Jim Davis has just delivered a paper entitled ‘An Irishman in London: ‘Irish’ Johnstone’s representation of Irishness on the London Stage 1782-1820’ at a conference at Trinity College, Dublin on ‘The Irish on the London Stage: Identity, Culture, Politics’.

Also, on 2 February he contributed a talk on ‘Some Aspects of Anglo-Australian Cultural Exchange 1880-1960’ for the London Theatre Seminar at Senate House, University of London.

Dr. Harpin will present a paper entitled “Gazing with alterity in Titicut Follies, Blue/Orange, and Ship of Fools” for a public talk organised by the MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health and the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London.

5:30PM-7:30PM, Monday 13 February

Film and Drama Studio, ArtsTwo Building, Queen Mary University of University of London (Mile End Campus)

Everyone welcome, Refreshments will be served, Free of charge

This talk is the first in a series of public events exploring the connections of mental health with performance and art practice.

Abstract

How have artists captured and communicated psychiatric spaces and patient experiences? And what types of evidence can we gather from their work to help forge more creative and humane alternatives current care practices? This paper will expose recurrent themes of spectacular cruelty and harm across three art works – Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967), Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000), and the vacuum cleaner’s Ship of Fools (2010). All three artists question how one looks at madness and mad folk. They ask what it means to care, what constitutes a community, and how far the political capacity to be properly seen and heard is conditioned through interlocking, authoritative discourses. This paper will sketch the ways in which the works politically engage with the apparent legibility of madness and will argue that, through aesthetic means, the three attempt to redistribute the locus of knowledge about madness, widen the aperture of perceptual realities, and decentre the question of where to ‘put’ madness. In their aesthetic interrogations of spectacle, care and harm, they provoke new and vital considerations as to what a hospitable community of support might actually feel like.

Dr. Susan Haedicke collaborated with Baz Kershaw and Earthrise Repair Shop to conceive and construct Prairie Meanders at the Conrad Environmental Research Area on the prairie in Grinnell, Iowa, in September 2016. This project was a large-scale version of earlier ‘meadow meanders’ created by Kershaw that explore human ‘econnectivity’ to the earth through performance ecologies, conservation and regeneration. Prairie Meanders constructed two meanders, one a quarter of a mile long; the other over two-thirds of a mile. These maze-like pathways mimic major ecological processes of Earth. Once the pattern is established, a walker meanders along the path and viscerally experiences a global ecology on a local, human-sized scale. Combining land art, nature trail, gallery display and immersive performance, the meanders produced dynamic experiences of 'glocal' ecosystem processes as they created environmental puzzles exploring the ecologies of interacting climates, landscapes and species.