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Theater of the Dead Bodies

Chicago Tribune reviews a very strange-sounding new bit of theater, performed in a surgical classroom at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago:

This is a grim part of town on a weekend evening. Unless a few cadavers are looking to escape a future in research, Local Infinities Visual Theater is not going to attract walk-up business.

This site-specific show sounds like a ghoulish Halloween prank. In actuality, it's one of the most intellectually absorbing theater pieces of the year. For anyone with an interest in medical ethics, or the history of science, or the way art and science fused uneasily together during the Renaissance, this Gelatin-fueled affair is not to be missed.Granted, you might take some persuading.In essence, this multimedia show wants you to ponder what it means and what it has historically meant to dissect a human corpse. There is, of course, the obvious issue of medical necessity. But that does not occur in a vacuum. The act of dissection comes with many fascinating questions. Is the dissectionist a scientist? Or an artist? Or an exhibitionist? Or all three at once?

This show is set during the Renaissance, when dissections frequently were done in public. But before you argue that's no longer the case and those issues thus moot, ponder the recent phenomenal success of the "Body Worlds" exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. There's still big, big money to be made from the exhibition of dead human bodies. And it's always fraught with ethical questions.

There's the issue of who gets dissected — it has often been criminals, or the otherwise dispossessed. In the case of the young Renaissance body of Suster Luyt, the first woman to get publicly pulled to bits in Amsterdam, there's no question that voyeurism and sexual fascination also played a part. Some people signed up to see the Luyt dissection because there was no other public forum to stare at a naked woman's body.

Has anybody seen this? It sounds amazing, worth a ticket to Chicago even.