Dazed In The Life

Audrey II looming over Mum, Dad and me on the set of "Little Shop Of Horrors".

I’ve been quite conspicuous by my absence from this blog for a wee while. One of the main reasons was that I was directing “Little Shop Of Horrors” in DU Players which ran from February 17th to 21st. I had an absolute blast and it was a joy watching everything coming together and to life before my – very heavy and sleep-deprived – eyes. I had a wonderful co-director in the immensely talented Jayne Stynes and it was great to have someone to bounce ideas off and turn to for much-needed hugs and confectionary when things got a bit much! The crew were tireless, especially over the weekend before the show, in their efforts to create a bleak Skid Row and the little shop itself. The band, perched precariously on a scaffold 7 feet above the stage, were so talented and led by my good friend and fellow juice-drinker Danny Forde. The cast members themselves made me – and everyone else – laugh uncontrollably with their comic timing but they also were, to a man, brilliant in their singing and dancing too, deserving the full houses and standing ovations which came their way. Shout out to Aaron, Seán and Ruairí too for making that Mean Green Mother, Audrey II, rock out and chow down. So, if I’ve been away, it was for a good reason!

“Bodies, The Exhibition” – or “BODIES…The Exhibition”, as I believe the garbled syntax of the display runs - has been in Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre lately. A strange venue for a science exhibition, was my initial thought. Then I discovered the exact nature of the show. What on the posters about Dublin looked like very good clay likenesses of the stripped human form turned out to be actual preserved human remains. I was more than a little disturbed by this discovery, and the fact that they were being displayed in poses such as performing a bicycle kick or conducting an orchestra made it all-the-more macabre. The controversy surrounding this exhibition must surely be in some way behind the choice of venue – a smaller Dublin theatre and music venue rather than one of the museums.

I decided to do some more exploration and visited the BODIES website. I found a rather disturbing note in their FAQs. The FAQ reads: “Q: Where do the full body specimens come from? A: The full body specimens are persons who lived in China and died of natural causes. After the bodies were unclaimed at death, pursuant to Chinese law, they were ultimately delivered to a medical school for education and research. Where known, information about the identities, medical histories and causes of death is kept strictly confidential”. (http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/bodies.html)

One has to ask about the morality in all this. These are unidentified bodies of people who may not have granted permission for their use in such an extraordinary way after death, let alone donated their bodies to science. Their relatives also have no idea that their loved ones are travelling the world in an sensationalised educational freak-show. How can one feel comfortable about the presentation of a corpse in a sporting pose when in fact they may never have played sport (Chinese residents are unlikely to have played American football), or as conducting an orchestra when they may have been fans of rap rather than classical? You may think that’s a flippant point, but it is really creating a fiction, a different life for strangers. It invades their previous existence and plonks them into a fishbowl with new props and surroundings, destroying their life-stories to tell a new, gaudy one. The claim that the bodies are “tastefully displayed” is sickening and hollow.

Furthermore, and more chillingly, there is a black market in the trade of corpses of executed, tortured or starved prisoners based in that country, with bodies fetching about $300 apiece. China’s human rights abuses are a matter of concern for the whole of humanity, yet we are blissfully unaware and uninformed about the provenance of these human statues. The practice of organ harvesting from the Falun Gong is another well-publicised, but much overlooked, offence and there are plenty of organs to be gazed at in this gruesome display. (For info and reports about this, visit http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/BodiesExhibits/ or Google: black market body trade China)

Whatever happened to these people before they died, there is something of Burke and Hare feel to all of this, harking back to the days of body-snatching and grave-robbing. Where is the respect in this? People who donate their bodies to science indicate this wish before they die, but I’m sure many of them would be horrified to think their stripped forms might be paraded about the capital cities of the world like this. What is more, the bodies in the Ambassador never even had the chance to indicate such a wish. They may not rest in a peaceful grave, being hauled about the planet as money-making exhibits.

It so happened that in college one of my courses was studying Séamus Heaney at the time, and his poems about the Stone Age bodies at Aarhus (such as “The Tollund Man”), which seemed more than appropriate. Heaney’s poems have a primitive feel to them, unashamed in their pagan and gruesome effect. But it made me think. There is a difference between the display of those Bodies in the Bog in a museum and the BODIES exhibition. The Aarhus displays are laid peacefully. Their histories are told, as much as is known of them. And there was scant chance of a family relative being about to consult about the wishes of the deceased regarding their destination after death.

There is a respect which is sorely missing in the BODIES display. To recreate the inside of the human body has been done in polymer before. This venture simply wishes to cash in on the sensationalism of using REAL human bodies, nothing more. If it claims to be merely educational, it should dispense with this immoral and disgusting selling point. The opening blurb on the website talks of the “amazing and complex machine” which is the human body. Machine eh? Something mechanical? To be taken apart, piece by piece, and ogled in doe-eyed wonder like the inside of a clock? The “machine” behind the display, Premier Exhibitions, calls on the consumer to “Peer Inside Yourself”. Perhaps they should peer inside themselves, think about exactly what they are doing, about where there money is coming from and about what a massive responsibility it is to take possession of a human body.