The Body In Pieces: Contemporary Anatomy Theatres

In spite of its obvious focus on the body in performance, the form of the medical anatomy theatre has not been a topic of great interest to scholars in the humanities, until recently. New approaches, such as Hillary Nunn's Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy and Stephanie Moss and Kaara Peterson's Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage signal increasing focus on both cultural and formal manifestations of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, on the heels of the notable rise in the sub-discipline of body criticism. While such examples point to new understandings about the anatomy theatre in early modern history, they do not address what happens to the form following the Enlightenment. The spectacle of the public autopsy was banned as a practice in nearly every European country by the early twentieth century, making its existence more difficult to explore in the context of modernism. Does it disappear? Go underground? Does it simply retreat back into the lecture halls of medical academies? Or is it resurrected now and again, brought back from the grave throughout the trajectory of modern and postmodern performance?

Although select resurfacings of the historic anatomy theatre are traceable within performance from the fin-de-siècle to the late-twentieth century, three recent productions illustrate what I would suggest to be more ironic quotations of the form within our own contemporary theatre: The Wooster Group's To You, the Birdie!, Cynthia Hopkins's Accidental Nostalgia and Caryl Churchill's A Number. In each production, bodies on stage, while not deceased, are framed as anatomized subjects, disciplined and dissected by both the medical-optical and media technologies that govern their behaviors. While LeCompte stages the heroine of Racine's Phèdre as a body pathologized and fetishized by hegemonic forces, Hopkins performs the role of a neurologist experimenting on her mind as a case study of psychogenic amnesia, and Churchill explores how biogenetic reproductive technology positions the clone as a pawn of medical experimentation. Attuned to contemporary visual culture, all three productions emphasize the body as a mediated pastiche of parts, recalling August Strindberg's famous definition of his modern characters as "mere scraps of humanity . . . patched together." With its unique focus on staging the body in pieces, each production introduces a new character as body part—foot, brain, and gene—into the dramatis personae of Western theatre, challenging not only established notions of what makes up the self but, beyond this, what makes us human.

A Brief History of the Body in Pieces

In his famous study of the rise of clinical practice and pathology, The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault foregrounds his discussion of the anatomo-clinical method of nineteenth-century medicine by first analyzing the classificatory medical system of the eighteenth. In its privileging of visual diagnosis, argues Foucault, eighteenth-century medicine built the foundations for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century field's reliance on observation, aided by introspective visual medical technologies, such as the X-ray and microscope. Using the classificatory method, the eighteenth-century doctor treated each disease as its own biological species and attempted to form a picture of its spatial configuration within the body. In so doing, the classificatory doctor's gaze was, as Foucault writes, "Directed initially not towards that concrete body, that visible whole, that positive plenitude that faces him—the patient—but towards intervals in nature, lacunae, distances." While Foucault writes of the historical doctor's experience of pathological diagnosis, his analysis speaks as well to modernity's focus on the interiors of the human body and the graphic representation of its parts and appendages through different forms of medical imaging technology, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Computer Tomography Scan. Coincident with the development of such technology has been the rapid increase in the circulation of visual representations of both interior and exterior isolated body parts within popular culture at large.

On television, from M.A.S.H. and ER to newer shows like Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck, Grey's Anatomy, and the Showtime series Dexter, programs depicting the lives of surgeons...