Performance: Key Changes, Medicine, Music, and Transformation

An interdisciplinary performance exploring transformation through sound, music, and storytelling at the intersection of medicine, patient experience, and contemporary art.

Transformation is a performance that brings together artists, clinicians, researchers, and people with lived experience to explore how change occurs in medical, artistic, and human terms.

Through sound projection, music, film, theatre, and storytelling, the programme examines transformation from multiple perspectives: the patient, the medic, and the artist. Works translate physiological signals and clinical data—pulse, ECG, ECT, cellular imagery—as well as experiences of coma and recovery, into sound, image, and narrative, creating new ways of listening to and understanding medicine.

The programme highlights how creative practice can transform clinical data and lived experience into meaningful artistic forms, generating insight, connection, and shared reflection. Together, these performances invite audiences to consider how art can humanise medical knowledge, shift perspective, and open more connected ways of understanding bodies, experiences, and systems of care.

Programme

Toggle Dance and Pulse Dance for Solo Eb Clarinet and Live Electronics – Rob Godman

Kate Romano – Eb Clarinet

Rob Godman – Sound Projection

Toggle Dance and Pulse Dance form part of a series of works exploring different aspects of musical and naturally occurring environmental rhythm, an area of research carried out by the composer over the past few years. This includes his AHRC IAA funded research project (Pulse) at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London in collaboration with Dr. Giampaolo Martinelli. Toggle Dance makes use of extended variations of toggle rhythms – drum patterns when played using the alternating-hands method, analogous to the call-and-response technique of singing found in sub-Saharan Africa. Pulse Dance is polyrhythmic with asynchronous loops of clarinet samples phasing over time forming complex rhythmic patterns in multiple tempi. Rhythmic irregularities in Pulse Dance are analogous to heart arrhythmia, normally requiring VT ablation surgical procedures to correct the condition.

https://robgodman.co.uk/music/

Elaine Chew – Abnormal Heart Beats

Abnormal Heart Beats comprises of three musical contributions, each a sonification of electrocardiographic traces of abnormal heartbeats. These pieces represent a kind of sonification because they were constructed from precise rhythm transcriptions and direct mappings of the originating ECGs. The data was not inspiration for the music; they are the music. In each case, the signals were mathematically and computationally transformed into music using algorithmic processes. Hear the Little Etudes for Piano based on aberrations of cardiac electrophysiology (2020) and Arrhythmia Suite, Nos 1-2* (2017-8) and 3 (2021), composed and performed by EC; and, see the heartbeats of a COVID-19 Heart Transplant Patient and Medical Team (2021) generated/visualised by Emma Frid with Michele Orini, Giampaolo Martinelli, and EC.

About Elaine Chew

Elaine Chew is a pianist and computational mathematician, and also an arrhythmia patient who has undergone radiofrequency and cryoablation at the Heart Hospital / Barts Heart Centre. Following the procedures, she pivoted from music information research to found the Digital Music Theranostics Lab at King's College London's School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging sciences. She and her team researches new ways to use music in cardiovascular diagnostics and digital therapeutics.

https://eniale.kcl.ac.uk/heartbeat-music/

Seb Harcombe (Elysium) – Coming Out of Coma

A testimony-theatre work, developed from interviews with former intensive care patients, exploring experiences of coma and recovery.

About Seb Harcombe

Seb Harcombe is a theatre director and coma survivor who suffered a cardiac arrest in 2019 and spent a week in an ICU coma at St Thomas’ Hospital. After his recovery, he attended peer support groups for ICU survivors at Guy’s and St Thomas’, where he was inspired by the testimonies of fellow patients - drawing on these narratives to create a piece of theatre, interspersed with music from Handel's Alceste, exploring journeys into the subconscious 'underworld' and back.

http://www.secretheart.org/seb-harcombe.html

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Barts North Wing, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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