{"id":2494,"date":"2018-10-30T11:28:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T11:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=2494"},"modified":"2018-10-30T11:40:28","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T11:40:28","slug":"shobana-jeyasingh-shaping-contagion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=2494","title":{"rendered":"Shobana Jeyasingh: Shaping Contagion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Shobana-Jeyasingh-Dance,-Contagion,-photo-Jane-Hobson,-2\"<\/p>\n

Discussing Jeyasingh’s\u00a014-18 NOW dance commission for New Scientist, 11 October 2018<\/a><\/p>\n

It still sounds mad \u2013 14-18 NOW, the UK\u2019s arts programme for the First World War centenary, commissioned a dance piece about the global flu pandemic. Why did you take this tragedy on \u2013 and how on earth did you shape it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shobana Jeyasingh\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>I began by looking at the smallest element of the story, H1N1, the virus responsible for the Spanish flu. The mechanics of virology appealed to me from the moment I began my reading and research. I spoke to two experts at length: Wendy Barclay, at Imperial College, and John Oxford at Queen Mary College, both in London.<\/p>\n

All the strategies the flu virus has for penetrating the cell fascinated me. How it battles past the cilia on the cell\u2019s wall is only the beginning. Once inside the cell it has to find the nucleus, and because it has no motive power of its own, it must hitch rides on transport proteins which themselves are unidirectional, so the virus must leap from one protein to another in search of its target like someone leaping on and off trams.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a strange and amazing narrative, even before the virus starts harnessing the cell\u2019s machinery to churn out copies of itself, which is surely the strangest twist of all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is an incredibly dark subject to tackle<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I said to John Oxford, who was part of the team that researched the shape of the H1N1 virus. But his work had made him feel very differently. He\u2019d embarked on this huge archaeological project, looking for the best-preserved tissue that might be infected with the virus. Tissue from people buried in lead coffins,\u00a0or in Alaskan permafrost<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And he found the families of these victims still recalling how their dying had been cared for. People knew they were in danger, if they nursed somebody with the flu. But, regardless, people gave that care to their family, their spouse, their child. And their everyday heroism was being remembered, even now. It\u2019s a dark story, yes, but Oxford showed me that story in an incredible, wonderful light.<\/p>\n

The way your dancers personify the virus is frankly terrifying. They\u2019re not \u201crobotic\u201d but at one time they move like nightmare quadripeds \u2013 columns of flesh armed with four extrusions of equal power and length, like RNA strands<\/strong><\/p>\n

At this point, they\u2019re not portraying living things. A virus is a sinister code more than a lifeform in its own right. It\u2019s a strategy, playing itself out in opposition to the body, by recruiting the body\u2019s own forces. It\u2019s not \u201cattacking\u201d anything. It\u2019s far more subtle, far more insidious than that. What killed you, once you were infected with H1N1, was not the virus itself, but the violence of your own immune response. Just the drama of it was fascinating for me.<\/p>\n

The medical profession doesn\u2019t get much of a look-in here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Doctors recognised what kind of disease the Spanish Flu was from its symptoms, but they had no idea that viruses even existed. How could they? Viruses are so small, without an electron microscope you can\u2019t even see them. Several suspected, rightly, that the disease was airborne, but of course filters that can screen out bacteria are no defence against viruses.<\/p>\n

So the work of helping people fell, not on the medical profession, who were powerless against what they couldn\u2019t understand, but onto the women \u2013 nurses, mothers, wives, carers \u2013 who risked their own lives to look after the sick. The last section of the work, \u201cEveryday Heroes\u201d, is about nursing: the irony that while men were either winning or losing on the battlefield, women at home were fighting what was mostly a losing battle against a far more serious threat.<\/p>\n

Why was this threat not properly recognised at the time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nobody knew what caused the flu, or why the youngest and the fittest seemed most prone to die. The onset was so sudden and dramatic, people would fall sick and die within a few hours.\u00a0 Someone perfectly healthy at lunchtime might be dead at teatime.<\/p>\n

In Manchester, the man who was in charge of public health, James Niven, woke up quite early to the fact that flu transmission shot up when people were gathered together. He tried to ban the Armistice Day celebrations in his city, but of course he was overruled. There was a huge spike in flu cases soon after. There are so many fascinating stories, but in 20 minutes, there\u2019s a limit to what we can explore.<\/p>\n

Contagion\u00a0<\/em>is not a long piece, but you\u2019ve split it into distinct acts. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seemed the only way to contain such a complex story. The first section is called \u201cFalling Like Flies\u201d, which was the expression one Indian man used to describe how he lost his entire family in the blink of an eye: his little daughter, his wife, his brother, his nephews.\u00a0 This section is simply about the enormity of death.\u00a0 The second, \u201cViral Moves\u201d, explores the dynamics of the virus. The third section, \u201cCold Delirium\u201d, is about, well, exactly that.<\/p>\n

What is \u201ccold delirium\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a name that\u2019s sometimes given to the virus\u2019s neurological effects. One of the things we\u2019ve begun to appreciate more and more \u2013 and this is why the official death count for the 1918 pandemic has risen recently \u2013 is that\u00a0Spanish flu packs a huge psychological punch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A lot of people who committed suicide in this period were most likely suffering the neurological effects of the virus. It triggered huge mental problems: screaming, fits, anxiety, episodes of aimless wandering.<\/p>\n

And this wasn\u2019t fully recognised then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

People noticed. But there was no means of reporting these cases to give people an idea of the shape and scale of the problem. Flu was not a reportable illness, like typhoid or plague. At the turn of the 20th century in Mumbai they had a plague that was fully documented and shaped the provision of public health. But in the case of flu, milder forms were so familiar, people didn\u2019t really take much notice until the sheer numbers of the dead became unignorable.<\/p>\n

And remember, in 1918 communication was not so effective. In Alaska, 90 per cent of a village community died, but there wasn\u2019t any way to connect this episode to 20 million deaths in India. The connected global map that we carry around in our heads simply did not exist.<\/p>\n

Contagion<\/em><\/strong>\u2018s set is a series of white boxes, arranged neatly at one end, and at the other end rising up into the air chaotically. Do they represent blood cells or grave markers?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

You\u2019re on the right track, though the idea first came from looking at pictures of hospital beds. Hospital beds tend to be ordered and in lines, and then this huge event comes along to disrupt everything, and sweep everything before it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discussing Jeyasingh’s\u00a014-18 NOW dance commission for New Scientist, 11 October 2018 It still sounds mad \u2013 14-18 NOW, the UK\u2019s arts programme for the First World War centenary, commissioned a dance piece about the global flu pandemic. Why did you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,622],"tags":[402,451,630,197,232,452,631],"class_list":["post-2494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-stage","tag-art-science","tag-dance","tag-first-world-war","tag-interview","tag-new-scientist","tag-performance","tag-spanish-flu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2494"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2504,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494\/revisions\/2504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}