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.
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
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Co-Instructor & Wearer of Many Hats
Prof. Paul Ranelli
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Research Assistant & Co-director
Michael Valdez
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Film & Editing
Kyra Rahn
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Additional films
Emiliano Silva Izquierdo
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Research Librarians
Sarah Jane Brown, Deborah Ultan
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Pharmacy Consultants
Lisa Hillman, Caroline Gaither, and Jon Schommer
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Guest Artist
Chris Bell
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