Performances of Exposure and Ethical Spectatorship in Hanna Cormick’s The Mermaid

Abstract

This article explores how Hanna Cormick's performance The Mermaid advances an understanding of air as a substance that connects bodies in lively, dangerous, and potentially even deadly ways. As someone who lives with multiple chronic health conditions that are activated by environmental or chemical pollutants, Cormick is particularly attuned to seemingly innocuous airborne substances. This article considers how The Mermaid draws on Cormick's lived experience to illustrate what Stacy Alaimo describes as ‘performances of exposure’, a concept that demonstrates how humans are linked in a transcorporeal relationship to the environment in life sustaining and life destroying ways. When performing live, Cormick lives with the very real possibility that she will have a seizure or an allergic reaction in response to an airborne pollutant in the performance space. This risk therefore prompts questions related to ethical spectatorship, as audiences are forced to grapple with their own complicity and responsibility in creating a safe and liveable space for Cormick and each other. In much the same way that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the dangers of shared (air) space and airborne transmission, so too does The Mermaid highlight our communal responsibility for the health and safety of others, and of the Earth. What is revealed by considering the ways we are materially linked to the air/space in which performances like The Mermaid take place? What kinds of ethical stakes emerge when we acknowledge the shared air/space of the performance as teeming with meaning? How does positioning the work as a performance of exposure make us more acutely aware of our enmeshment in the world, our culpability in the escalating effects of climate change, and our responsibility in cultivating communally liveable (and breathable) air/spaces? In posing these questions, this article considers how Cormick's work presents new forms of ethical relations that are based on a politics of atmospheric exposure.

Notes

1 I draw the term ‘bodymind’ from Margaret Price (2015), as a way of acknowledging the inseparable entanglement of body and mind.

2 These critiques have been addressed by proponents of the social model (Shakespeare and Watson 1997; Oliver et al. 2012), but balancing an understanding of disability as a social construct and as a lived experience remains a point of debate within disability studies.