Mad Methodologies and Community Performance: The Asylum Project at Bedlam

An essay hosted by Petra Kuppers, with Stephanie Heit, April Sizemore-Barber, and VK Preston, with additional photos and images by Andy Hickey and Andrew Wille

Petra Kuppers

This essay presents a workshop-based and process-focused community performance project through a mad studies lens—that is, through a multi-vocal, multi-perspective knowledge creation centering on psychiatric survivors’ experiences. In the performance experiments at the heart of this essay, we are strangers, meeting at the site of a working mental asylum, Bethlem Royal Hospital in Greater London—Bedlam, one of the oldest institutions of mad confinement and treatment.

We do not know yet how to speak to one another, how to make art together. The very act of coming together is an experiment. During a few hours of movement and observations scores we develop our antennae for one another, and then we end in an open-space improvisation¹—beyond “theatre,” beyond “dance,” and into an art/life experimental zone that allows for different bodyminds to touch one another, keeping “strangeness” alive as an energy source that feeds new and poetic insights.

Performance is the modality we choose, in particular historical surrealist and situationist open-encounter methods, ways of stirring up spaces of indirection, hesitation, channeling, and openness. We engage with the dérive, a literal drifting in our environment, and the freewrite, a form of automatic writing that witnesses what drifts over our consciousness. With these two methods we work deep in the heritage of experimental performance, with its own emphasis on multi-vocality, as Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart write when they name the challenge that collaborative performance offers to “the authority of text [but also that] of the individual creative artist—and, by implication, any suggestion of a singular ‘truth’” (6). Experimental communication is the core method of this dispersed creation process: spinning creatively onward from what we are working on, in the moment, in the group that assembles, responsive to shifting environments. This lineage encompasses Dwight Conquergood, who argues that performance can be understood “as a lens that illuminates the constructed creative, contingent, collaborative dimensions of human communication; knowledge that comes from contemplation and comparison; concentrated attention and contextualization as a way of knowing” (152). This is our terrain, our analytic, our method. We use all our performance technologies, embodied, emplaced, enminded, environmental, and spiritual. And we use performance as a healing method: keeping ourselves safe(r), calling on protection, using an ambient poetics to layer new meaning into sites.

One core concern of disability studies and mad studies is who counts as someone with expressive means. Performative multi-vocality and the lean into poetic writing methods allow us to reap the benefits of collaborative site-specific improvisation. We assemble and distribute knowledge anew, aware of who is coming to expression and who is not, leaning toward silences and openings.²

An exploration of research methods and forms of writing that allow for alternative knowledge production unites the histories of collaborative performance-making, performative writing, and the new discipline of mad studies. In a mad studies manifesto, three editors brought together this assembly of definitions that resonate strongly with collaborative performance ideas:

Mad Studies can be defined in general terms as a project of inquiry, knowledge production, as political action devoted to the critique and transcendence of psy-centred ways of thinking, behaving, relating, and being.

[B]y its very nature Mad Studies is an interdisciplinary and multi-vocal praxis.

Mad Studies takes as its principal source, inspiration, and raison d’être the subjectivities, embodiments, words, experiences, and aspirations of those among us whose lives have collided with the powers of institutional psychiatry.

Mad Studies is an exercise in critical pedagogy, in the radical co-production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge. Following Foucault, the practitioners of Mad Studies are concerned with deploying counter-knowledge and subjugated knowledge as a strategy for contesting regimes of truth.

(Menzies, LeFrançois, and Reaume 13–14)

Connections among the various definitions align: a multi-vocality that decenters any...