When the x-ray was invented, late-Victorian modesty was outraged by the prospect of being able to see what lay beneath a lady's clothes. Subsequently, before its dangers were realised, the x-ray became a novelty. Public booths allowed lovers to x-ray their hands and send them to each other as love tokens. Today, imaging technologies are commonplace. Our insides have become a digital spectacle - we are glass bodies, transparent beings who can hide nothing. What does that do to our sense of self? Our ancestors could only probe the body by touch and speculate on the site of the heart, but we can actually see it beating. What does that do to our imaginations? Ultrasound, developed for military purposes, even allows us to peer into the future at our unborn babies. We clutch these images, souvenirs of new life, in the same way that the Victorians sent each other x-rays of their hands.
Played out in a womb-like pod situated in the atrium of Guy's Hospital, this brief free performance produced by Athletes of the Heart utilises film, music and live performance to offer reflections on the theme of becoming transparent, with particular reference to reproductive technology and IVF.
It begins with a white-gowned woman lying on a hospital trolley and ends with her child on the same trolley represented by a little red matinee jacket, a tiny pair of tights and small shoes. The link is a string of pearls, the eggs that connect mother and daughter and past and future. It is an image as startling as the cry of the woman longing for a baby, who, catching sight of her unborn child in the womb, exclaims: "I've seen the future, and she's marvellous!"
The piece doesn't always succeed in turning science into art (at times, you get too much information), but it's probing and intelligent, and the intimacy of the experience creates a dreamy spell that gets under your skin so that long after it has finished you have a heightened awareness of your own body.
· Until March 24. Performances are free but must be booked in advance on glassbodybookings@googlemail.com
