Awaiting Tiresias - Zoom / Livestream Performance

Watch in full screen, with headphones, and in darkness for optimal effect.

Awaiting Tiresias draws upon Greek mythology, common attitudes towards blindness and disability, and modern conceptions of gender in its multi-layered analysis of identity and diagnosis. It examines tensions between liminality and diagnosis, sight and insight, and inter and independence. The performance relies upon film’s ability to carefully construct perspective and interiority as a means of generating empathy and awareness.

This recording is of a livestream performance of Awaiting Tiresias that took place on September 7, 2022 as part of the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference. It is best experienced with headphones, lights turned out, and minimal distractions.

CREATIVE TEAM:

• Author: Heather May

• Performers: Heather May & Kelly Walker

• Director: Heather May

• Original Compositions and Sound Design: Kelly Walker

• Video Design: Heather May

• Technical Director and Stage Manager: Kelly Walker

• Audio Description, Captioning, and Audio Description Editor: Heather May

• Audio Description Narration: Kelly Walker

WORKS CITED IN PERFORMANCE:

Moeschen, Sheila C. “Dramatizing Distress: Sentimental Culture, Melodrama, and Nineteenth-Century Reform for the Deaf/Dumb and Blind,” in Acts of Conspicuous Compassion: Performance Culture and American Charity Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) 18-48.

Wong, Alice. “I’m Disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? As medical rationing becomes a reality, ‘quality of life’ measures threaten disabled people like me,” Vox, 4 April 2020. Available at https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/4/21204261/coronavirus-covid-19-disabled-people-disabilities-triage [Last accessed 23 October 2022].