On Being Ill – Emese Csornai

On Being Ill is a sound and movement installation piece, played in a theater. The subject of the installation is illness, and its starting point is the book from Virginia Woolf with the same title. It is an accompaniment into absence, with an eye on all the non-communicated content of illness.

The narrative is a journey along the spine, embodiment of several conditions of illness, and where the illness is never an end point, a result to evaluate, merely a starting point. The body and the mind too is always looking for new alignments instead of judging the current condition. Could society perhaps adapt to such an agility too, turning its back to the good old dualistic habit of judgement?

The project is a research of presence, and is directed to explore the possible mental and emotional states resulting of acute physical condition. On Being Ill is driving our attention to the content of certain conditions, releasing them from their dogmatic brackets of dictated value. Throughout the piece the event of a ritual naturally happens.

This is the first movement performance I have directed in an assignment-based collaboration in which content, editing and dramaturgy (light and staging) was my responsibility. This methodology encouraged me to envision and direct further movement performances using my visual arts educational background.