On perfection: Pain and arts-making in Aronofsky's Black Swan

ABSTRACT

This article is a piece of autoethnographic work that delves into the intricacies of creating an aesthetic of the body with disability as applied to Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan. The author argues for a Théâtre de la Cruauté approach to a poetics of the body broken, as well as beauty, developing a ‘unique language halfway between gesture and thought’. It is this practice that the author, an artist/poet and academic of the traditional academy, interrogates and attempts to enact in her own work as a person with fibromyalgia, a form of chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP).

KEYWORDS:

• CNCP
• chronic pain
• art
• disability
• Black Swan
• Aronofsky
• film analysis
• beauty