Mark Storor likes a challenge. In Puffball at the Roundhouse, he turned the experiences of teenagers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning into a circus that was as transformative as it was transgressive. It rained broken Barbie dolls, young people bandaged up like mummies were unwrapped and aerialists took flight. It was like seeing a physical manifestation of the adolescents’ feelings.
In For the Best, the experience of children with renal disease and the families and medics who care for them became a tender and intimate installation in which sad teddy bears were hung on washing lines and a nurse clambered around a pipe-like structure as if inside a patient’s vessels, feather-dusting their blood. Nobody had to tell us that the figure hovering at the edges was death, waiting for his chance to pounce. We all just sensed it.
Storor is a genius at excavating lived experience and showing it as staged metaphor. It means his shows are understood as much through the heart as via the head. Which is probably just as well, because even far-sighted funders such as the Wellcome Trust initially balked at Storor’s latest proposal: a show based on the stories and lives of men with erectile dysfunction.
The view was that although erectile dysfunction is a very common condition, it’s just not something that anyone would be willing to talk about or want to see a show about. Erectile dysfunction has been described as “the canary in the trousers” because it can be a significant early indicator of cardiovascular problems. But it’s a taboo subject wrapped up in shame, postcard humour and childish jokes. Then there was also the pressing question of how Storor could possibly translate this sensitive subject into art.
That question will be answered later this month when The Barometer of My Heart opens at the Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health and Wellbeing Centre, which was the health and drug-testing centre for athletes during the London 2012 Olympic Games. A cast of nine professional actors, including one woman, will be performing a devised piece that is much an exploration of masculinity and its various manifestations as it is about the direct experience of impotence. Storor is always reluctant to explain exactly what will happen on stage, because in all of his work, decisions about content are often made at what some might view as an alarmingly late point in the process. But this approach has the benefit of ensuring that every image and sequence has earned its place.
But the question is also already partly answered by the image being used for the production. It’s a curiously unsettling film noir shot that shows a naked, bearded Storor looking down at his penis while his own shadow looms over him as if it is twice the man that he is. Leaving Storor nowhere to hide, it’s the antithesis of most photographs of male nudes. Storor looks exposed and vulnerable, which is exactly how many men with erectile dysfunction feel.
Storor won’t say whether erectile dysfunction is an issue for him: “If I say yes, people will say of course I made a show because he’s affected, as if that somehow devalues the motivation. If I say no, it looks like I’m denying something that we really need to talk about openly and don’t.” Even the medical professional finds it a difficult subject.
“Lots of doctors don’t like below the waist,” says Leighton Seal with a dry smile. He’s the endocrinologist who runs a penile dysfunction clinic at St Georges Hospital in London, and who bravely opened up his clinic to Storor and acted as a consultant throughout the project. From his daily work at his clinic, Seal is acutely aware that the penis can be the barometer of a man’s physical and mental health. Statistics have suggested that penile dysfunction can manifest itself around three years before a heart attack, but it takes most men 21 months before they go to see a GP, thus losing valuable time.
“It goes to the heart of what it means to be a man and how men feel about themselves,” says Seal. “It’s not about sex, it’s about a sense of self and identity. I’m for anything that helps promote the conversation.” He says that a young adult male is designed to wake up with an erection every day, and if he’s not doing that, we need to investigate why. “Erectile dysfunction has a serious effect on relationships. I hear the same stories over and over, of men who hope their partners will go to bed before them and fall asleep, so they don’t have to deal with the problem.”
Despite the sensitivities around the condition, only four out of 69 patients said they were unwilling to let Storor be present at their medical consultations.
“I saw it as my function to be totally present and utterly invisible,” says Storor, who always has a strong ethical framework in place before he starts on a project. “I was very aware that what I was seeing in the clinic was the very first public performance of a very private matter.”
Some of the experiences of the clinic are likely to find their way anonymously into the final performance, most notably the moment when every man is asked to put his socks and trousers back on, a ritual that becomes a version of the hokey cokey.
But while Seal sees the show as a powerful way to get people to talk openly and without embarrassment about penile dysfunction, and has seen from early sharings of the piece how “when you take the cork out of the bottle, the conversation flows”, Storor knows that the success of the project stands or falls by its artistic quality.
“I feel terror at the responsibility of communicating the message that if you have penile dysfunction you should get help, but the real terror for me is whether in the end I can deliver a great piece of art that really connects with people in different ways. What Barometer of My Heart shouldn’t be is a glorified health campaign. I’m interested in exploring the emotional experiences of the men affected, and finding the theatrical form to present that landscape so that everyone can access it. If we fail, we have to fail spectacularly.”
