The perpetual feedback loop between the body and the arts is a vital space of inquiry that connects many diverse fields. How does a body become a site of artistic production? How does embodied practice illuminate the complexities of perception and self-awareness? How does a body heal itself through knowing itself? These questions surrounding artistic practice, as it lives through and on the body, are the focus of two recent publications that offer up bodies for further dissection and consideration.

The Body and the Arts, coedited by Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude, and Jane Macnaughton, maps the dynamic relationship between the body and the arts, tracing this connection over time from the classical period to the present day. Contributors to this collection are drawn from a variety of disciplines in order to explore the multifaceted role of corporeality in the arts across literature and the visual and performing arts, including dance, opera, and film. This breadth of scope engages many enduring cultural concerns surrounding the body and art, including the impact of science and technology, the space between actual and ideal bodies, the representation of pain and pleasure, and in particular the materiality of the body. In the introduction, the editors acknowledge the impact of cultural-materialist thinking on body studies as providing a pervasive mode of reading the body as a product of culture. This thinking is made explicit in several of the essays in the collection; however, the primary focus of this work is the “fleshly, experiencing, living body” (4). The editors write: “The aim of this volume is rather to open out the multiplicity of cultural perspectives on the body over time, and explore in relation to these the fundamental and dynamic roles of the body in a variety of art forms” (4). The collection, organized in three parts, offers contested notions of how the body is known in art, including the body as inspiration, medium, object, subject, and sign. Through these interconnected and often competing claims the chapters reject any fixity in the relationship between the body as art and the body within art.

In Part I, “Thinking the Body,” each contributor considers theoretical readings of the body within a particular historical context in order to locate artistic and scientific perceptions of bodies. These essays collectively suggest the ways in which individual, public, and especially medical understandings of the body have influenced Western literature and visual art. Richard Sugg considers the history of the soul as it evolved concurrently with practices of anatomy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He argues that in the quest for a spiritual body, the balance between medical and spiritual authority may be felt most presciently in the ways that material networks of arteries were initially given meaning. The concomitant histories of medicine and popular culture are similarly intertwined in Steven Connor's essay on the influences of “fizziness.” Technologies of fermentation and distillation impacted how the living body was experienced. Connor writes: “The aerated body, and its dream of lightness, is a way of taking into the body the out-of-body experience of air” (69). These chapters demonstrate how conceptions of the body formed concurrently with scientific and theological thought engender questions about how the body is both felt and represented.

In the book's second part, “Writing the Body,” the focus tightens to explore representations of the body in literature. This section begins with an essay by Saunders, who draws on written accounts of the four humors in the literature of the Middle Ages to move toward a consideration of visceral reactions to lived conditions, isolating these phenomena through the descriptive power of language. Ulrika Maude returns to the technological advances represented in modernist literature by parsing the experience of listening to the audio recordings in Krapp's Last Tape: “The tapes also enable the audience, as a result of the visualizing quality of the sound, to see the phantom of the younger Krapp on stage, side by side with the now decrepit Krapp” (126). Available technology creates the collapse of the body into its own different iterations; the potential of this exchange emerges from the impulse to record and to document the body's functions.

Finally, in Part III, “Viewing the Body,” the book addresses the experience of witnessing art and visualizing bodies. Artist Antony Gormley evocatively describes the use his sculptural installations make of his own body, as he actively participates in the sculpture by offering the dimensions of his body as the mold for his creations: “All of these works start from a real event, they're indexical, not symbolic, not representations, not signs. They are, in the same way that a thumb-print is, registers, traces of a lived moment” (211). Gormley's art, helpfully reproduced in photographs in the book, resists a fixed narrative by corporeally modeling a mode of looking at bodies as they relate to space and time. Continuing the exploration of body as medium, David Fuller examines the operatic body as the means of virtuosic vocal production. He questions the desire to change the bodies of opera singers in ways that suit a particular visual aesthetic but that might compromise aural experience. Judith Buchanan then considers impulses to capture bodies on film and problems inherent in conceiving of film as a permanent register for bodies. A collective consideration of these essays reveals the enduring potential of bodies simultaneously to create specific meaning and to escape meaning, which further demonstrates that a process of understanding a body is always incomplete.

Knowing the body through artistic practice can elucidate the potential of art to heal the body. In Theatre in Health and Care, Emma Brodzinski surveys embodied practices within a variety of health-care settings. Her purpose is to interrogate specific forms of localized community theatre that have evolved around health and wellness in order to identify larger trends. The emerging field of theatre in health and care, particularly identifiable in the U.K. health-care system, ranges from medical training to advocacy projects designed specifically for patients. Brodzinski draws on a range of case studies in England, the United States, and India that provide insights into working practices while also posing critical questions related to the larger goals of this developing field.

The monograph is organized in four chapters, each incorporating a theoretical crux undergirding theatre in health and care that is then developed through two or three particular case studies. For example, the first chapter, “Embodied Spaces: Theatre in Health Institutions,” builds on the work of Victor Turner and cultural geographer Yi-Fi Tuan to consider how theatre companies function within the walls of dedicated health-care institutions, such as the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Program, whose members see their practice as existing in direct relationship with the hospitals they serve. Chapter 2 expands the application of theatre in community education. Utilizing Brecht's concept of Spass, or the joyful working out of problems, Brodzinski examines NiteStar and Nalamdana, two theatre groups working to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS in England and India, respectively (56). In Chapter 3, “‘But I Already Have a Voice …’: Ventriloquism, Theatre and the Healthy Citizen,” Brodzinski employs Augusto Boal's concept of legislative theatre to reflect on the ways disabled artists advocate for their own rights. Finally, Chapter 4 considers the value of medical simulation. Using Baudrillard's notion of simulacra, Brodzinski provides a compelling exploration of the efficacy of theatre as a tool for training health professionals.

Theatre in Health and Care, as a survey of an emerging field of theatre studies, is ideal for students, instructors, arts and health practitioners, and those with a more general interest in how the arts may be applied to health and care. In contrast, The Body and the Arts is tailored toward historians of the aesthetic who desire a more robust application of theory as well as more carefully presented and parsed historical evidence. While Brodzinski's survey does an admirable job of covering new territory, her study might have benefited from deeper engagement with the history of medicine in theatre, including but not limited to the performances of surgery for public spectacle in eighteenth-century London. However, taken together these works offer a particularly fascinating rearticulation of the immediacy of the body in understanding art, and of art in understanding the body. Both publications include excellent photographs that often illuminate the elusiveness of the body in written description. Each book also provides highly useful lists of bibliographic resources. By offering up new questions about how we experience and heal the body through the arts these works make significant contributions toward realizing the potential of corporeal studies.