Performing Science and Medicine

Saturday, 15 November 2025 | 17:30-19:30

Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité

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Performing Science and Medicine:

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.

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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.

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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/