• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / News Archive / Disabled artists praise dancer’s avant-garde epilepsy experiment

Disabled artists praise dancer’s avant-garde epilepsy experiment

By guest on 1st November 2009 Category: News Archive

Listen

A dancer with epilepsy who will try to induce a seizure in front of an audience has won praise from other disabled artists for bringing the condition “out of the closet”.

Award-winning dancer and choreographer Rita Marcalo will spend 24 hours trying to induce a seizure as part of Involuntary Dances a “24-hour event” at Bradford Playhouse on 11 and 12 December.

Marcalo has stopped taking medication and, during the performance will try to induce a seizure, for example by drinking alcohol, eating dark chocolate and using strobe lights and “specially designed computer programmes”.

If she has a seizure, a “loud alarm will sound” and cameras will start recording, with the audience also encouraged to take pictures.

The Bradford event is the first in a planned trilogy by Marcalo – who has a background in physics – examining the relationships between dance, epilepsy and drug research, in collaboration with neuroscientists from Leeds University.

The 24-hour event will be a one-off, but will also be used as the basis for a film installation.

Poet Peter Street, who has epilepsy, described the performance as “a major, major move forward”, as epilepsy-based art was “probably one of the last avant-garde art forms to be brought out”.

He said Marcalo was “taking control” of her condition, and added: “It is all about us coming out of the closet and this is really going to bring it out with a big bang, and good luck to her.”

Philip Lee, chief executive of Epilepsy Action, said his charity had received “several complaints” about Marcalo’s planned performance, which he said was “potentially very dangerous”.

He added: “At the very least, the performance should carry a health warning advising people that they should not attempt this themselves under any circumstances.”

But a spokeswoman for Arts Council England, which is part-funding the work, said there would be a “full personal and public risk assessment”, with “appropriate medical support” during the performance.

She added: “She is an important artist whose work deserves to be seen, and Arts Council both respects the creative decisions she makes in her work and supports her right as a disabled person to be heard.”

Allan Sutherland, a writer with epilepsy, criticised opposition from “old-fashioned and paternalistic” epilepsy charities.

He said: “It seems to me that she is doing a carefully thought-out piece of work which I think is very interesting.”

He said epilepsy was still “demonised” but usually not visible, so people with the condition do not tend to meet each other and the themes explored by Marcalo are not debated.

Sutherland said Marcalo’s control over her own performance would contrast with intrusive films of seizures that are taken without permission and placed on YouTube.

Peter Street’s fifth collection of poems, Thumbing from Lipik to Pakrac, was published earlier this year by Waterloo Press

24 November 2009

Share this post:

TwitterFacebookWhatsAppReddit

Related

‘Muddled’ blue badge reforms ‘are to blame for renewal delays’
6th February 2015
UN debate will be reminder of true inclusive education
6th February 2015
IDS breaks pledge on PIP waiting-times, as tens of thousands still queue for months
30th January 2015

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

Disabled high-rise leaseholders are living in post-Grenfell fear of fire and financial ruin

Disabled people highlight scores of lockdown concerns

Regulator investigates DWP over universal credit ‘cover-up’

Tomlinson held just a handful of external meetings every month early in pandemic

US retail giant faces legal action over new face covering rule

Minister allows transport industry its fourth exemption from access laws

Government’s pandemic failings caused us ‘horrendous’ challenges, say DPOs

Watchdog has approved care settings for COVID patients in only three-fifths of areas

High court is asked to order fresh inquest into death of Jodey Whiting

MPs call for inquiry into government’s role in COVID deaths of disabled people

Advice and Information

DWP: The case for the prosecution

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web