An Installation, A Performance and a Doctor’s Office

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Photo: April Biggs - aprilbiggs.org

April Biggs 'Sick Girl'

April Biggs 'Sick Girl'

On the way into Sick Girl, audience members are given intake forms on clipboards. The atmosphere is somewhere between an art gallery, a small stage theatre and a doctor’s office waiting room. One by one members of the audience are called up to a front desk from numbers. that have been written on the intake forms. The three-page intake forms are general wellness questions. Some of them are whimsically poetic. Some of them are rather abstract. Under the bold heading “Medicine,” there is the question: “Do you take any?” This is followed by the question “How do you feel about that?” 

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Photo: April Biggs - aprilbiggs.org

April Biggs 'Sick Girl'

April Biggs 'Sick Girl'

At the front desk, audience members have the opportunity to check temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen level. There’s the opportunity to walk around the installation, It consists of various artifacts of the medical journey of the artist: April Biggs. Years ago she’d suffered from cystic fibrosis. She’d survived a double lung transplant. There are jars full of hospital wristbands. There’s a small poster made from old prescription labels.

The audience has the opportunity to wade into a tub of empty plastic prescription bottles. Numbers continue to be called as audience members work their way through the installation. At the end of the installation, the Patient will see you. There she is: April Biggs sits in a consultation area in a medical gown with a long train that includes empty syringes and various trappings of the journey to recovery. She’s radiant at the end of it all. Once everyone has been through the installation, she engages in dance movement and abstraction of drama. There is pain. There is passion. There is the sound of air—inhalations and exhalations with lungs Biggs wasn’t born with. It’s a powerful experience reflecting on the nature of human survival through diagnoses and drugs and plastic and so much more on the constant path to recovery.

April Biggs’ Sick Girl ran for one weekend only at The Pink House as a part ofTRIP/syck, a program of three shorts with 53212 Presents. For information about more upcoming shows with the 53212 team, visit their website at 53212presents.org.