| Abstract | Who Cares – the aesthetic and expressive capture of the body through thermal imaging
Choreographer Angela Woodhouse and collaborating artist Caroline Broadhead share research towards Who Cares, a new screen dance installation utilising thermal technology.
Since September 2022 we have been working in partnership with NHS staff to open conversations on recent and current experiences with specific focus on the role of touch as a signifier of care, contamination, intimacy and trust.
Through interviews with ICU staff at Whittington Hospital, London we invited reflections on experiences both during and since the pandemic. Focus was on alertness to touching and not touching; social and emotional contact and how nurses became the conduit for grief and loss. Prompted by their voices we undertook a series of experiments with dancers Martina Conti and Alice Labant to interpret questions of care through the expanded boundary of self, made visible through thermal representation.
Initial discussions with NHS staff have revealed the need amongst frontline staff for a moment of pause to capture personal thoughts on the notion of one body in relation to another, of how touch, so critical in care, has become so guarded through the pandemic. These dialogues served as grounding for research with the dancers in which we imagine the relay and forensics of touch, revealing our bodies as overlapping, drawing attention and giving space to these tensions. The visual capture of heat in breath, in the exchange of clothes or in the residue of touch offers the opportunity to explore the environment of the tactile, normally unseen. Experiments revealed the body as extended through time, of detail (heat) emerging and fading, of quiet attention on the evolving biology of individuals that in turn carries an emotional resonance. The extraordinary capture and manipulation of the moving body to establish the poetic potential of thermal imaging technology, forges new artistic investigations for us, and for the field.
We welcome the opportunity to share this interdisciplinary (dance/fine arts/health) research at the symposium through presentation and exhibits as a means to address topics of care, ethics, capture of the unseen, human biology and aesthetics.
Funded by Arts Council England and Middlesex University with additional support from NHS England.
Exhibition : Thermal Duets 5 x videos (framed iPods) run on a continuous loop. |
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