STAGE TUBE: FUEL Podcast - 'Waiting… for a cancer diagnosis'

Brian Lobel is a New York-born, London based performance artist who creates performances about bodies: politicized bodies, marginalized bodies, dancing and singing bodies, happy bodies, sick bodies and bodies that need a little extra love. After being sick as a young adult, he became fascinated with unique bodily experience and how it is conceived, discussed and witnessed by others. While the work takes many different forms - installation, stage shows, cabaret, interactive performance and publications - each project is keenly interested in how the audience relate both to Brian and to others.

To do this, he combines his intimate stories with grander public narratives (about illness, technology, nationalism, economy, sexuality and more) in an attempt to show that we are all in this together. His work playfully inspires audiences to consider the world around them with renewed vigour, generosity, reflection and an insatiable desire to engage with others.

Brian says: "For the "While You Wait" series, I thought it would be cheeky and subversive to write "Waiting... for a Cancer Diagnosis" and to try to put into practice some of the thinking that I have done in the past 12 years since I was diagnosed, treated and cured of testicular cancer. Because I have spent so much time working as a professional cancer patient - performing my personal patient narrative as well as creating work about how cancer patients exist in public space - I thought that the podcast would be able to be both simple, personal and profound. I wanted to make something that was well-researched, built in consultation with a professional, and that was a bit funny, sexy and political. I wanted and expected it to be easy, especially as I've thought about this subject for so long. Of course, the moment one agrees to write "Waiting... for a Cancer Diagnosis", suddenly, karmically, it happens. The bump. And the theoretical ideas you have about what you would do while you wait seem like a distant memory. This bump is not a metaphor, or an idea: this bump is serious."