Isolated Acts: Theatre in Asylums and Hospitals

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Isolated Acts investigates the practice of theatre and performance in psychiatric environments. The twentieth century has witnessed manifold changes to the delivery of mental health care. This network is particularly concerned with the movement from asylums to hospitals to community based structures in relation to the theatre practice taking place therein. By drawing together a broad range of academics, clinicians, and practitioners this research network explores the plural ways in which theatre and performance have been used within psychiatric contexts. The network considers the performance histories of, and current practices within, these psychiatric care spaces. Moreover, it interrogates the changing patterns of care, the radical shifts in architectural environment, and the mutable understanding of psychiatric illnesses and how these have impacted on performance work in care settings. Concurrently, the network deliberates how professional theatre practice has sought to represent psychiatric environments in the same period. The network will excavate the largely overlooked theatre history of performance in psychiatric spaces and examine what is at stake ethically, politically, therapeutically in such work. The network will also rethink the manners in which practitioners have attempted to translate psychiatric spaces, and individuals' experiences of these spaces into theatre aesthetics. The network places the work that takes place within psychiatric contexts in dialogue with work that takes places about these psychiatric environments. In this way the network is able to reflect more fully on the practice of theatre and performance in psychiatric contexts. This project seeks to shed new light on notions of space, well being, and live performance. By bringing together figures from across seven academic disciplines from psychiatry to art history, as well as collaborating with international artists, health care professionals, and asylum archivists the project will investigate the history and politics of theatre and performance in controlled psychiatric environments. The network will comprise two events in 2011: a practice-based one day symposium at the University of Exeter; and a two day conference at the University of Cambridge. These events will generate important new research in this field and sow the seeds for future research and collaboration. The network will produce a co-edited special issue of the journal Medical Humanities and also will also disseminate the research to a broader online community through a dynamic website. By attempting to understand an overlooked part of theatrical practice and explore its relationship to psychiatry this research network will contribute to a better understanding of performance, mental health, illness, and well being. Our collaborative investigations into the role and nature of theatre in and about closed environments will shed important light on how we understand, both historically and currently, the impact of the arts in mental health and care. This network departs from a keen sense that mental health matters. It seeks, therefore, to uncover the role of theatre in this context.