Ania Nowak’s Obelix Nutrix ruminates on nursing (its histories and realities) as a performance of the art and science of caring. It premiered at Salzburger Kunstverein and ran at Sophiensæle from 29 to 31 November 2024.
She enters the stage dressed in a white cotton nurse’s frock, kneehigh, lace-up, white leather stiletto boots, a nurse’s cap sporting a sparkling silver strip, and dangling between her bare legs, a red string of beads: her female, life-giving power agush. In spoken, rhythmic melodies, our ‘Supernurse’ begs one of us in the tribune to ease her pain with ibuprofen, synchronising her imploring syllables with a doll-like box step. A willing spectator obliges, digging around in their coat pockets, and Supernurse gratefully pops a small white pill they produce and ingests it with water from a little bottle in her uniform. We love and admire Supernurse and want to help her, as her role in helping us defines her. In the lineage of feminist Fluxus works like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), trust and submission drive the participatory exchange. Supernurse Nowak draws us into her orbit, playing with the implicit trust we (must) have in the social encounter of healthcare. Oozing maternal intuition, she has faith in us, her inherently fragile, dependent patients. She gains our sympathy, respect and confidence by risking herself for us, both daily on the frontline and right here in the Kantine, swallowing any mass-produced, identical-looking anti-inflammatory tablet proffered up.
©Salzburger Kunstverein
The 35-minute solo unfolding from this opening scene is an incisive exploration of care as a gift and a burden. Our Supernurse is proven a paradoxical figure both vulnerable to pain and carrying the ‘obelix’ (oversized, superhuman) task of caring for others (‘nutrix’: to nurse, to treat kindly and with extra care), alleviating our suffering through her unwavering and compassionate attendance. She winks at the archetypical roleplay fantasy: a soft, tender woman with illicit sex appeal who nurtures us with unconditional care, touch, and personal risk in our service. Against a crisp, staccato sound score, she sings smooth, airy vocals about her selfless and impartial commitment to our needs through the power of tactile affection and companionship and her facilitation of non-human healing agents against pain: pharmaceuticals.
Developing thoughtfully from the choreographer’s long-term research into universal phenomena like love and sickness, Obelix Nutrix represents and dissects the figure of the nurse—tracing its lineage back to Florence Nightingale, personified as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ (lighting the dark as she checked on wounded soldiers during the Crimean War). Supernurse Nowak empathises with, cares for, and tends to our individual and involuntary experiences of pain in the human condition as we each move across the continuum of living and dying. In the closing scene, Nowak sits in a chair downstage centre, reading aloud our medical rights, presenting euthanasia as a legally sanctioned option for incurable pain. She suggests that death can be a form of care—a choice to end suffering in a dignified way, accompanied by a nurse, rather than the indiscriminate and often painful process of natural death or the solitude of suicide.
Obelix Nutrix challenges us, through a skilful choreography of humour and confrontation, to reflect on the intricate web of dependency, trust, and vulnerability that defines caregiving. It urges us to question how we are cared for, how we might care for and respect others’ self-determined lives and deaths, and how our autonomy is an act of collectivity rather than individualised separateness.
Obelix Nutrix by Ania Nowak premiered at Salzburger Kunstverein and was presented at Sophiensæle from 29 to 31 November 2024
