Anna Ovaska writes about how the Finnish play Kipeä esitys (2022) guides its audience to read pain in new ways. The “tragicomedy” – as the play is characterized by its creators – shows pain as painful, but also as a source of creativity and community.
“I have to quit acting.”
“How to be in contact with another person if one can’t stand straight?”
“What if I go and lie down under this chair?”
“If your pain was a work of art, what kind of a work of art would it be?”
Kipeä esitys (my translation)
In Kipeä esitys (The Sick Show, performed originally at Theatre Takomo, in Helsinki, Finland, in spring 2022), three characters ponder the ways chronic pain affects one’s profession and artmaking, one’s social relationships, and even very basic things like moving in the world. Like many other works of art, the play also reflects on the possibilities of turning pain into artistic expression. However, Kipeä esitys doesn’t offer any definitive answers; it has neither a coherent plot nor a closed ending, which would show a resolution to the pain. Rather, the play consists of fragments and reflections, conversations between the characters (who have symbolic names: “Rage,” “Hype,” and “Depis,” i.e. “Depression”), musical scenes, and movement on the stage.
The play was written by two Finnish actors (Julia Lappalainen and Ella Mettänen) who suffer from chronic pain, and was performed by Lappalainen, Mettänen, and musician Antti Autio. Lappalainen and Mettänen also interviewed eighteen other people who deal with pain in their daily lives, and the audience can hear the voices of these interviewees on tape during the performance, answering questions like: “If your pain was a work of art, what kind of a work of art would it be?” On the stage, we also see projections of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, alongside other cultural representations of pain.
Kipeä esitys not only makes pain its central theme and a question for art, but also directs its audience to think about how we “read” (chronic) pain and suggests new ways of approaching it. The name of the play means literally a “painful” or “sick show,” but the word kipeä also conveys the colloquial meaning of “sick,” as in English, referring to something “cool” or “excellent.” Through the dual meaning of the title, the genre of the play stated in the pre-performance information (“a tragicomedy about pain”), and the characters’ self-reflections and conversations, the play offers its audience instructions on how to read pain in different ways – as something painful, but also as something constructive and playful. We are invited to respond to the play through our bodies, but also with attention to the social structures of power that shape experiences of pain. In other words, the play urges its audience to recognize the experiential, aesthetic, social, and political dimensions of pain. In this way, Kipeä esitys creates a link to contemporary crip perspectives on pain, which seek to highlight individuals’ experiential knowledge about pain and to expose ableist cultural understandings of pain, while also acknowledging the need for care (see, for example, Siebers 2010; Mintz 2013; Patsavas 2013; Mellor 2023).
The play repeatedly turns to the common idea of chronic pain as socially estranging: “How to be in contact with another person if one can’t stand straight?” As literary and disability studies scholar Susannah B. Mintz (2013, 8) notes, in many cultural representations, “[the] pained self loses its place in the human community.” At the same time, researchers like Mintz have written powerfully against such conceptions of pain and suggested that works of art can also offer more positive representations of pain. Kipeä esitys, too, oscillates between the understanding of chronic pain as a personal and social “tragedy” and as something that is a natural part of life, even a creative resource. To demonstrate this, the play includes a metafictional and self-reflexive level on which one of the characters (played by Ella Mettänen) questions their ability to remain on stage and announces that they “have to quit acting;” it seems impossible that a person who suffers from chronic pain could work as an actor. However, the inclusion of this scene is a strategic move – one that is familiar also from other recent feminist works like Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018), which likewise challenge the norms of what counts as a “good” performance. Although acting seems impossible, it continues, only in a different form, thereby admitting and making visible its limits. As such, the play questions the ableist norms that control artistic creation, especially in a profession like acting.
Modes of Reading
In addition to the way the play quite explicitly guides its audience to think about the social and political dimensions of pain, audience responses to the play reveal different ways of “reading pain” and how engagement with art can shape what we are able to perceive in the real world. For example, after seeing the play, an audience member wrote of one of its self-reflexive scenes:
The most touching moment in Kipeä esitys [The Sick Show], for me, was when [actor] Ella Mettänen curled up in the furthest corner of the stage. The creature crawled inside a small space covered by a sheet of plastic. Through the plastic we can barely see the creature inside its safety nest. It ponders about how one is allowed to be on the stage, what ways of doing and performing are expected and required on the stage. The creature asks: can one be like this, too?
The question extends from the performance to wider society. How should a person be [in public]? Which ways of being are allowed in the ableist society, in general?”
Helavuori 2022, n.p., my translation
Helavuori (2022) refers to Mettänen’s character as a “creature” (olento), a living being who is able to move, act, and think, but who is not necessarily seen as fully human. As Helavuori notes, the play invites its viewers to ask questions about our society and about the stigma attached to pain. Can I be out in public if I’m suffering from such severe pain that I can’t hide it? Can I be visibly in pain?
A different kind of response comes from a theatre critic in Finland’s largest newspaper:
The pre-performance information for Kipeä esitys [The Sick Show] states that the work is a tragicomedy about pain, written by Julia Lappalainen and Ella Mettänen, actors who live with pain.
It is interesting to notice how the mention of experiencing pain almost automatically makes one wait for details: what, when, what kind? In this performance, however, there will be no such familiar continuation. Rather, the pain of both the performers and the interviewees heard on audio tapes is, in a way, hidden.
Of course, this is absolutely allowed. You don’t have to talk about your pain. But, in a way, it is also contradictory, when even in a performance that recounts experiences of pain, pain remains as if behind a curtain.
Kangasniemi 2022, n.p., my translation
The critic notices how they were almost disappointed when the pain was not “made visible” (or visible enough) after all. In fact, there are no extended scenes of agony and despair in the play. No vivid descriptions of pain or elaborations about its causes.
Instead, pain is “made visible” through the characters’ self-reflections, their discussions about the social effects of pain and their ways of coping, the audio recordings, and the props, like a pink ball of rope, which the characters carry, or the mattresses on which the characters lie down. These props can be seen as visualizations of pain, but they also invite theatre-goers to imagine their softness, smoothness and even comfort: they are representations of pain, but also healing devices. The pain is thus projected onto objects on which the body in pain can rest, instead of the more usual symbols of pain (knives, needles, etc.) (for more on this, see Scarry 1985).
In contrast to the “lack” of pain on the stage, the aforementioned critic underscores the “radical” nature of the play: before the play begins, an employee of the theatre welcomes the audience and says that, if anyone feels like it, the audience is allowed to stand up from time to time, and that there are also a few places in the front row where it is possible to lie down: “A great job in normalizing pain! Because in the same way as pain seems, so self-evidently, to be a private matter and something to keep to oneself, it is also often something shameful” (Kangasniemi 2022, n.p., my translation). The critic writes about what happens before the play, not in the performance itself. But it could be argued that this process of making it normal to experience pain in public spaces is the whole point of the production. Kipeä esitys offers a safe space to be in pain in public – even if this means that one must curl up under a chair (as an actor) or lie down on a mattress (as a member of the audience).
As Mintz (2013, 93) notes in her book about the ways different genres affect the representation of pain, a play can make the audience aware of their own bodies and of the bodies of other audience members. This is exactly what Kipeä esitys does. From the very beginning, it brings attention not only to the bodies of the actors, but also to the bodies of the audience; it makes us aware of our own pains and vulnerabilities, and thus normalizes pain.
Reading the Politics of Pain
Kipeä esitys makes room for bodily experiences of pain on stage and challenges the norm of an actor (or a theatre-goer) as able-bodied: it is okay to curl up under a chair; it is okay to be visibly in pain in a social space, and to bring pain into the public domain.
The play aims to challenge, maybe even change, our “culture of pain” (Morris 1991): to eliminate the shame and loneliness attached to pain, which is still prevalent, especially in Finnish culture. It refuses to make pain into a “spectacle,” and it refuses to “resolve” pain. At the same time, it creates a community between the audience members and their bodies, the voices of the people sharing their experiences of chronic pain on tape, and the bodies of the actors on stage.
The play reminds us that while pain is painful, and often needs attention and care, it can also be turned into something else: art, relationships, community, and activism. Even if there aren’t ways to treat all pain (and sometimes the “cure” can be worse than the illness, as crip scholars like Tobin Siebers (2010) and Susannah B. Mintz (2013) have argued), many forms of pain can be made more bearable. As paradoxical as it might sound, what we need is more space for pain in the world.
About the author
Anna Ovaska (PhD) is a literary scholar working at Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, Tampere University, Finland. This essay is part of her project “Reading Pain” (Kone Foundation 2020–2024), which examines the social and cultural structures of power that shape experiences of pain, narratives we create about pain, and our ways of reading. The project also develops embodied and critical modes of close reading for the use of medicine and healthcare.
References
Helavuori, Hanna. 2022. “Kipeä esitys Teatteri Takomossa kysyy, miten saa olla.” Hanna Helavuori (blog), March 23, 2022. https://hannahelavuori.com/kipea-esitys-teatteri-takomossa-kysyy-miten-saa-olla.
Kangasniemi, Sanna. 2022. “Saa nousta seisomaan, jos on vaikea istua – Kipeän esityksen radikaalein juttu sanotaan jo ennen kuin yleisö pääsee saliin.” Helsingin Sanomat, March 21, 2022. https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000008667534.html.
Mellor, Neko. 2023. “Cripping the Pain Scale: Literary and Biomedical Narratives of Pain Assessment.” Medical Humanities 49 (4): 593–603.
Mintz, Susannah B. 2013. Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body. London: Bloomsbury.
Morris, David B. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Patsavas, Alyson. 2014. “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 203–18.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Siebers, Tobin. 2010. “In the Name of Pain.” In Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, edited by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, 183–94. New York: NYU Press.
