Asylum, an immersive devised theatre production скачать в хорошем качестве

Asylum, an immersive devised theatre production

Directed by Rachel Bowditch An Immersive Site-Specific Performance about Women, Writing, and Madness. The Historic Ice House, November 2013. Part III of the Muse Trilogy Funded by a Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts Research Grant Concept Asylum was an immersive site-specific devised work investigating the history of women, writing, and mental health through images, movement, words, and text. The harrowing history of women and madness reveals a dark and disturbing past of confinement, torture, and misdiagnosis. As an artist, I am fascinated by how we, as a society, define "insanity" and how this definition has shifted historically throughout time. The term “asylum” is historically bound and has fallen into disuse—recalling images of white padded cells, barred windows, ‘continuous bath time,’ electroshock therapy, and other practices that have controversial histories etched into the public imagination. Much of our image research revealed hundreds of abandoned asylums, haunting reminders of a forgotten past—empty hallways, rows of bathtubs, cracked windows, rusted doors to solitary confinement, gurney’s with worn leather straps, stained mattresses, and shattered dreams. The piece was largely inspired by Ten Days in a Mad-House written in 1887 by a reporter Elizabeth Cochrane, under the pseudonym Nellie Bly, who feigned insanity to be admitted to the asylum on Blackwell Island in New York. This resulted in Ten Days in a Mad-House, which exposed the horrific treatment of the patients, in particular, women. Her reporting led to a radical reformation of mental institutions in the United States. system. We used this source material to structure the main frame of the performance. We developed characters inspired by historical figures we unearthed in our research; Zelda, Renee, Charlotte, Nelly, Mrs. Chenoweth etc; however they were not bound to their historical narratives, we used them as launch points to create new characters based on historical research. Each episode included a movement sequence; for example—a bathtub ballet, a chair symphony, a hospital bed duet, and the Thorazine shuffle. The quality of this piece was intensely physical, haunting yet beautiful, disturbing yet delicate. Working with choreographer Eileen Standley, we developed a somatic movement vocabulary based on the body systems and experiential anatomy. As the audience moved through a series of ‘micro-environments’ they had the ability to create their own experience from multiple vantage points. Asylum was the third installment of a devised performance triptych, The Muse Trilogy that began in 2006 with The Ophelia Project, a poetic portrait of the lives and writing of Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath and Memory Room, a durational performance/window installation about women, writing, and memory commissioned by INFLUX 3, Scottsdale Public Art 2013. The connective thread that binds all three works in The Muse Trilogy is women and writing, in particular, stitching in themes of mental illness, addiction, memory, and suicide. For more information about the project, visit: https://vesselproject.org/asylum