMI’s journey onstage, however, I worked alongside the cast—which was rounded out by actors Olivia Walsh and Darragh Scannell—to theatrically establish a representation of the severance between WOMI’s self and body. We collaboratively devised a harsh and often violent choreographic design in which Scannell and Walsh continuously enacted an objectification of Blendell’s body as WOMI from the outset of the production. This established Scannell and Walsh as the physical representations of WOMI’s psyche, as disconnected entities from her body, while also signaling chronic illness’s extreme control over her life. This schema of physical movement would continue throughout the first four segments of the piece to continuously establish the characters’ positionings and relationships within the onstage world for the spectator. Once these conditions had been represented successfully, WOMI could finally begin her journey.

By repositioning myself, both within the production’s world and within a twisted version of my own life as a “WOMI,” I unknowingly reignited my own journey of healing as a person learning to live with chronic illness.

As Sarah Ramey suggests, the subject must first venture downwards to confront that which ails her. When WOMI literally jumped into the world of being sick, she fell into a world of doctor visits and insurance policies. Though these encounters are often traumatizing in real life, I decided to establish the world WOMI finds herself in as farcical and ridiculous in comparison. We utilized the comedic abilities of the cast in tandem with my history as a musical theatre performer to create a segmentary theatrical structure that morphed these horrible stops along the healing journey into humorous, ritualistic skits. As WOMI was pushed, pulled, and prodded, I hoped our eventual audience would laugh at her predicaments. We certainly laughed about them in rehearsal. At the height of the farce, Walsh and Scannel manipulated WOMI’s body through an over-the-top cancan dance routine, eventually trashing the stage with a barrage of flying medical bills.

However, WOMI’s descent continued. The comedic nature of her journey quickly disintegrated when the house was filled with a soundscape of whispered insults commonly associated with the stigmas of being sick in Western society. Lost was the fun of the previously kooky doctor and his nurse counterpart. The poking and prodding reached a brutal tipping point as Walsh and Scannell began to repeatedly batter WOMI’s form into crucifixion-like pictures representative of her broken body. As these actions became unbearable to watch, WOMI was finally able to break away and place her hand around Scannell’s throat, communicating to the viewer a confrontation with the illness in its physical representation, as well as the metaphysical wounds it had inflicted.

In the next steps of WOMI’s healing journey, my direction employed a sharply contrasting gentleness in style to physically represent the rebuilding of the character’s sense of self and corporeal body as one entity. After establishing a fragmented ragdoll characterization in the aftermath of WOMI’s confrontational release, Walsh and I worked together to create a simple ballet in which Walsh could begin to reconstruct Blendell’s body through the physical stacking of her bones, joints, and muscles. Though WOMI fails to restrengthen perfectly, Walsh is able to help her rise up just enough to partake in a “self-care” healing ritual. As the onstage representation of WOMI’s self, Walsh’s showing of care for WOMI’s physical body creates an opportunity to heal the divide between the two. As depicted in the beginning of the piece, the two are parts of the same whole, but only through the completion of the journey can the leading character’s sense of separation begin to heal.

After weeks of development with such a hard-working cast, I felt that WOMI successfully utilized art to portray a journey of healing for chronically ill spectators as an avenue for their own healing. Through happenstance, however, I was required to step physically into the theatrical world of my own creation as a performer when Olivia Walsh fell terribly ill hours before the production’s dress rehearsal and final performance. By repositioning myself, both within the production’s world and within a twisted version of my own life as a “WOMI,” I unknowingly reignited my own journey of healing as a person learning to live with chronic illness. Onstage, I physically moved through some of the worst parts of my life in a newfound position of power. Unwillingly, I was confronted with and moved beyond my deepest fears about my essential self and experienced that relief that Anna Halprin describes. When I danced in the healing ballet I had created, it felt as if I was recreating my own broken body anew by rebuilding WOMI’s. For the first time since falling ill, that body felt like my own.

In her writing on dancing with scoliosis, Weronika Grantham describes her healing journey much the same as Halprin and Ramey. However, Grantham includes an additional step: releasing her journey for readers, or in my case, spectators. Only through the completion of this last step does she write that she was able to feel “well, whole, alive and connected to others and to the world.” By applying Grantham’s final phase, I came to see Halprin and Ramey’s healing journey not as a one-time-only, big-fix process, but as a cycle to continuously undertake and reinvestigate in learning to live with chronic illness. As I continue on this path of rejuvenating the relationship between my body and my sense of self, both as a practitioner and patient, the option always exists to start fresh, go “down to the roots,” and begin again.

As an additional reward in my own cycle of healing, I was given the opportunity to discuss WOMI with two chronically ill spectators after my thesis presentation. They mirrored the same sense of relief in viewership that I had felt in performing. Through the internalization of physically representative theatre as a healing tool for both parties, we were able to find the very “interconnection” that chronic illness so often strips away. In the shared space between viewership and performance, those who live with chronic illness have the ability to join together in this process of mind-body-spirit repair, each affected by the other. In these connections unique to theatre, a newfound sense of togetherness is a welcome outcome. And though theatre cannot cure an ailing mind or body, it can begin to help us heal our purest form—our “self”—and in doing so, return us to our humanity.