Insulin at Teatime
Partner Organisations: University of Sunderland
Creative Practitioners: John Kefala-Kerr
Researchers or Experts: Dr Kathryn King
Co/Lab Curator: Dr Suzy O’Hara
Insulin at Teatime is a vocal setting of the verbatim testimony of adolescents living with type 1 diabetes. This new musical composition responds to Dr. Kathryn King's co-authored paper “Perceptions of Adolescent Patients of the ‘Lived Experience’ of Type 1 Diabetes” (2017), and uses the transcribed words of young respondents cited in the study.
In deploying the heightened utterance of the singing voice, Insulin at Teatime seeks to engage with the study’s findings in respect of conveying the particular difficulties facing the above-mentioned group and the need for improvements in long-term healthcare management for these patients.
Insulin at Teatime
As well as seeking to create a musical work that 'gives voice' to the experiences captured in King et al, I’m also attempting to connect the study’s imperatives to my own exploration of the interrelationship between musical composition and everyday life. As a type 2 diabetic myself, I have developed novel ways of artistically narrating my own experience of this chronic condition (eg. www.bloodchoir.com), and the young people's accounts in the "perceptions" study present a particular compositional challenge in terms of arriving at a musical solution that gives due regard to the raw, unadorned and unpremeditated nature of first-person testimony.
Co/Labbers
Reflections
