I got your back: a one(ish) person show exploring pain, medicine, empathy, and performance

ABSTRACT

While pain pulls us to retreat into our personal experiences, the theory and practice of autoethnography invites us to offer the hyper-personal up as radical social engagement. Applying and adapting physical therapy techniques as movement vocabulary, this autoethnographic performance explores the empathic relationships that converge as individuals encounter the U.S. medical system, documents and describes living with pain, looks at practices of coping through crafting, and tackles difficult conversations around health and happiness. The performer and director build their performative relationship by challenging the interiority of conceptualizing pain and demonstrating the relations between empathy and performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• pain
• performance autoethnography
• crafting
• health

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jay Allison, Andrea M. Baldwin, Deborah Cunningham Breede, Tessa Carr, Denee Davis, Lisa Flanagan, Monica Gallegos, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, Anne M. Harris, Stacy Holman Jones, Steve Johns, Amber L. Johnson, Gigi Perez-Langley, D. Soyini Madison, David Purnell, Samuel Sloan, Melissa Tindage, Shelly Travis, and Brianne Waychoff.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.