Shannon Yee - Reassembled Slightly Askew - Photo by Ryan O’Hare

Shannon Yee: Reassembled, Slightly Askew

Shannon Yee - Reassembled Slightly Askew - Photo by Ryan O’HareReassembled, Slightly Askew describes Belfast-based artist Shannon Yee’s overwhelming personal journey in and out of surgery while hospitalised due to a brain infection. It continues through to rehabilitation and a realisation that the social and emotional self will be forever altered… slightly askew. The piece touches on the world around the patient, the medical professionals who care and treat her, and her steadfast relationship with her partner.  It carefully portrays Yee’s wavering navigation through both the event and its consequences, and reaffirms a faith in human beings’ ability to heal.

The form of this piece makes it an immediate success. Handed a consent form by two performers dressed in medical uniforms, I am sat in a waiting room for my treatment, a hospital wristband is attached, and coats, bags, and identities are left behind. Audience members are led to their beds in a large, stark hospital room on the first floor of Battersea Arts Centre. I feel entirely in the hands of the two nurses in this cold empty environment. The transition into the intimate world that Shannon Yee has created is well facilitated by the nurses who balance their roles and their patients’ needs as nervous viewers in a way that reassures, enabling the audience to fully immerse themselves in a piece that calls for extreme vulnerability.

The rest of the piece seems simple, participants lie in their bed and listen to audio through a set of headphones. The complexity is in its construction which allows Yee to explore the geography of site and senses in altering, dislocating, and disorientating ways. Integral to this affect are the blindfolds we are given and the binaural technology used to create the work. Without sight, images are conjured up in the mind, evoked by a chaotic and multilayered soundscape. Our perceptions of space and of movement are altered and senses of feeling, hearing, and of movement are heightened. There is a science behind this swirling moving world of voices, medical machines, and fuzziness. Working with sonic artist Paul Stapleton, the piece uses two methods that make it innovative and fully immersive. Binaural recording techniques, which allow artists to situate sound recordings ‘in space’ around listeners’ heads, creates the illusion that we are in fact inside Yee’s mind, have taken her place, and hear her voice as it if it were our own.  Speaking bodies also move and interact within the space around the listener whilst a technique called diffusion moves sound in and out around space also: it’s a strikingly full-body experience of sound as we lie, immobilised in our beds.

What this creates is theatre that is disorientating, unsettling and disquieting, as well as calming and comforting in the bedside manner of Yee’s partner and the blanket that tucks us in.

Complex emotional responses echoing Yee’s experiences are cleverly, thoughtfully generated.  Our bed becomes the entire world: it is safe, yet often constricting like a prison and regularly invaded by noises both recognisable and alien. The relative safety and passivity of the patient generates a reluctance to re-enter the outside world and emphasises the trust that is given ultimately through powerlessness.  There were four points that became almost unbearably panic-inducing, but safely dissipated, giving listeners a taster of their own fears and emotive responses.

The sound score feels disorientatingly physical:  sensations of air popping and blowing around your head and footsteps in crunchy grass above you, invasive bee-like buzzing and the powerful sound of a baby crying are emotive sensations that open up personal narratives and interpretations. I was convinced throughout that people were moving about the room (though I was assured afterwards that this was not the case), that the bed shakes, and the end of it was knocked by someone – your sense of reality versus the constructed landscape of sound is truly shaken. The heightened vulnerability created here, means that tiny vibrations in the floor boards feel like waves: I was lost, a small falling stone in a deep ocean of sounds and imagined images.

Innovative in its method, and informative and educational in its outcomes, Reassembled, Slightly Askew intimately connects medical professionals with patients in terms of empathy as well as art to make sense of personal trauma. For audience participants who enter this theatrical induced coma, it feels like a ritual in which audiences pay homage to everyone who has suffered in similar ways.  This generous production goes a long way to opening up a dialogue about the experience of serious illness that allows participants to begin to truly consider it whilst respecting its gravitas.

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About Rebecca JS Nice

Rebecca worked as a dance teacher, lecturer and choreographer for eight years specialising in tap and jazz. She has a background in Art History and is currently training further in medieval history and contemporary choreography with a particular interest in live art. At the early stage of her dance writing career, Rebecca reviews and analyses theatre and dance performance and is working on a papers for publication.