Toward the Unknown Body: Stillness, Silence, and Space in Mental Health Settings

Since 1970, my practice and resources as a dancer and choreographer have shifted from physical to perceptual challenges.

--Deborah Hay (22)

As a physically disabled performance artist who has spent thirteen years exploring physical and dance theatre, I have attempted to find new ways of creating performances with people who are living in pain, people with cancer, and older people. In my work, the need to evade, play with, or subvert the meanings of bodies--whether gendered, disabled, racial, or class-based--has been paramount. Initially, my practice focused on creating stage performances inspired by Brecht, Artaud, and the aesthetics of performance art. Recently, however, my community performance work has become increasingly process-based. I now conceive of it as an ongoing intervention rather than as a progression toward a traditional stage performance.

What has brought about this change in my practice? Recent projects working with people in mental health settings such as social clubs and day care workshops have led me to experience the same shift noted by Hay, forcing the question of "perceptual challenges" to the forefront of my practice and leading me to reexamine my own emphasis on visual representation. Work in these settings is dominated by the fact that all participants have been medically diagnosed as mentally ill and therefore in need of special care. A limited range of images is available to the general public about mentally ill people--images that range from the homicidal maniac to those involving self-neglect and screaming fits. People who are labeled mentally ill and who use the mental health system's resources encounter the effects of these public images in sometimes not so subtle ways: day care homes are attacked and despoiled, planning applications for new centers are blocked by people who fear for their safety. This socially expressed hatred and fear can easily be internalized by people who have been diagnosed by the mental health system.

In the light of my work with people diagnosed as mentally ill, Hay's statement inspired me to ask a series of questions. What does it mean to work with perceptual challenges? If we can find ways to challenge perception, the way we experience the world, are these then not also ways to challenge representation and the processes through which we make meaning out of what we see? How can challenges to audiences' perceptions inform a performance practice that does not offer clear-cut images but rather subverts representational certainties? In particular, how can changes in perception help shape a performance aesthetic that can be useful for people whose bodies have been violently read for clues to their "abnormal" minds?

This article charts how the concept of perceptual challenge has spurred me to explore new forms of community artwork. It shares my creative process in order to show how traditional frames for performance and contemporary theories of bodies and space can inform each other. Specifically, I am synthesizing a theory of the body in space developed by Rudolf Laban with a theory of being-in-time-and-space advanced by Henri Bergson in order to come up with a theoretical framework that drives my work with people in mental health contexts.

Much of the work I describe here has been developed with one specific group in the Welsh valleys, an economically depressed area in the United Kingdom. The members of this group are all clients of Mental Health Day Care Services. In Britain, people diagnosed with moderate to severe mental illness (including schizophrenia, voice hearing, and depression) can be referred by medical practitioners to Day Care Services. Part of the responsibility of these services is to organize events or sessions for their clients (e.g., rambling, bingo, yoga, swimming, tea groups). At the Day Care Services where I work with them, all clients can choose up to three events a week to attend and may change their preferences whenever they wish. Day Care Services provides...