ABOUT

Pharmakon: Performance Science is a Zoom performance and classroom process investigating intersections between pharmacy and theater with focus on medicine and toxicity, economies of care, and social healing.

Over spring semester 2021 at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 14 students and 3 faculty members (in theater and pharmacy) dug into the roots of pharmakon--a term meaning at once healing and poison.

Students responded to prompts imagining new drugs, relating personal medication stories, embodying ancient healers and Greek choral texts. We created healing rituals inspired by the campus’s Native American Medicine Garden. We considered the U.S. opioid crisis and its relation to racial logics and commodity capitalism with members of zAmya Homeless/Housed theater company. We theatricalized new findings in psychedelic therapy documented by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind.

Throughout the class, we worked to rethink our relationship to plants, fungus, earth -and to each other- as interdependent. The stories related to an audience of pharmacy and theater students via an interactive Zoom performance that took place in April of 2021.

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THE STUDENTS

Noah Branch

Regan Carter

Mel Fellows

Amber Frederick

Kierney Gray

Grace Hillmeyer

Emiliano Silva Izquierdo

Alexandra Jorndt

Noah Keating

Claire Loveall

Emily Vaillancourt

THE LEADERSHIP

Co-Instructors & Directors

Luverne Seifert, Sonja Kuftinec

Co-Instructor & Wearer of Many Hats

Prof. Paul Ranelli

Research Assistant & Co-director

Michael Valdez

Film & Editing

Kyra Rahn

Additional films

Emiliano Silva Izquierdo

Research Librarians

Sarah Jane Brown, Deborah Ultan

Pharmacy Consultants

Lisa Hillman, Caroline Gaither, and Jon Schommer

Guest Artist

Chris Bell

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"A scholar, a clown, and a pharmacist walk into a library--and that’s no joke. Our convergence as co-instructors over two years of research and planning has, in fact, come to feel more like a road trip--or perhaps a journey of ongoing discovery. Pharmakon represents one moment in that process, joined by a stalwart group of students, including graduate research associate Michael Valdez. Over the spring semester, the students--many confined intermittently by Covid to Zoom, or struggling to make sense of their relationships to interpersonal healing and social toxicity--took on the role of co-explorers. They responded to prompts imagining new drugs, relating personal medication or intoxication stories, embodying ancient healers, and forging through Greek choral texts to examine the roots of the pharmakon--a term meaning at once medicine, poison, and scapegoat."

-Sonja Kuftinec, Co-instructor