Hanna Cormick: the performance artist who's allergic to the world

Hanna Cormick is allergic to the industrialised world. When the Helsinki-born, Canberra-raised actor, acrobat and contortionist is exposed to everyday items such as plastic, pesticides, cigarettes, perfumes, some food odour or even the ink in a book, she is prone to not only hives, throat swelling and anaphylaxis but “very violent” seizures too.

The seizures “look like I’ve lost consciousness and my whole body is jerking and moving about on its own”, she explains. They are caused by mast cell activation syndrome, an immunological condition that forces Cormick to spend most of her life in a sealed “safe” room in her mother’s Canberra house.

Anyone entering Cormick’s room has to go through a decontamination process, because many products derived from fossil fuels pose her serious danger. She lives in the house with her actor partner, and her safe room contains a positive-pressure air system, multiple air filtration devices and, by necessity, little furniture.

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Soon, Cormick will briefly journey to Sydney festival to perform her short, text-based show The Mermaid: both the story of her life and a metaphor for the poisoning of the planet. “I had been treating my body as something I could exploit, without expecting to meet its needs,” she recalls via Skype from her sealed room.

“I realised, like the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and their impact on the planet, I had been treating my body with the same hyper-capitalist mindset.”

Cormick’s performances will be staged at the Coal Loader in Waverton, a former coal plant turned into a sustainability centre on the waterfront. The Sydney trip has required detailed advanced planning. She had planned to stay in an eco-construction on a remote Blue Mountains property – the clean air of bush living is easier on her mast cells – but the bushfires sweeping through the state have presented high risks.

“It’s obviously in all our minds, given the current fires, but we haven’t found a good back-up yet,” she says, when emailed a follow-up question amid the haze this week. “We will probably have to find a less immunologically safe (but more fire-safe) location, and I would need to sleep in protective gear and my respiratory equipment and oxygen – which I’ve been having to do with the smoke pollution right now anyway.

“It’s really painful – respirator masks are very painful to wear for long periods – but it’s kept me breathing fine so far.”

Performing in public carries severe risks to her safety, too. At the start and end of her first performance of the premiere season of The Mermaid, in Canberra in March 2018, Cormick suffered seizures while sitting on the floor in front of her audience.

“It can be really confronting, and I think not just to see these sorts of medical events; they don’t always happen in the work, it is random,” she says.

“The audience also has to think about the way our own actions might be impacting others.”

The Sydney festival shows require audience members to be mindful of what they bring in with them – but the venue’s naturally ventilated, outdoor harbourside location lessens the risk.

“There have been times when patrons have been asked not to wear fragrance, makeup or hair products, especially indoors,” says Cormick. “At other performances [such as in Sydney], they’re asked to move to the back if they are wearing any of those products.”

Until 2015, Cormick had been enjoying a multiskilled acrobatic and acting career in Europe – including an arts residency in the south of France, working with circus in refugee camps on the Turkish-Syrian border, devising and rehearsing shows in Paris and performing with a troupe at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

But she had been hiding a growing list of unexplained symptoms – weight and muscle strength loss, fainting and being out of breath – until “the crash” of April that year: allergic reactions to all food, great pain and an inability to walk up a flight of stairs.

Forced to return to Australia to rest and seek answers, her doctor raised the possibility Cormick was suffering a form of the debilitating genetic connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. This bad news was just the beginning.

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This syndrome impacts not only joint mobility but, in more severe cases such as Cormick’s, causes serious problems in every organ system: brain, heart, lungs, spinal cord, gastrointestinal tract, pelvic organs and veins.

“Now, my bones are coming out of their sockets many times every day,” says the former contortionist, who was finally diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome in 2017. The next year Cormick was diagnosed with – among other diseases – mast cell activation syndrome, the cause of her seizures; and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a form of orthostatic intolerance which can also cause her body to collapse. Her father has the same “trifecta”, she says, and her mother has mast cell activation syndrome too.

These days, when Cormick ventures outside her safe room in her wheelchair – “once a week, once a fortnight, that kind of thing, usually for an hour at a time” – she wears a respirator and relies on an oxygen tank to avoid seizure triggers. It is a “big operation”, requiring multiple helpers, to ensure she is as safe from pollutants as possible.

There is no treatment for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, but physiotherapy helps prevent deterioration. For postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, Cormick is on regular IV saline infusions and is weighing up getting a pacemaker fitted. Frequent injections of a high-dose drug, omalizumab, have decreased the frequency of Cormick’s seizures, and she has the standard rescue medications for acute episodes: adrenaline, oxygen and albuterol.

There are other immunotherapy medications that could help, she says, but they are restricted in Australia. “Sometimes it feels like you fight bureaucracy more than you fight the symptoms.”

Part of Cormick’s motivation in creating The Mermaid was to confront her own past attitudes to disability. She says she will be forever grateful to the performer Liz Carr, who drew her attention to the concept of the “social model” of disability, which holds that disability is caused by the way society is organised.

“The circus industry, the dance industry are incredibly ableist spaces, and I had developed a damaging mindset that confused my values with what I could do, with my productivity, especially my physical abilities,” Cormick says.

“They are industries that foster the idea you can do anything if you try hard enough. Having the antidote of the social model was necessary for me to start unlearning that.”

• The Mermaid is at the Coal Loader from 17 to 19 January 2020. Sydney festival runs from 8 to 26 January