When ‘get well soon!’ is not an option: Sick-bodied performance as an alternative ontology in Johanna Hedva’s Sick Witch

When a chronically sick body is not forced to get better, it interrupts notions of productivity, invites slowness and makes space for other ways of being. Closely examining the performance of Sick Witch by chronically ill, body-based artist Johanna Hedva, I argue that their performance undoes assumptions of sickness as a stagnant, passive, waiting state in which the goal is always to ‘get well’. Provoked by Hedva’s work, I ask: what place do sick individuals have within a neo-liberal ontology predicated upon being well? I explore and critique how health and sickness are used to define human value drawing on theorizations of neo-liberalism as an ontology from scholars spanning the fields of dance, performance and disability studies including Petra Kuppers, Maria Firmino-Castillo, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo and others. Using performance analysis I examine how Hedva performs embodiments of sickness – most notably the embodied performance of retching – to disrupt assumptions about getting well. Ultimately Hedva’s performance of Sick Witch reveals an unsettling truth, that not only does a neo-liberal ontology violate chronically ill and/or disabled bodies but shapes our very understanding and enactment of reality; neo-liberalism pushes us to prioritize productivity over our wellbeing.