Surfacing Stones, Clearing Airs

How can premodern medicine enable dancers to harness, reflect on, and subvert their own experiences as patients? Beginning with this question, twelve community dance workshops were facilitated in Chicago, Oberlin, Boston, and Los Angeles, USA, from 2022–2023. First, a series of scores, or loose instructions, were composed for movement drawing on historical research on medicine in the medieval Islamic world. These scores were offered to dancers in studios. Then, facilitation techniques were learned from the disability dance community that enabled offers of workshops to people with no prior experience in improvising dance, including other sick and disabled movers. This project is explained here in detail, the suggestion being that movement, among other embodied research methods, can be a useful tool for historians of medicine. Each of the five scores inspires improvised movement in relation to a different experience of illness or therapeutic modality drawn from “humoral medicine.” The hope was that defamiliarizing medicine would enable people to access new insights about their own medical encounters and enable understanding of the historical texts inspiring each score in new ways. However, the embodied explorations of workshop participants went far beyond the immediate material presented.