An art of contingency: Producing biosocial theatre

There is a diverse ecology of practices and organisations operating at the intersection of the biomedical, the artistic and the social. Such socially engaged arts practice draws on and incorporates understandings of the body directly or indirectly derived from biomedicine. It might be responding to infectious disease or a health condition such as dementia. This chapter proposes the idea of biosocial theatre as a framework for exploring what happens when artistic practices or social structures encounter medical practices or biological knowledge. Biosocial theatre thinks its artfulness and social function together and registers a relationship to the way the social is or has become entangled with the biological or biomedical. The chapter pays particular attention to infrastructural or supportive practices that produce and are produced by biosocial theatre discussing examples including the work of the artist Mark Storor and Contact theatre in Manchester, UK.