A stage with a large white backdrop…three performers speak to us, move, play, share with us. An overhead projector projects light and shadow, textures, spacetimes, transforming everyday objects into poetic metaphors for crip time. A duet between violin and absent heartbeats, weaving their absence into the space. A dance in the soft quiet of a mossy boundary layer.

Proper Time is a live, multidisciplinary, trio performance that explores time through the lens of disability, physics and personal narrative. It is part lecture, ambient gig, dance performance and collective rest.

Created and performed by Raquel Meseguer Zafe, Anna Starkey and Jamie McCarthy, all artists with lived experience of chronic illness. The project grew from an exchange between the artists during a period of intense pain and fatigue, reflecting on their disorienting and fragmented experiences of time and connecting these with a shared fascination with moss, which improbably survives within its own small-scale layer of spacetime. Proper Time blows open ideas of time, playfully entwining Crip experiences with physics, ecology and more than human knowledge systems.

Challenging normative, capitalist, colonialist ideas of time, the work asks the question: "if we understood another person's experience of time, could we build a bridge to it?" Alongside dance, music and text that explore the texture and materiality of time, Proper Time fuses analogue and digital technologies to facilitate meaningful ‘absent presence.’ Exploring the absence and interruption that accompany chronic illness, Proper Time makes these experiences visible and tangible to an audience. Sensors and online software bring the heartbeats and breath of remote participants, the 'Crip Chorus' into the performance space in real time. Translated into music, this living data isduetted and danced with, bringing those participants that are absent into the heart of the work.

“I was moved by the intimacy of the heartbeats” - Research & Development sharing.

“It was such a profound experience to be part of, especially as - you know, chronic illness being so isolating for so many years, and suddenly you're right there and part of it!" - Crip Chorus member

“This is quietly powerful work” audience member, Berlin Choreographies of Care event 2025.