Performing Science and Medicine
Performing science and medicine is an interdisciplinary online working group
Image: Colour lithograph: “human vivisection”, published in Lustige Blatter. Berlin, c. 1910. [cropped] Illustration: Wellcome Library, London/Wellcome Images
Upcoming Events
Lecture Series
Dates and information to be announced
Online
We are very pleased to invite you to a new monthly lecture series starting in October 2026.
"Performing Science and Medicine" is an online lecture series that treats performance as a mode of inquiry, an active method for thinking through the often interrelated fields of science and medicine. By inviting scholars, artists, theatre practitioners, and those working across these fields, the series aims to prompt cross-disciplinary discussion on performance as a productive framework for critically examining topics such as the relational dynamics between experimenters and research subjects, the entanglements of artistic and scientific experimentation, and the pedagogical and epistemic possibilities of theatre in medical education.
The series is open to all humanities and performance studies scholars and students, as well as practitioners interested in the connections between performance and science and medicine. The Zoom link will be available on our website about two weeks before the first lecture. No registration is required.
Past Events
Public Event
Performing Science and Medicine
Saturday, 15 November 2025 | 17:30-19:30
Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité
An evening of artistic interventions on the relationship between performance and knowledge in the lab, the clinic, and the public realm.
This event will showcase the work of artistic researchers who explore topics at the intersection of science, medicine, and the human.
Alex Mermikides will present a lecture in three parts, featuring the work of her theatre company Chimera which makes collaborative theatre about medical experience. She will share excerpts from projects which foreground subjective experience of patients, nurses and doctors in clinical and educational settings. Projects include Bloodlines (2012), a 'mutated' multimedia lecture-stroke-dance performance that tracks the diagnostic and biomedical story of a young man diagnosed with a deadly form of blood cancer, Careful (2017), a dance/theatre performance about nurses which places its audience in the care of five over-stretched nurses, and Anatomy of a Doctor (2025), a performance about living tissue donation and education, reminding us that our future doctors learn from the dead.
Lucie Strecker and Mariella Greil will present a performative intervention entitled Shaken Grounds, Porous Zones: Where Body and Landscape Tremble, focusing on the body’s innate capacity to tremble as a way of releasing stress, tension, and trauma. The performance foregrounds the interweaving of physiological and psychological processes to offer embodied insight on the seismic landscape of an ecologically, politically, and economically shaken world community. By addressing the terrain in which the distinctions between body and landscape dissolve, this work responds to rising ecological grief, recognizing that, like the Earth itself, bodies register tremors and ruptures. Through somatic art practices, these shockwaves can be transformed into contemporary rituals of resilience, where land and bodies are understood as porous, interwoven entities, each holding memory, trauma, and history. Encountering and cultivating responsibility and care toward shared futures rests on our capacity to live in resonance with the Earth’s deep rhythms.
By bringing these projects together, we wish to have a conversation about using performance as a method for critically investigating science and medicine and to foster the dialogue between artistic practices and historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives.
The event will conclude with a panel discussion between the artistic researchers moderated by Prof. Dr. Lara Keuck and event organizers Dr. Michele Luchetti and Dr. Sasha Bergstrom-Katz. This event is generously supported by the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
Contributor bios:
Mariella Greil focuses on contemporary performance, in particular its ramifications for the choreographic and the ethical. She works on developing a politicized and ethico-aesthetic practice, asking how artistic methods can support the development of future living scenarios that respond to global emergencies. www.mariellagreil.net/
Lucie Strecker is an artist, performer, and researcher with a focus on experimental systems within performance art. She considers microperformativity as a way to question human levels of perception—both spatial and temporal—emphasizing biological and technological micro-agencies in relation to art and history. www.luciestrecker.com
Alex Mermikides is D’Orly Carte senior lecturer in Arts and Health at King’s College London. As part of her research and practice as a director, dramaturg and playwright, she devises performances about medical experience with her theatre company, Chimera and develops performance-based approaches to communication skills education. https://alexmermikides.com/
Workshop
Representing, Reshaping, Reenacting:
Performance studies and practices meet the history, philosophy, and social studies of science and medicine
Friday & Saturday, 15-16 November 2025
Berlin Museum of Medical History of Charité
Performance has been considered one of the central knowledge paradigms of the twenty-first century (Salter 2020), even though concepts of performance and performativity remain slippery, since they operate across various epistemic and ontological registers and scales. This workshop will present, critically examine, and refine both practice-based and theoretical performance methodologies. It thus addresses the topic of performance in science and medicine starting from the assumption that performance is implicit in scientific and medical practices, and wishing to investigate how performance and theatre studies have been applied as a tool for both researching and improving these fields. Indeed, contributions by historians and sociologists of science and medicine highlighted how science is performed in laboratory settings and how medicine is acted out on patients (e.g., Goffman 1959, Rheinberger 1997). More recently, scholars have employed theoretical and practice-based performative methods to experimentally explore, for example, medicine’s treatment of the human body (e.g., Mermikides 2020). However, performance is still underexplored as a research method within the humanities in science and medicine, despite a growing literature focusing on the relationship between theatre and science (e.g., Shepherd-Barr 2020) and between medicine and performance (e.g., Bouchard & Mermikides 2024).
With this workshop, we will bring together art practitioners, scholars in the performing arts and in the medical humanities, as well as philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science and medicine to foster and record cross-disciplinary research surrounding the questions: How can the historical, philosophical, and social studies of science and medicine benefit from focusing on performativity and theatricality as analytic categories? How can art and performance-based practices enhance the critical reflection on scientific and medical practices pursued by the humanities? And to what extent can the critical humanities borrow concepts from the performing arts? The conference will take place in the suggestive Ruin Hall of the Charité Museum of Medical History in Berlin. Taking inspiration from the troubled history of the location, originally built by Rudolf Virchow for his Pathological Museum and subsequently bombed during World War II, the topic of performance in science and medicine will be addressed starting from the notions of representing, reshaping, reenacting. The workshop will include collaboratively planned activities as well as short papers and will culminate in a collaboratively produced edited volume.