How can we rein­vent the rela­tion­ship between care­givers and the people they care for, tak­ing it out of the reduct­ive per­spect­ive of ill­ness and dis­ease? Gathered around an ori­gin­al cho­reo­graph­ic piece, 13 patient-care­giver duos per­form their mov­ing and del­ic­ate responses. 

In the pair­ing between a patient and a loved one, ill­ness is both what sep­ar­ates and what unites them, in an often destabil­iz­ing pas de deux. Anxi­ety, dis­cour­age­ment, exhaus­tion, aggress­ive­ness, anger, frus­tra­tion, the pro­jec­tion of one’s own feel­ings and anxi­et­ies onto the oth­er, all con­trib­ute to cre­at­ing a new rela­tion­ship that can some­times be a source of con­flict. How can we find a new bal­ance? How can we ima­gine set­ting up a duo (wife-hus­band, child-par­ent, friend-loved one) where a peace­ful rela­tion­ship with one­self, with the oth­er per­son and with oth­ers in gen­er­al can be estab­lished? This is the vast yet intim­ate field explored by the par­ti­cip­at­ive cre­ation A MI-AMI, ima­gined over six week­ends of work­shops where exper­i­ment­a­tion and impro­visa­tion will give rise to scenes that may be danced, spoken or sung.