Mad, Bad & Sad L ISA A P P I G NANE SI
Mother Complex N O N I H AZLEH UR S T
GISELLE DIES OF A BROKEN HEART AND JOINS THE WILIS…A GROUP OF FEMALE SPIRITS WHO HAVE BEEN SCORNED AND OCCUPY A HAUNTED WOOD. IT'S A FRIGHTFUL SIGHT THAT EVENTUALLY LED TO THE COMMON PHRASE ' GIVES ME THE WILLIES '.
Contents THIS EDITION OF STORY IS INSPIRED BY QPAC’S JULY TO DECEMBER 2018 PROGRAM.
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24
MAD, BAD & SAD
OUTSIDER ART
LISA APPIGNANESI
20
34
A BEAUTIFUL THING
ON THE RIGHT TRACK JUDITH MCLEAN
DOUGLAS MCGRATH
16
10 FACTS ON MENTAL HEALTH
28 THE ROAD FROM NORMAL
DALLAS JOHN BAKER
48 MOTHER
NONI HAZLEHURST
38
AFFAIR, BETRAYAL, HEARTBREAK, FORGIVENESS MAEVE BAKER
52
64 WHAT'S ON AT QPAC
LETHAL MAGICAL THINKING GUY RUNDLE
42 58 68
WAYS OF SEEING
FIVE MINUTES WITH...
BEHIND THE SCENES
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL
UNAMPLIFIED LISA GASTEEN
Welcome Stor y is a magazine curated by QPAC for the creative and curious. Arts is integral in our society. Often the focus is on how art makes us feel: inspired, uncomfortable, excited, challenged, relaxed. More than that, art helps us to make sense of the world around us, to make sense of each other, to find meaning and help create harmonious communities. Learning through art enables students and anyone who is curious to discover and develop empathy, to be problem solvers able to think creatively and to be resilient. In these pages and beyond through our digital portal The Creatory, we bring together ideas, people, musings and moments so that we may know ourselves better, see others and imagine possible futures. I hope you enjoy this edition of Story.
John Kotzas Chief Executive QPAC
In this edition In the opening line of Patti Smith’s lyrical and restless book M Train, she recounts an observation made in a dream that she recently had: ‘It’s not easy to write about nothing’. I love a killer opening sentence and this one stuck with me. I was reminded of it when we began discussing madness as the through line of this edition of Story. People were nervous, uncomfortable, it’s a subject that makes people twitchy. Madness is real and imagined. Everything and nothing. Light and heavy. Fleeting and eternal. Individual and collective. I thought about Patti’s dilemma. It made me wonder how we choose subjects to write about, or in a lot of cases, how they choose us. QPAC’s program over the coming six months is rich with folly, joy, eccentricity, delusion and in some cases psychosis. Madness by any other name.
And so it was we found ourselves on a quest to consider
Melbourne based illustrator Maeve Baker has created a
madness from multiple directions, led by the most delusional
contemporary take on the traditional Giselle story arc of
figure in literary history, the knight errant Don Quixote.
betrayal, heartbreak, unravelling and forgiveness. QPAC
He is a prominent feature in our program. Teatro alla
Scholar in Residence Professor Judith McLean reminds
Scala Ballet Company will perform Rudolph Nureyev’s
us of the hard work consciousness requires and recounts
take on the wandering nobleman’s quest to revive chivalry
a personal experience of ‘stepping into the light’.
in its November season. In fact, madness also infiltrates the company’s second production Giselle. In this case, the madness borne of heartbreak.
Toowoomba’s Dallas Baker references his latest play Ghosts of Leigh about Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant performance artist, designer and legend of the 1980s
How to set the field for this discussion, so broad in its scope?
London club world. In his piece The Road from Normal,
British writer and former Chair of the Freud Museum
Dallas explores constructing visual façades and the intricate
Lisa Appignanesi allowed us to publish a section of her book
relationship between our outer and inner worlds.
Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to Present. In it are many stories of depression, anguish and addiction, some famous like Virginia Woolf or Zelda Fitzgerald and others not. It maps how we have viewed mental disorders and other states of mind over two centuries. Lisa Appignanesi very generously took time out from chairing the Judging Panel of the Man Booker Prize International to write us a new introduction especially for this edition of Story. All of our contributors have taken different paths and arrived in different places in relation to madness.
And there is so much more. While the beginning of Patti Smith’s M Train came back to me quickly, I confess I had forgotten how she concluded the collection of reflections on life and art. In the final pages she closes the loop on the dream challenge she described in the book’s opening. ‘It’s not so easy writing about nothing,’ she repeats. And then, sage and poet that she is, she quietened any lasting uncertainty I had about exploring madness. ‘Dreams beget wishes that beget lingering questions… Perhaps it’s not where we are going but just that we go’.
As we approach the centenary of the First World War Armistice, Guy Rundle’s Lethal Magical Thinking takes us back to the Western border of Germany and then pulls us through to the present via multiple wars and cultural shifts including the invention of the term ‘shellshock’, the intellectuals of The Frankfurt School and growth of
Rebecca Lamoin
psychoanalysis.
Editor
Australian legend Noni Hazlehurst has written beautifully
rebecca.lamoin@qpac.com.au
and directly about chaos and sanity, the central role of art and creativity in the lives of children and about the magnificent one woman show Mother written especially for her.
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Contributors LISA APPIGNANESI Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, cultural commentator, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of the non-fiction books Trials of Passion; Mad, Bad and Sad; and Freud’s Women (with John Forrester), an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead, and nine novels, including The Memory Man and Paris Requiem. In September 2018, Fourth Estate will publish her latest work of non-fiction, Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. She is a visiting Professor in Literature and Medical Humanities at King’s College London and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of her contribution to literature. She is a former President of English PEN and former Chair of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. Appignanesi was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2013.
DALLAS JOHN BAKER Dallas teaches writing, editing and publishing at the University of Southern Queensland. He has published dozens of scholarly articles and creative works, including a number of plays. Dallas spent most of the 1980s as a gender-bending club denizen in illegal and/or underground gay bars in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, a time he sees as his apprenticeship for his later PhD studies. These days he spends his time writing and researching on topics such as creative writing, publishing and, of course, gender. His most recent play, Ghosts of Leigh, was staged at the historic Empire Theatre in his hometown of Toowoomba.
MAEVE BAKER Maeve Baker is a Melbourne based animator, illustrator and comic artist. She struggles to put down her pen, seeking to communicate relatable content in interesting ways. Maeve studied under artists and animators at the Queensland College of Art (Australia) and Volda University College (Norway) during her Bachelor of Animation before it’s completion in 2017. During her degree, she received several awards for academic excellence as well as one of three awards for Best Portfolio in Animation (2017). Maeve is currently employed at 12Field Animation Studio and on an array of freelance animation projects for clients in Melbourne and Brisbane.
JOHN DOHERTY John Doherty is a Brisbane based artist, who has engaged in community art groups and initiatives for over 15 years. With a lived experience of schizophrenia, homelessness and marginalisation, Doherty has found art to be a form of therapy and purpose. Recently Doherty successfully exhibited a large retrospective of works at Hope Street Café, an activity of Micah Projects. Doherty has a distinct style of freely brushed colours in which you can see a heavy influence from Impressionist artists such as Chagall and Cezanne – artists he refers to as heroes. Doherty confessed that he will continue to paint and exhibit his art so long as he has a bit of paint and a brush in hand.
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STORY TEAM Story Editor: Rebecca Lamoin (rebecca.lamoin@qpac.com.au). Story Team Editorial: Professor Judith McLean, Emily Philip, Eleanor Price, En Rui Foo, Maria Cleary, Sally McRae.
NONI HAZLEHURST Noni Hazlehurst AM is one of Australia’s favourite and most respected and awarded actors.
Digital Lead: Kim Harper. Creative & Design: Rumble.
In late 2016 she completed a second sell-out tour of Mother, for which she earned a Helpmann Award nomination for Best Actress. Earlier this year she performed a sell-out season of the play at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, once again to critical
Q PAC
acclaim. This year she has filmed A Place to Call Home – The Final Chapter bringing the much-loved series to its conclusion.
Chair Professor Peter
Other recent credits include feature films Ladies in Black, Truth and The Mule,
Coaldrake AO
and television projects The Broken Shore, Redfern Now and The Letdown for the ABC.
Deputy Chair Leigh Tabrett PSM Trustees Dare Power, Susan Rix AM, Leanne de Souza
JUDITH MCLEAN
Executive Staff Chief Executive: John Kotzas
Professor Judith McLean is the Chair in Arts Education, a joint appointment between Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) where she holds the role of Scholar in Residence. Judith’s career is distinguished by her breadth and diversity of experience as an arts educator, artist and
Executive Director – Stakeholder Engagement Strategy: Jackie Branch
cultural leader across Australia. She is currently a Director on the Board of Tourism and
Executive Director – Visitation:
Events Queensland, and leads QUT’s executive programs using arts-based practices in
Roxanne Hopkins
the corporate and government sectors.
Executive Director – Business Performance: Kieron Roost Acting Executive Director – Curatorial: Bill Jessop
GUY RUNDLE Guy Rundle is currently Crikey's correspondent-at-large, and a regular contributor to The Sunday Age. He was an editor of Arena Magazine for fifteen years, and is a frequent contributor to a wide range of publications in Australia and the UK.
The views expressed in Story are those of the individual authors and contributors and do not necessarily reflect the position of QPAC.
Ö N D E R K I L AV U Z
(COVER ARTIST)
Önder Kılavuz is an Ankara, Turkey-based concept artist with a love for sci-fi and fantasy. He explains - "I first met Don Quixote in an old black and white movie when I was a child. His story taught the mere awareness of such a thing as imagination and how the perception of reality may alter through that ability. Cervantes dreamt Don Quixote as a hero who chased after his own imaginary epic. What I dreamt of was simply a new confrontation for him at the watermill, wondering what he would see."
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Brief ly CULTURAL HOTSPOTS
“Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They’ll gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.” - Professor Jan Gehl, Danish architect & urban designer
NEWS & VIEWS MAKING HEADLINES IN THE ARTS WORLD
In May 2018, the Queensland Government announced a $150 million investment in a new theatre to be built at QPAC by 2022. A fifth theatre completes QPAC architect Robin Gibson’s vision for the Centre and provides space for QPAC and local companies to create and present new works. Queensland isn’t alone. Arts infrastructure is making headlines around Australia. The Victorian Government announced funding to build a contemporary art wing as part of The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne’s Southbank and South Australia will have a new arts and cultural destination in Adelaide, transforming the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site. It’s easy to look at an entertainment juggernaut like Netflix, or social media platforms like Facebook and think that everyone is in their own bubble consuming entertainment and “socialising” without having to interact IRL (in real life). But humans are social animals. We are hungry for stories, hungry to connect with people, hungry for ideas. Our public spaces should facilitate this. Public spaces are integral to cities. They serve as meeting places and community hubs, places for people to congregate. Whereas once community was synonymous with geographic location, now when we are more connected than ever, public spaces like our theatres and art galleries serve as important beacons for communities of interested people to come together.
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT DON QUIXOTE Published between 1605 and 1615, the novel Don Quixote is considered a founding work of modern Western literature, arguably the greatest work of fiction ever published. It has been adapted and reinterpreted across various art forms since it was written. The tale of a knight errant searching for adventure and who is intent on proving that chivalry is not dead, has been cited by many including literary legends William Faulkner and Ben Okri as the best book of all time. Adaptation is an art form in itself. With a work as rambling and grand as Don Quixote, what hope is there for those who dare to dream and chase windmills? The adventures of Don Quixote have been told in many art forms. There are books based on characters and vignettes from the original, music, opera and dance including Rudolph Nureyev’s athletic ballet masterpiece which will be performed in the 2018 QPAC International Series by Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company in November. And dozens of film adaptations dating as far back as 1906. Screenwriter, director, actor and comedian Terry Gilliam has spent a large portion of the past three decades trying to get his movie version of Don Quixote on screen. His efforts have mostly been famous for their failure, suffering casting and funding difficulties and literally fire and flood. Many have called the project cursed. But after 29 years, Gillam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. It received mixed responses.
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the day. In 2018 that level of correction isn’t commonly available and so instead most of us must live and die by what’s on record. No stranger to this, when Roseanne Barr tweeted late at night about a former Obama administration senior advisor, it must have come as no surprise that her comments were captured, dissected, reproduce and discussed at a rate of knots. The reactions were widespread and polarising. Her TV network ABC moved swiftly to cancel the show she created and starred in, Roseanne. People variously excused her, praised her, condemned her, chided her, called her out, unfriended her. As the cries of ‘censorship’ grew in volume, some brave souls reminded us about nuance and complexity. Documentary maker Michael Moore who said ‘Roseanne…is a person who long ago broke through and brought an authentic voice of working women and men to television via one of
THE MYTH OF THE ‘MAD’ GENIUS Creativity has long been linked with mental health issues. Increasingly, many artists and creatives are very open about their experiences of various mental health disorders including bipolar, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and ADHD. Many historical artists are now being retroactively fitted with modern diagnoses. The idea of a link between ‘madness’ and ‘genius’ is an old one dating as far back as the Ancient Greeks who believed that creativity came from the muses (gods). This notion carried forth to the Romantics and settled
also said to see the world in different
the greatest TV series of all time.
ways and so therein the link has
It was ground breaking because the
been made.
TV industry had historically either ignored, ridiculed or patronized those
A plethora of studies throughout the
of us who grew up in the working
20th and 21st centuries have looked
class. Roseanne changed that.’
at this and tried to definitively establish a link between creativity
It remains to be seen what happens
and mental illness. They’ve given
with the show Roseanne and whether
rise to ethical and moral questions
it can continue without her. The
about leaving mental health issues
controversy comes at a time when
unaddressed so as not to hinder
we’re questioning (again) whether or
creative outputs. Assumptions and
how to separate artists from their art…
stereotypes abound. Science has
or their madness.
offered multiple connections but is not definitive. The romantic notion of the ‘tortured artist’ is long lasting…
into general use through the link
TWEET STORM
that creativity is akin to originality in
In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of
that it allows one to see what others
Truth ensures that history is accurate
cannot. Those with mental illness are
according to the propaganda of
DISCOVER MORE STORIES AND READ RELATED ARTICLES AT QPAC.COM.AU/STORY
When I set out to research and write the book that became Mad, Bad & Sad – from which an extract follows on the next pages - I wanted both to inquire into the ways our current understandings of madness what in our highly medicalised age we call mental illness – had come into being. What I discovered in the process were the ways in which various diagnoses – together with the dividing lines between what is considered normal, what aberrant – were historically specific and depended greatly on a time’s expectations of behaviour. This was perhaps more the case for women, a gender that has always been subject to description by male experts and thinkers. Such description, together with the male medical gaze, inevitably impacts on women’s self-understanding.
Mad, Bad & Sad BY LISA APPIGNANESI
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The Adams Memorial featuring allegorical sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens commissioned by writer Henry Adams to honour his wife Clover Adams. Saint-Gaudens named the figure The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth but it became commonly known as Grief . Adams rejected all naming and in a letter to the artist’s son declared:
"Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption— Grief, Despair, Pear's Soap, or Macy's Mens' Suits Made to Measure. Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx."
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At no point in my research was I tempted to make the romantic leap into thinking that all forms of inner disorder and consequent behaviour were simply fabrications either on the sufferer’s or on the doctor’s part. From the first written records, it is clear that people, however they may express their ills, suffer from versions of extreme and debilitating melancholy which are more than sadness, from painful, disabling symptoms which have no known physiological base (this is true even in the age of scientific scans and superior mapping technologies), from hallucinations, dislocation, anomie, and so on. What changes, and changes emphatically through time, are the causes we attribute to often enough evolving symptoms and the attendant forms of treatment. Doctors and interventionist drugs do not always need to be the first point of call. Whether we have now, as some psychiatrists may wish to claim, reached a high point in understanding and treating mental disorders, is open to question. There must be an irony to the fact that while we pretend to greater knowledge, to better and more scientific medicine, the toll of sufferers nonetheless seems to rise and rise. Diagnoses, themselves not impervious to movements and fashion, can amass followers. We want names for the things that are difficult to bear. I hope Mad, Bad & Sad sheds a little light on these perplexing matters.
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The simplest way to begin is to say that this is the story of madness, badness and sadness and the ways in which we have understood them over the last two hundred years. Some of that understanding has to do with how the dividing lines between them were conceived and patrolled, in particular by a growing group of professionals or 'mind doctors', who came to be known, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, as 'alienists', psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. They were also sometimes neurologists, pathologists and latterly neuroscientists and psychopharmacologists. All of them thought they were in one way or another illuminating the dark corners of the mind and amassing crucial knowledge. In that sense, and appropriately, they thought of themselves as scientists. They were helped along the way by criminologists, judges, statisticians and epidemilogists. Crucially, they were also helped by patients.
"I have long been aware of the shallowness of sanity" So this is also the story of the way in which madness, badness and sadness - and all the names or diagnoses these states of mind and being have been given as time went on - were lived by various women. Frenzies, possessions, manias, melancholy, nerves, delusions, aberrant acts, dramatic ties, passionate loves and hates, sex, visual and auditory hallucinations, fears, phobias, fantasies, disturbances of sleep, dissociations, communication with spirits and imaginary friends, addictions, self-harm, self-starvation, depression - are all characters in the story this book tells. So too are the Latinate and Greek designations they took on as diagnoses - monomania, melancholia, hysteria, dementia praecox, schizophrenia, anorexia - and their often casual, but scientising shorthand today, MPD, ADHD, OCD and so on. Since mind-doctoring, for better or worse, is not only about understanding and exploring the mind or psyche, emotions and acts, but also sometimes about making them work better
together, treatments are also players in this book, whether
Sometimes the pills, like other cures, work. At other times,
they are 'moral', surgical, galvanic, electrical, pharmaceutical
they can make things worse - no matter what the scientific
or talking - sometimes even writing.
imprimatur they wear.
I have long been aware of the shallowness of sanity. Most of
There is a battle being waged in the area of mental health.
us are, in one way or another. Madness, certainly a leap of
As more and more of our unhappiness is medicalised, as
the irrational, is ever close. We have all been children and
diagnoses are increasingly attached to conditions or aspects
can remember a parent's or sibling's sudden rage - even,
of behaviour and the number of sufferers grows, people
though less well, our own explosions. We all sleep and
want more service - either more pills or more therapy, even
wake and sometimes the dream lingers, won't be shaken
of the kind that comes as a computer program. They want
off, incomprehensible with its ruptures of time, space and sometimes shape, so that we're as small as Alice confronted by the caterpillar, let alone party to the languorous visions of that opium pipe. We drive along in our cars and suddenly emerge from a trance in which we can't remember who we were. At other times, our dead won't let go of us and shadow our days, as if they were there, in the room, too close. Or we or a partner wakes and simply can't rise. The light has suddenly gone out on the world. It feels as if it will never go on again. Everything is too big, too difficult, too miserable. No pulling up of the socks will fix things. Those negative, persecuting screams of all that is wrong in our lives are so loud only suicide feels as if it might blot them out. All this is common enough - as are physical symptoms for which the doctor can find no organic base. If any of this persists, or grows exaggerated, in partners, children or ourselves, we feel fear and perhaps shame. The fear that our minds have grown alien to us, the shame that our acts, words or emotions can slip from our control, are often combined with a wish to disguise both states if at all possible, or to find a simple physical reason at their base. In our therapeutic society, we may equally feel that a trip to a GP or mind doctor will provide us with a pill that cures. This made me want to know whether we had entered a century where sadness and madness, let alone attendant badness, had really grown to terrifying proportions. Or whether we had begun to count things we hadn't counted before and certainly not in the same way. In other words, had what we now term a mental disorder come to encompass something more than, or different from, what it had while I was growing up in what now seems like a distant last century, let alone in the century before? Since the business of history, like novel-writing, makes one distrust present certainties. I also wanted to know whether this incessant growth in illness might be linked to the unstoppable growth in potential cures. There is nothing like the discovery of a much publicised set of pills to invoke a mirroring illness. To put this another way, the shape of our unhappiness or discontent can, proteus-like, be morphed to fit the prevalent diagnoses.
doctors to cope with their wild, inattentive (ADHD), suicidal or self-starving children. They want some kind of control or overseeing of those who may be 'perverted', dangerous to others or themselves when in the midst of a frenzy which is also an inner anguish. Or they want help to see them through what they can't get through alone. At the same time, there's a rising disenchantment with our mind doctors, from within their own ranks, too. The medical imperialising of all parts of our mental, emotional and psychic lives, the pills that promised to make us 'better than well', may now, it seems, have overreached. To assume that sadness, even in its malignant form, is caused by a chemical imbalance may not be an altogether useful hypothesis or a particularly true one. I feel sad when my dog dies. That causes a change in my brain. The emotion isn’t caused by the brain. Everything animate beings do or feel Âfrom watching a football match, to kissing, to eating – causes complicated chemical change. But no amount of serotonin will bring Mr Darcy to the door, make England win the World Cup, bring peace to warring neighbours or end global warming. Nor - any more than God - may the latest much publicised cure-all: cognitive behaviour therapy. There are many aspects of our lives which have ended up within the terrain of the mind doctors when they might more aptly belong in a social or political sphere either of action or of interpretation. Exploring the history of madness and mind-doctoring brings all this into focus. Putting historical periods, old diagnoses and symptoms side by side might, some would imagine, give us a bright sense of the rise and rise of science and of our present medical and pharmaceutical miracles. We certainly know far more about our neural and biochemical make-up than Pinel, the founder of 'alienism', or Freud dreamt of. We have more efficient drugs and more elaborate hypotheses. But where we have what may arguably be more sophisticated, certainly more ordered diagnoses, disorders proliferate and also grow in complexity.
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Therapeutic ideals have so penetrated
of mind doctors spotting, shaping,
same thing - the percentage of cures
our Western world that there is
naming - in a word, 'diagnosing' - or
through care or time does not seem
sometimes a sense that the 'psy'
even suggesting an illness, though
to have changed all that much over
professions can fix everything. What
all that happens too. People, and it is
the two hundred or so years that this
much of the ensuing history puts into
people who become patients, are not
book's story charts. But our managing
relief is that cures are rarely absolute
utterly passive. We are talking here of
of the most extreme forms of mania
or forever.
mental or psychic illness, and, mad
or delirium has.
or sane, patients are as susceptible to In one of his pithy, throw-away
knowledge as doctors and often know
I decided to focus on women as a
remarks, the philosopher Ian Hacking
how to hide from or use it.
way into this history of symptoms, diagnoses and mind-doctoring for
noted, “In every generation there are quite firm rules on how to behave
As historians of medicine have
various reasons. Perhaps the first is
when you are crazy.” Anthropologists
increasingly argued, illness is the
simply that there are so many riveting
have long charted the different
product of a subtle interplay between
cases of women, and through them a
expressions of madness and the forms
cultural perspectives and what is
cure may take in unfamiliar cultures. Nor are modern cultures, however globalised, altogether homogeneous where disorder is in question. A BBC
is particularly the case with mental illness. In the 1820s and 1830s, George
psy professions was constructed. With John Forrester, I had explored some of this terrain in Freud's Women.
Man Burrows was as certain that he
There is more. Contemporary statistics
had proof of the links between the
always emphasise women's greater
uterine system and the disordered
propensity to suffer from the 'sadness'
‘stress' characterised by medics as
brain as some doctors and drug
end of madness. Go to any hundred
'retired husband syndrome', an illness
companies are today that what is
websites and this will be reiterated,
that could turn a wife's repressed
known in the psychiatric manuals
and perhaps not only because women
worry about a salarymanhusband's
as 'Female Sexual Dysfunction' is a
buy more self-improving drugs.
imminent return to the home, where
question of specific hormones. There
habits of obedience and servitude
was a sense during the last years of
would have to be reinforced, into a
the twentieth century that certainty
round of skin rashes, ulcers, asthma
had been arrived at and that the
and high blood pressure.
causes of mental illness had been
program about Japan, where the population is ageing, recently explored a prevalent and debilitating form of
As I was amassing material for this book, I realised that symptoms and diagnoses in any given period played into one another in the kind of collaborative work that all doctoring
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also a shifting biological reality. This
large part of what we recognise as the
located in brain chemistry, or so the pharmaceutical companies had led us to believe. The new century has brought altered perceptions about biology itself.
inevitably entails. Often enough,
If symptoms or disorders can
extreme expressions of the culture’s
sometimes have aspects of a
malaise, symptoms and disorders
collaborative production between
mirrored the time's order - its worries,
patients and doctors, this does not
limits, border problems, fears.
make the torment, the anguish of a
Anorexia is usually an illness of plenty,
mind gone awry, any the less real.
not of famine, as depression is one of
And intervention by mind doctors can
times of peace and prosperity, not of
make illness better, though the kind
war. It is perhaps no surprise that an
of intervention - care or pill or talk
age in which the sum of information
or time away from the family - may
available in any given minute is larger
not always be instrumental in the
than it has ever been in history should
process as is sometimes thought. I
find a condition in which attention is
was surprised to discover that - in so
at a deficit. This is not a simple matter
far as people might be counting the
These figures may be true enough. Certainly if they aren't 'true', the cultural illusion prevails. A magazine like Psychologies, which looks at the softer side of psychic order and disturbance, always carries a woman's face on its cover, as if psychology, that whole business of understanding the (troubled) mind and relations, were uniquely a feminine undertaking, whatever the gender of the doctors. Hardly surprising to find that two out of three clients for the talking cures offered by Cambridge University's Staff Counselling Service are women. The study of women, madness and mind doctors has its own history, and one which has gone through several shifts since Simone de Beauvoir first explored the terrain in The Second Sex. What came clear in that major study was that a particular period's definitions of appropriate femininity
or masculinity were closely linked to definitions of
wrote an MA thesis on Edgar Allan Poe and his hauntings
madness. Not conforming to a norm risks the label
by the dead and undead; and that I worked part-time for
of deviance or madness, and is sometimes attended
a psychoanalytic publishing house in New York, turning
by confinement. For Friedan, Millett, Greer, the great
what was often expert babble into prose.
feminists of the second wave, mind doctors constituted the enemy, agents of patriarchy who trapped women in
My doctorate, though in literature, already contains
a psychology they attributed to her, stupefied her with
some of the strands of this book: how femininity was
pills or therapy, and confined her either to the ‘madhouse’
constructed and understood by the great writers of the
or the restricted life of conventional roles. The promise
turn of the nineteenth century, in particular, Henry
was held out that women's rise in the professions would
James, brother of Alice, who features in these pages;
change all this.
Proust, still the greatest literary psychologist, and Robert Musil, a near-neighbour of Freud's, who also
Historians of the 1980s and 90s showed us that not only
came into that modernist literary picture with its
were there hidden prejudices in the way in which women
everyday psychopathologies.
were conceived of and treated, but that easy notions of historical progress and
Freud's Women is, of course, part
objectivity were themselves
of this trajectory, as are several
to be interrogated. It became clear that disease as much as gender and biology were hardly fixed universals, free of their time's, or our, ways of seeing. The history of psychiatry was not just the history of a great march down the Boulevard of Science towards immutable scientific laws and better drugs for everything. Today, we might want to question whether brain scans and neuro-chemistry, whatever else they may teach us, really do hold the keys to ultimate knowledge of the mind and its disorders.
"Contemporary statistics always emphasise women's greater propensity to suffer from the 'sadness' end of madness"
of my novels, from Memory and Desire to Sanctuary and Paris Requiem, where mind doctors somehow seem to intervene to strut their stuff. Finally, my mother's Alzheimer's vividly reminded me both how fragile and how extraordinary the human mind is. It sent me on a journey into the harder side of the brain sciences. I spent two years shadowing the world of the Brain and Behaviour Lab of the Open University. Here, neuroscientist Steven Rose led research into memory. I was forced, through what sometimes felt like supervisions, alongside reading and conferences, to
People have asked me why,
confront a biochemical approach
after writing fiction, I have chosen to immerse myself in
to brain and mind. All this is partly reconfigured in my
the history of a science and practice which has so many of
novel The Memory Man. Of course, it also prepared me for
its own writing professionals. Have I been a practitioner?
the work in these pages.
Am I a patient? In a way, Mad, Bad & Sad is a book I have been I could answer that, as a writer, I simply have a faith in
writing all my life.
the outsider's view and have always had a fascination for the vagaries of the human mind. Or, since there are many ways of tracing one's trajectory, I could say that an interest in madness was also a form of survival. My early family
Q PAC I N T E R N AT I O N A L
life – which I evoked in Losing the Dead – amongst people
S E R I E S : T E AT R O A L L A
chased by the Holocaust to peaceful Canadian shores
S C A L A B A L L E T CO M PA N Y
had its own strangeness, one that was hardly reflected in
- DO N Q U I XOT E
television sitcoms. Retrospectively, it makes sense that I
7 – 1 7 Novem b er 2 0 1 8 Ly r i c Th ea t re, QPAC
15
Mental health is more than the absence of mental disorders. It is an integral part of health; indeed, there is no health without mental health. Mental health is determined by a range of socioeconomic, biological and environmental factors. Cost-effective public health and intersectoral strategies and interventions exist to promote, protect and restore mental health.
10 FACTS ON MENTAL HEALTH 1. Around 20% of the world's children and adolescents have mental disorders or problems
This stigma can lead to abuse, rejection and isolation and
About half of mental disorders begin before the age of 14.
health system, people are too often treated in institutions
Similar types of disorders are being reported across cultures.
which resemble human warehouses rather than places
Neuropsychiatric disorders are among the leading causes
of healing.
of worldwide disability in young people. Yet, regions of the world with the highest percentage of population under the age of 19 have the poorest level of mental health resources. Most low-income and middle-income countries have only one child psychiatrist for every 1 to 4 million people.
exclude people from health care or support. Within the
7. Human rights violations of people with mental and psychosocial disability are routinely reported in most countries These include physical restraint, seclusion and denial of basic needs and privacy. Few countries have a legal
2. M ental and substance use disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide
framework that adequately protects the rights of people
About 23% of all years lost because of disability is
8. Globally, there is huge inequity in the distribution of skilled human resources for mental health
caused by mental and substance use disorders. 3. About 800,000 people commit suicide every year Over 800,000 people die due to suicide every year and suicide is the second leading cause of death in 15 to 29 year olds. There are indications that for each adult who died of suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. 75% of suicides occur in low-income and middle-income countries. Mental disorders and harmful use of alcohol contribute to many suicides around
with mental disorders.
Shortages of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists and social workers are among the main barriers to providing treatment and care in low-income and middle-income countries. Low income countries have 0.05 psychiatrists and 0.42 nurses per 100,000 people. The rate of psychiatrists in high income countries is 170 times greater and for nurses is 70 times greater.
the world. Early identification and effective management
9. There are five key barriers to increasing mental health services availability
are key to ensuring that people receive the care they need.
In order to increase the availability of mental health services,
4. War and disasters have a large impact on mental health and psychosocial wellbeing Rates of mental disorder tend to double after emergencies.
there are five key barriers that need to be overcome: the absence of mental health from the public health agenda and the implications for funding; the current organisation of mental health services; lack of integration within primary
5. M ental disorders are important risk factors for other diseases, as well as unintentional and intentional injury Mental disorders increase the risk of getting ill from other diseases such as HIV, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and vice-versa.
care; inadequate human resources for mental health; and lack of public mental health leadership. 10. Financial resources to increase services are relatively modest Governments, donors and groups representing mental
6. Stigma and discrimination against patients and families prevent people from seeking mental health care
health service users and their families need to work together
Misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental ill
and middle-income countries. The financial resources
health are widespread. Despite the existence of effective
needed are relatively modest: US$ 2 per capita per year
treatments for mental disorders, there is a belief that they
in low income countries and US$ 3-4 in lower middle
are untreatable or that people with mental disorders are
income countries.
to increase mental health services, especially in low-income
difficult, not intelligent, or incapable of making decisions.
CRISIS SUPPORT If you or someone you know needs immediate help, please contact: Emergency 000 | Lifeline 13 11 14 | Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800
WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION WWW.WHO.INT
MensLine 1300 78 99 78 | Suicide Call Back 1300 659 467 Your local GP or treating psychologist / psychiatrist if you have one.
17
A beautiful thing W I T H D O U G L A S M C G R AT H
Douglas McGrath is effervescent, in the way Americans often are, and is a superb storyteller. It’s a talent he’s utilised as a playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. In the early 1980s, and right out of college, he landed smack in the heartland of American satire, Saturday Night Live. Presumably this is where he sharpened his wit and honed his political jabs which now feature on the pages of some of the United States most respected publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair and The New York Times. McGrath and his collaborator Woody Allen were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay for Bullets Over Broadway, he also wrote and directed the adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. In lots of ways he was the perfect choice when producers wanted someone to write the book for the musical about legendary singer-songwriter Carole King. Story had some fleeting moments with him.
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MUSICAL THEATRE IS A KIND OF MADNESS… Can I tell you a story about my son? I grew up in Texas, bleak west Texas, which is one colour, brown. It’s just dirt. So when I saw The Sound of Music, which is lush and green and Julie Andrews and her blue eyes and the pink lips and everything gorgeous, I was just…wow. It’s a wonderful musical. So when Henry our son was three or four, I thought he was ready to see The Sound of Music. It’s a little early, but when you’re a parent there are certain things you can’t wait to share with your kids. I put him in the chair and we got it going. I put it on the big TV screen and you know that wonderful opening with the aerial shots all over the city and then it finally ends up on the mountain and it’s beautiful and clear? Then over the mountain comes one of the great musical stars of all time, beautiful Julie Andrews. She flings out her arms and she drops her jaw and out comes that peerless voice of hers. I was so excited. I thought I can’t believe it, I’ve now got a son and I’m showing him this wonderful movie. I’m a creative person, so I’m also needy. I wanted to make sure that by this point he was sufficiently enraptured. I stole a glance over at him and this is what I saw. Just like this (facial expression of boredom). He felt me looking at him so he turned to me and said, “Well, she’s weird”. I was just horrified. “What do you meeeean?”. Then I realised he’d never seen a musical before. So he had no idea that if you have a feeling, instead of telling someone your feeling, you sing it. I thought, “Okay, you need to get with the program here Henry because this is a great art form”. He stuck with it and about 15 minutes later, early in the story still, he turned to me, this time not taking his eyes off the screen and he whispered, “I think she likes the captain”. Then I thought, “OK we’re in!”. A musical itself is a form of madness because if madness is the rejection of rationality or reality or what we know, there’s nothing madder than a musical!
THE CREATIVE PROCESS…. This was such a wonderful experience, Beautiful, but it was the first musical I’d written and so I was very, very lucky it was fantastic. When you’re writing for print, like my political satire, you’re essentially writing by yourself. Your editor might make a suggestion or two but it’s really up to you.
21
When you’re making a film, even if
I thought warmth had to be our
The Locomotion. They wrote Blame
you’re the director, you’re working
guiding point and as a producer Paul
it on the Bossa Nova. They just did
with scores of people and although in
loved that. Whenever anyone else
whatever was of the moment.
the end they have to do what you want,
came aboard the project who had a
you like the idea of building not just
different approach, he would always
OLD IS NEW IS OLD
consensus but you want people to see
say, “No, no. We’re doing it this way”.
I had this preconception that I was
things the same way.
so sure was right about her, about the We had someone come in early on
four of them in fact, and about the
In anything that works, I think it’s
who had an idea that the musical
place they worked. Do you know
because everybody working on it
should be done like an old-fashioned
about the Brill Building?
signed on to the same vision. The
musical where people sing the songs to
things that don’t work are always
each other as their feelings, but I had
There were two buildings people
the ones where you feel like – in the
written it in a different way. For want
mean when they talk about the Brill
case of a musical for instance - the
of a better term, or at least to use a
Building. The Brill Building is at 1619
composer wanted one show, the
less exciting term, it’s a more realistic
Broadway, which is 49th or 50th St.
book writer wanted another show,
musical in that nobody is pretending,
They were at 1650 Broadway just up
the actress playing the part wanted
they’re not on the top of an alp singing
the street. It was in those two buildings
another show. They weren’t all
about the sound of music or anything.
that the sound, the Brill Building
on the same page.
They come into an office and they say,
sound, was created. At 1619 there were
“I wrote a song last night. Do you want
wonderful writers like ( Jerry) Leiber
We were very lucky in our show in
to hear it?”. So the audience never has
and (Mike) Stoller and Ellie Greenwich
that Paul Blake, one of our producers
to make that leap of, “Why are they
but at 1650 there was Carole and
(our two producers are Paul and Mike
singing like that?”.
Gerry, Barry and Cynthia, Neil Sedaka,
Buzner), they loved how I saw the show. Early on Paul asked me, “What do you think the tone for this show is?”.
COMPETITION, AMBITION AND DRIVE
been around since the teens and the 20s and they were the buildings where
You have to figure that out early. I said,
Carole told me this and I found this
the songwriters of the earlier era went
“To me it’s Comdon and Green”. (Betty
so interesting… they were genuine
to sell their songs, the Tin Pan Alley
Comdon and Adolph Green wrote
artists, the four of them and they really
writers, but some of the great writers,
Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon).
wanted to write something great but
Irving Berlin and all those people
They always wrote these shows that
they also wanted whatever they wrote
would have passed through those
had a love story in them but that were
to be popular. They always studied
buildings to first sell their songs.
essentially about friendship. They had
the charts. I think it was Wednesday
a wonderful warmth to them.
when the Billboard charts would come out. They’d immediately go right
In creating Beautiful, one of the things
downstairs to the newsstand and grab
I learned in talking to Carole and
it - remember newsstands? Then they
Gerry (Goffin) and Barry (Mann) and
would see whatever was number one.
Cynthia (Wiel), our four characters,
If it wasn’t them, they’d think, “Why
four real people, is what came through
is that song number one?”, and they
was this warmth from the four of
would study and try to analyse why
them. Warmth between Carole and
the song was number one.
Gerry, who had divorced after a
22
Bobby Darin. Both those buildings had
But now it’s the late 50s and the old guard is changing. The public mood is changing and no-one really wanted to dance to Oh What a Beautiful Morning anymore and the big band sound had passed. So my idea was that the musical was going to be about these kids, these kind of ground-breaking revolutionaries who were going to overthrow the old guard and create the
contentious unhappy marriage. They
Neil Sedaka did this a lot. He would
new sound of rock’n’roll. That made
still had this great feeling of warmth
analyse it right down to what are the
sense to me based on what I knew. So
with each other. And they were great
chords in that song, or that sound. In
when I told Carole that idea and her
competitors with Barry and Cynthia,
Carole and Gerry’s case they did it
face just lit up like a sunrise and she
who were on the other side of a wall in
and sometimes turned out something
leaned across the table and took my
their New York office building. They
great. It didn’t just feel like a copy.
hand to squeeze it, I thought, “I have
were great competitors and yet they
If dance songs were a craze, they
so nailed this idea”. But she squeezed
loved each other. I loved that!
wrote dance songs. They wrote
my hand and she said, “That is so
wrong”. I almost fell out of my chair.
people were doing him, everybody
18 writers helping him, he has an
She said, “We loved the old guard.
does imitations of him. Saturday Night
individual voice and a wonderful take
We loved Cole Porter. We worshiped
Live has the very funny Alec Baldwin
on things. I think he’s doing something
Irving Berlin and George Gershwin”.
version, he’s everywhere. As I studied
unique because he devotes essentially
it, I just thought, I can’t keep doing
the whole show to one topic and
Trump himself, it’s too worn out.
although they dress it up with a lot of
That explains a lot. It explains the melodic complexity of their music.
comedy, what’s underneath is heartfelt.
By ‘complexity’, it’s not overly complex
So the other three pieces I wrote,
but it’s not simple the way many pop
I came at him indirectly. The second
songs are simple. Listen to Will You Still
piece was about Jeb Bush. It’s called
Most late night people - and I
Love Me or to Natural Woman. These are
Jeb Bush is Totally Committed but you
know why, if you’re on five nights
songs that have a beautiful depth of
see he’s in shellshock. He is back home
a week - just have to make jokes.
feeling. They come into the ear easily
with George and Barbara and he’s
I know what it was like at Saturday
but they’re not simple minded. And
totally in shock by the way he’s been
Night Live. You’re scouring the news
Gerry’s lyrics and Cynthia Weil’s lyrics
treated by Trump. The whole piece is
for anything. There’s a nursing home
are much richer than most, not all,
about Trump and yet it’s seen through
fire and you’re, like, “What’s the joke?”
but most of the lyrics of the period. I
the eyes of other players.
and then you feel sick about yourself.
He picks things that he cares about.
John will pick a topic that he can find
believe that’s because both Gerry and Cynthia wanted to be playwrights and
Then I did one called What the Obamas
a lot of humour in but that he can also
so they wrote characters. Each song is
Like to Watch. Remember when Trump
make legitimate points about. It’s a
the story of somebody. Maybe not The
accused Obama of wiretapping? So I
kind of social critique.
Locomotion but certainly Up on the Roof
thought what if he did, that’s just too
or Cynthia’s wonderful song Uptown.
good. So the premise of the piece is
The piece that got me hooked on
I think Will You Still Love Me could be
that once Trump was elected, the CIA
the show was one he did early in the
a one-act play by Tennessee Williams,
installed cameras in all parts of his
first season on these awful accidents
it’s so tender.
universe. Then when the Obamas get
General Motors was having. Their cars
home every night they watch the feed
were exploding or something, some
- the CIA gave it to them as a parting
terrible thing. Of course they knew all
gift. They come home every night and
about it, didn’t do anything for a long
they can’t wait to watch. But I never use
time, put the blame on somebody else.
Trump. I use Ivanka and Jarrod getting
The way he approached it, he was like
dressed for dinner (he’s worried his
an outraged activist but with a superb
pants make him look fat.) Of course,
sense of humour. And the sense of
it’s almost always about Trump
humour didn’t in any way minimise
but coming from the side or
what he was trying to say, the punch
different angle.
was still there.
It takes a while, because you want each
Dickens was very brilliant at balancing
piece to be just so and you can get
comedy and drama and what he knew
them to that point and then the night
and what I was lucky to learn from
before you mail it in, your same idea
him, was that the comedy makes the
could be on Jimmy Kimmel. Whereas
drama all the more dramatic and the
they’re not really doing the other stuff
drama makes the comedy all the more
the way I was doing it. I thought it was
relieving when it comes.
THE UNITED STATES AND POLITICAL SATIRE We’re deep in madness at the moment. It’s all pre-satirised. I wrote four satirical pieces about the Trump administration for The New Yorker. The first piece is called We Have a Serious Problem. That one is Trump himself. It’s Trump and an aide and he’s trying to figure out how to get out of the running for President because he didn’t really want to run for President. By that point he was running. By the time he was in, everybody, dead people were doing satire about Trump because he’s a big target. He refreshes the well every day.
a way to cut through.
He is the gift that keeps on giving.
JOHN OLIVER AND CHARLES DICKENS
He is a disaster for the country and the
John Oliver, he is so brilliant, he is
world but he is a gift to satirists. What
a person that has a really individual
B E AU T I F U L : T H E CAROLE KING MUSICAL
I found was that because so many
voice - I mean, even though he has
F rom 1 3 Ju ly 2 0 1 8 Lyr i c T he a t re , QPAC
“I’ve got a huge collection of artwork at home, and try to paint daily. Art is very good for my health; it is very uplifting for the spirit and it works to communicate good vibes for people.” - J O HN DOHERTY, ARTIST.
24
Outsider Art The French artist Jean Dubuffet took the Surrealist obsession with Outsiders to a new level by daring to collect and exhibit their work. Not only did he champion the artwork of schizophrenics and local mediums, but he also celebrated art made by eccentric isolates and self-taught laborers. Dubuffet recognized in the work of these divergent groups one unifying trait: a raw quality untouched by academic rules or current trends. Outsider Art Fair, Paris Outsiderartfair.com
25
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The road from normal BY DALLAS JOHN BAKER
Writing is like dancing, it’s moving (or making marks) to a beat, a beat inside. The things that are written—novels, poems and plays—hold those rhythms in them, ready to be released when read or performed. That beat doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the echo of the writer’s experiences, their loves and losses. It’s easy enough to hear the music in any piece 28
of writing, but to understand it fully, we sometimes need to track that beat back to its source, to the moments and experiences that led to its creation. To understand my play Ghosts of Leigh, you need to go back to the 1980s and take a ride in a Datsun 120Y through the rolling grasslands of the Darling Downs.
“Those who dance are considered mad by those who cannot hear the music” – Friedrich Nietzsche The road sparkled in the morning sun like a strip of black diamonds. Beautiful, even though the sparkle was just the glitter of millions of tiny shards of glass from broken headlights embedded in the bitumen. The highway curved between low hills blanketed in wild, golden grass, separating the paddocks on one side from those on the other with a dark, glittering slash. The paddocks stretched back in every direction under a luminous blue sky. Every now and then, far off in the
We were quite a trio, my mother, my grandmother and I. All outcasts in our small conservative town, and all so disconnected (perhaps alienated) from other people’s expectations that we just did what we wanted; unconcerned by others’ reactions, unfazed by the risk inherent in being different, in standing out. My mother went to bed for days in depressed, hypochondriac fits. My grandmother spoke in riddles and often went on lone adventures in the middle of the night; barefoot and wearing only a nightgown. I grew my hair long and put on my mother’s make-up and an op-shop kimono and went for long walks in the countryside; a gender-bending bush-baby.
distance, a lonely farmhouse sat on the horizon, watched over by a lightning-struck gum tree. The Darling Downs, my home.
To outsiders, the things my grandmother did and the things that I did were in the same category: stuff only lunatics did. My mother’s sins were not seen as quite so
My mother’s little Datsun 120Y rode on the sparkling blacktop almost silently, the noise of the engine lost in that empty landscape. My mother steered the car with one hand and wound down the window with the other. She angled her face to let the cold air dry the tears that rolled freely down her cheeks. They just kept coming and she’d grown tired of wiping them away. She was heartbroken over something. I didn’t know what. It was one of the saddest things I’d seen in my whole life. Even though I was only fourteen years old, I was sure I could live to a hundred and not see anything that sad ever again.
serious. But if on occasion sympathy was shown to my mother or grandmother, none ever came my way. People seemed to think that I’d chosen to be different, to be a freak. Whereas they thought my grandmother was born crazy, they believed my own actions and choices had made me that way. And somehow my crimes were more taboo, because mine were crimes against gender. It was as if they thought I was being different (being myself) to spite them, as part of a willing refusal of their sense of what was normal, right and good. Whatever they believed, my behaviour and gender presentation weren’t about rebellion, or trying to set myself apart. It was simply the outflow of an atypical mind, of thinking
At best, outsiders read my mother as not quite normal, at worst, they read her as hysterical. In reality, she was just sensitive and a little bit sad. She turned on the radio and cranked up the volume. Do You Really Want to Hurt Me by Culture Club was playing. One of our favourite songs. She started singing along, the tears still streaming down. This was the moment I understood that some people’s minds are quite different to everyone else’s; that one person’s way of thinking and perceiving can be as unlike another person’s as moonlight is to the harsh gleam of stadium floodlights. It was also the moment I realised that there is beauty in that difference. There is pain and loneliness, yes, but also something tender that is worth cherishing.
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness” – Allen Ginsberg The kids in my neighbourhood called my grandmother ‘the mad witch’. She was a paranoid schizophrenic in a time when hardly anyone had heard that term let alone knew what it meant. They called me ‘the sissy freak’. Everyone knew exactly what that meant: queer.
differently; of not having the same (restricted) sense of what was normal that everyone else had. I just didn’t believe in gender the way other people did. For me it was something to be played with, something fluid and fun, a performance. Playing with gender was how I expressed myself. Because of that I was drawn to other people whose approach to gender was much the same. An expression of this was my record collection, which in the 1980s contained barely a single gender-normative performer. It was all David Bowie, Boy George, Marilyn, Dead or Alive and Divine. And it was through my genderbending fandom that I encountered the unforgettable Leigh Bowery, a genius of shock and outrage whose drag-inspired costumery spoke to me (and woke me) in ways nothing else had before.
“There is no great genius without some touch of madness” – Aristotle The idea that genius, especially creative genius, is linked to madness is literally as old as Aristotle. That’s a fair bit more than a two thousand year tradition of linking
artists, writers and performers to ‘lunatics’. It’s no wonder then that the idea is hard to dislodge, despite the fact that there is no substantial evidence linking mental illness with creativity. Madness, in the form of hysteria, has long been associated more with women than men. The connection between creative genius (or talent), madness and femininity is evident in everyday life. The few creative professions most people encounter on a regular basis—such as hairdressing, window-dressing, interior design, dressmaking and beautician—have long been seen as feminine. The men who participate in these professions are deemed effeminate by default. The same is true for men who participate in the more rarefied arts of ballet, opera and theatre. The figure of the ‘artsy effeminate’ is a cultural stereotype that persists despite the fact that male dancers, singers and actors are often both masculine and heterosexual. It is because of this persistent association between creativity and femininity, between madness and the effeminate, that men who don’t look how men are supposed to look, whose gender presentation (or visual façade) defies gender norms, are often perceived as hysterics, as lunatics. More to the point, they are also often perceived as scary and dangerous. Leigh Bowery played up to the notion of the scary effeminate with sublime irreverence and turned his (powdered) nose up at all social norms around gender. In fact, he made these things the basis for all of his (unconventional) art. In an interview with Ian Parker in London’s The Independent1, Bowery described his artwork as, ‘both serious and very funny. It's decorative, but there's something underlying [it] that's maybe tragic and disturbing. There's a tension between the two.’ The tension between the two is the tension between
“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free” – Nikos Kazantzakis Ironically, to be free does not come without a price. We all pay something for our freedom. Sometimes we pay a price just for being ourselves, especially when being ourselves confronts sacrosanct norms like gender. When we do that, when we break or transcend taboos, we are deemed mad, perhaps even dangerous. In my stage play, Ghosts of Leigh, the lead character, the ghost of a young (1980s) Leigh Bowery, says this: ‘There is always a price to pay for being different, always, and sometimes it’s a high price, but it’s worth it. Besides, the price you pay for hiding who you really are is much higher. Sometimes it costs you your life.’ In a lot of ways this play had its genesis in that Datsun 120Y, on that empty road slicing through the Darling Downs when I was 14. I knew then that I was not like everyone else and that as a result I would experience loneliness, and perhaps pain. But I also knew that I wouldn’t conform and be like everyone else, even if I could. If I did, then I would lose the tenderness that comes from being an outsider, the tenderness that makes an ordinary country road seem like a thread of glittering black diamonds. Leigh Bowery was the role model I used for negotiating the pain and loneliness, and for how to be myself, how to preserve the tenderness within. ‘Look out there, Dallas,’ my mother had said on that morning, motioning with her head out to broad skies and acres of golden grass. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered, raising my voice a little over the wind flooding in the window. ‘It’s really beautiful.’
normal and abnormal, sane and insane, male and
She smiled, wiping the last tear away. ‘Not everyone
female, between the banal and commonplace and the
sees it, but I knew you would.’ She hit the accelerator.
extraordinary. Bowery’s crafted visual façade reads
The little 120Y lurched forward, its tires whirring on the
on the outside as outlandish, as mad, but it rests on
glittering road that stretched far away from normal to
an inner philosophical architecture that is profoundly
another place; a place where people like us could feel at
logical. Through outrageous costumery and a flirtation
home and dance to the beat of a different drum.
with the limits of acceptable behaviour and dress, Bowery is highlighting two things: 1. That gender norms are deeply conservative and conformist; and 2. That most individuals unconsciously adhere to a rigid (and
1
2
‘A bizarre body of work’ (Sunday 26th February 1995) Running Wild (1988)
hierarchical) dress code as opposed to following their own inner impulses or desires, which is, in itself, a kind of (imposed) madness or forced inhibition. It’s as though that made by author J.G. Ballard when he wrote, ‘In a
PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT
totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.’ 2
F rom 2 6 Sept em b er 2 0 1 8
Bowery’s costumes were a visual declaration similar to
Ly r i c Th ea t re, QPAC
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on the right track BY JUDITH MCLEAN
One of the pleasures of insomnia is that it offers uninterrupted nights for deep listening; a favourite is the BBC Radio 4 podcast Desert Island Discs. Many of you will be familiar with such programs that invite people from all walks of life to select music that delineates the vicissitudes of their life. For me, the best interviews are the ones where the person doesn’t try to tell a victory narrative leaving out the warty bits, but rather reveals their vulnerabilities, their frailties and foibles. Frankly, perfection bores me. When I was invited to be a guest on a similar program (Hi-Fidelity on ABC 612), I spent many nights listening extra carefully, trying to determine what sparked the interviewer’s imagination. Certainly it was the stories that left me perplexed asking, ‘how could they think or do that, that’s just madness, are they crazy?’ that fired my imagination. The Talmud is recalled here: ‘we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are,’ pointing to the possibility that we all seem slightly mad to one another. I realised that creating a lifeline
undertaking cognitive therapy, talking
punctuated by music was an opportunity
with a counsellor, a life coach, or a
to reflect and bring to light motives
psychiatrist, becoming conscious requires
behind choices I had made or perhaps
intense effort in attempts to understand
more interestingly choices I had not made
ourselves. Nobel Prize winning physicist
and the associated life consequences.
David Bohm supported this when he
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says
stated, ‘you’ve got to give a lot of attention
getting conscious is like, ‘stepping into
to consciousness. This is one of the things
the light’. It does require work, really
of which our society is ignorant. It assumes
hard emotional mental work. This kind
consciousness requires no attention.
of deep emotional reckoning is not often
But consciousness is what gives attention.
credited as exertion or effort. Reasons
Consciousness requires very alert attention
include privacy, people don’t talk about
or else it will simply destroy.’
it fearing others’ judgement, stigma, addressing mental issues makes others
Bohm goes onto to argue that normally
uncomfortable, suspicion or a person
our thoughts have us rather than we having
seeking help may have deep pathologies.
them. This is the rider (ego) and elephant (id) metaphor, thinking we are in control
Whether it’s talking honestly in the
of this unruly beast (unconscious), when
media, reflecting on a lifeline, meditating,
essentially we haven’t much of an idea
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how it behaves. Antidotes to unruliness are definitely mindfulness and meditation, but as I chose my music I began to think something more was at play. I determined that the stories of misadventures that reverberated for me in others were not because of schadenfreude but rather because of a fascination about how we seem to expect solidity from this protean thing called the ‘self’, acting as if omnipotence and omniscience are a replicable model, as if infallibility is some kind of fixed entity that always acts in full self-awareness. This struck me as plain silly. Like believing we’re Greek gods and can meditate ourselves into logic and order. There’s an ongoing preposterousness inherent in assuming that we can know how our lives will turn out and also know how to act wisely in the world, and if we don’t know that, it’s a real character flaw. More often than not as we listen to people’s stories we realise that what we do is sabotage ourselves by doing quite the opposite of what might be good for us. The examples are endless: over/under committing, unadvisedly/never falling in love, over/under parenting, over imbibing/wowsering, over/under exercising, overspending/being stingy, over/ under eating, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. For interviewers, artists, scholars, teachers, therapists and audiences of the arts and humanities, the primary purpose is to reflect and understand the complexities of
The idea even that we have an unconscious inner life that runs in us is an anathema to many people whose ego cannot accept that they’re not in charge
the human condition, particularly focused on the vagaries of the self. Scholar Deborah Britzman calls it, ‘creating a love affair with what is at its most difficult to love,’ and
because I could not put my experience side by side with
psychoanalyst Adam Philips says that, ‘revealing the
my intentions and see where I had been wrong. All I
idiosyncrasy of our desire – or what in different languages
could do was drift blindly from one experience to
might be called our madness, or our passions, or our
another, vaguely hoping that if enough things happened
imagination,’ is the unofficial (or illicit) work we do on
to me I would eventually learn wisdom…I did not know
trying to figure out our inner anomalies. The idea even
how to emerge from blind thinking into that state of
that we have an unconscious inner life that runs in us is
seeing in which reflexion and the drawing of conclusions
an anathema to many people whose ego cannot accept
were possible.’
that they’re not in charge.
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The idea of doing the same thing and expecting a
British author and psychoanalyst Marion Milner explains
different result is a platitude for madness. Milner’s
that a lack of consciousness is like a temporary madness,
writing calls to mind an idea called the implicit paradox.
wanting a thing and doing the opposite. She refers to it
The implicit paradox, as the name suggests, is when
as ‘blind thinking’. The synonyms abound: foolishness,
unknowingly we fail to link intentions, experience and
stupidity, irrationality, craziness, idiocy. In psychology it’s
outcomes, so patterned or habituated behaviour happens
called unconscious thinking. Milner’s ideas are as relevant
despite expecting a different result. The implicit paradox
now as they were in 1934: ‘I plunged into experiences only
manifests itself when the automated natural way of being
to find when I came out I could conclude nothing from
- even though often painful - happens automatically
them and I could find no rule for future guidance,
because it’s a well-practiced neurological pathway and
behaviour becomes comfortable. Whilst it seems to be
the best of everyone, my need is to see people as they
what we want (anger and yelling), that choice works against
really are and not some fictionalised view of people.
what we really need (vulnerability and understanding).
PLAYLIST: MARVIN GAYE - WHAT’S GOING ON
Ironically, by unconsciously choosing anger we sabotage our chances of getting what we need, adopting the former
Deep reverence for mystery – As an academic, I’m prone
behaviour automatically because it is a familiar patterned
to being an iconoclast wanting empirical proof for the
response. Sadly, unconscious choices often derail us, in
big existential questions of life. I’ve struggled to accept
turn making us miserable and mad.
mystery and the inexplicable. Becoming a grandmother has helped.
As I compiled my playlist, nowhere was my own implicit paradox more startlingly obvious than in my love life. Getting to consciousness around my beleaguered love life
PLAYLIST: ECHAD MI YODEA BY OHAD NAHARIN PERFORMED BY BATSHEVA - THE YOUNG ENSEMBLE
meant seeking the wisdom of that great sage Rick Astley
Re-parenting one’s self – Many people I coach haven’t
in the 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Come on, please
been parented as well as they could have been despite their
no judgement, it was the 80s - big emotions, big hair,
parents’ best intentions. We all need to learn we are lovable
shoulder pads and dance pop. As I cried, danced and sang
and the life we have is a gift. A good coach or therapist will
along it was indisputable that Rick had written this song
help you with the hard inner work of becoming conscious.
just for me.
PLAYLIST: DEEP PEACE (ANY VERSION IS SOOTHING)
And if you ask me how I'm feeling
Telescopic view of time – Taking the long view. So much
Don't tell me you're too blind to see
of our life is about the short haul. Whilst achieving goals is
Never gonna give you up
important, realising that time, space and pace are artificial
Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna… Without seeming defensive, it’s fair to say that most of us are very good at falling in love and not so accomplished at falling out of love, hence Rick’s music soothed my
constraints and needn’t dictate goals that need longer time, space and time. PLAYLIST: MAX RICHTER THE WAVES - TUESDAY REFERENCES / READING LIST Bohm, D. in Jaworski, J. (1996). Synchronicity: The inner path of leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Britzman, D. (2003). After-Education. New York: State University of New York Press.
obstinacy (want) to stay in a relationship that was past
Britzman, D. (2009) The very thought of education: psychoanalysis
salvaging when what was desirable (need) was to move on
and the impossible professions. New York: State University of
from the broken relationship. Unexpectedly, even though
New York.
it appears counter intuitive, the pain experienced while
Burow, P (2016) NeuroPower: Leading with Neurointelligence
extricating ourselves from broken relationships and facing
Copernicus Publishing Pty Ltd
what’s needed, offers more opportunities for insight and growth than its flipside, falling in love.
Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.
So, how do we become more conscious of our implicit
Damasio, A. (2004). Looking for Spinoza. London: Vintage.
paradoxes and move towards sanity, acknowledging that
Milner, M (1934) A life of one’s own. London: Virago.
ultimate sanity is a utopian state? Here’s four things to consider that have helped me out and were part of the aforementioned playlist.
Phillips, A. (1993). On kissing, tickling and being bored. Great Britain: Faber & Faber. Phillips, A. (1998). The beast in the nursery. London: Faber & Faber.
Cognitive fitness – Reflect on your habituated patterns and determine whether they are wants or needs. How
judith.mclean@qpac.com.au
well are your current wants serving you? What might the unconscious need be? E.g., my want tends to be to think
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Physical spaces offer tiny glimpses, insights into the people who occupy them and the things that happen there. Elements seen every day are seen anew by someone else’s eyes. A worn spoon is suddenly more evocative, a sign more poignant, corners sharper or noises more acute. What happens beyond the realm of the public gaze? What do you, say or value in private that you do not in public?
Story invited friends who are resident at West End’s Common Ground to bring new ways of seeing to some of the hallways, orchestra pits, nooks and crannies backstage at QPAC.
Ways of Seeing BEHIND THE SCENES
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BRISBANE OPEN HOUSE 1 3 & 14 Oct o ber QPAC and Brisbane wide
QPAC is proud to play host to an inspired array of world-class shows and artists as part of this year’s Brisbane Festival. Under the banner ‘All together Brisbane’, the program is a curation of masterful performances that are altogether epic, challenging, shocking, spellbinding and hilarious.
Book your tickets now at brisbanefestival.com.au or QTIX 13 62 46
HORROR
GRATITUDE AND GRIEF
Memorial
Eskimo Joe with Camerata
SYMPHONY FOR ME
7-9 September
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT
15 September
Out of the darkness, a vast field of bodies emerges. At the centre,
It’s music for the masses, programmed by the people. The hugely
a woman stands, the voice and heart of a god, the elements, time
successful Symphony for Me returns to QPAC. This free concert,
itself and thousands of lives caught in visceral moments of war.
performed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, will uncover extraordinary stories in an unforgettable evening of music
Hamnet
requested by you.
8-12 September
Hamnet is a video-based and live-action play of a boy - the ghost of William Shakespeare’s only son who died at age 11. It is a story
En Masse
19-22 September
of loss and how the absence of a son and a father ultimately
A wild, tender and savage ride, En Masse presents two visions
influences another, the story of Hamlet. Set somewhere in purgatory,
of humanity at its extremes through circus settings of Schubert’s
both worlds are brought together by Dead Centre and presented
Winter’s Journey and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
in a sparse and thought-provoking production.
Gratitude AND Grief
PETER GRIMES 9 September
20 AND 22 September
Peter Grimes is the defining British opera of the 20th century and a
Katie Noonan’s Elixir, Michael Leunig and Camerata
masterpiece of musical theatre. What really happened to the young
Multi-platinum selling, and five-time ARIA award-winning singer/
apprentice of gruff fisherman Peter Grimes? This monumental,
songwriter Katie Noonan returns with her jazz trio Elixir, Australia’s
life-defining musical event stars Australian tenor Stuart Skelton -
‘poet laureate’ and illustrator Michael Leunig, and Camerata –
the greatest performer of the title role on the planet.
Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra – for a special evening of word-inspired illustration and music.
Horror
HoME
Inspired by your favourite scary movies, Horror is an imaginatively
12 -15 September
26-29 September
gory, genuinely terrifying and funny live experience. A young woman
On an empty stage, a house is conjured up from thin air. You watch
and her friends are terrorised by a vengeful spirit when they visit the
it fill room by room as generations of inhabitants move in, grow up,
place of her tormented childhood.
get old, argue, do laundry, fall in love, work and party.
The Owl AND the Pussycat Stalin’s Piano
14 September
26-29 September
The Owl and the Pussycat is an enchanting and intimate theatrical
A composer, a piano, a virtuoso, historical footage, and a wildly
experience for families. Be swept away in this all-new opera with
chilling – at times very funny – meeting of Joseph Stalin, Ai Wei Wei,
stunning vocals, interactive theatre, and a troupe of musical puffins.
Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Goebbels, John F. Kennedy, Gough Whitlam, Julia Gillard, Donald Trump, and more.
Eskimo Joe with Camerata
28 September
It’s a cultural sound clash as one of Australia’s biggest selling indie bands and Queensland’s premier chamber orchestra perform in a one-off musical event together. Eskimo Joe, along with Camerata invite you to an evening of their ARIA chart-topping hits including ‘From the Sea’, ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’ and ‘Foreign Land’ as you’ve never heard them before.
Mother BY NONI HAZLEHURST
Noni Hazlehurst is an artist, educator and activist. She is beloved and awarded for her work across music, stage, television and film. For several years she has been performing Mother, playwright Daniel Keene’s deft and poetic work on a woman untethered from the everyday. Using Mother as a starting point, we invited Noni to consider ideas of madness.
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Madness thrives on chaos.
are actually devoid of reality, but
Sanity depends on peace.
which eerily crawl into the zeitgeist to become a new reality.
Madness has different meanings for different people.
Although the research into the developmental effects on children
I can only describe my own
of our current technology
definition of it - one that has
dominated lifestyles is in its
changed over the years. I’ve learned
early days, in the studies already
lessons about the effects on all of
done, the conclusions are clear. A
us - particularly children - of the
dependence on technology at the
overly judgmental and reductive
expense of human interaction has a
demands of our way of life.
detrimental outcome for children.
Even an occasional opportunity for peace is better than none. But we live in a state of chaos, especially in cities, where the madness is magnified. Our environments are
And the ever growing statistics show that anxiety, depression, self harm and worse are almost becoming de rigueur for younger and younger children.
defined by constant bombardment
And while we try to do what we can
of all the senses, hard surfaces,
to protect our children, our eyes are
greyness, with only perfunctory
fixated on screens. We don’t make
and confined examples of nature
eye contact with each other. We’re
to soften the landscape. Wherever
all on our individual treadmills,
we go, we’re surrounded by screens
trying to stay out of trouble, and
and headlines, which either distract
working hard to pay off the debts
us from, or alert us to, news of
we’ve chosen to accumulate. And
imminent disaster.
there’s such a preponderance of
The pressures of our world drive adults crazy. We know that. So what is it doing to our children? Children are growing up more engaged with the world than any previous generation. But they’re also clearly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that they’re not always able to assimilate or contextualise, given their limited experience. It’s almost impossible for our kids to find peace. The prevailing ‘popular culture’ experienced by children today focuses on reality shows which
horrifying news that we retreat to our fortressed cells and lock ourselves in to rest, before donning our armour to do it all again tomorrow. The madness everywhere makes us fearful. We know there are people who’ve been driven to the point of craziness by the madness, and we try to avoid them. It makes us feel overwrought, overcome, even paranoid. Everything is a fight. It’s US v. THEM. There’s no peace. It’s war. That’s no way to live.
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Everyone needs and wants to feel
which triggers reflection on the status
while providing $250 million for
connected. Separation and isolation
quo and on our own perceptions of
school chaplaincy programmes is
play a big part in madness. As nature
reality, which can lead to a desire
positively bonkers.
demonstrates, we need each other.
for change.
Without leaving the city altogether,
The arts speak truth to power, shining
better if the arts are a meaningful
the only way to provide the sustenance
a light into dark corners, which is the
component in their lives.
for the mind, body and spirit that
bleedingly obvious reason why arts
nature bestows, is exposure to and
budgets are being slashed, and artists
Surely it is the definition of madness
involvement in the arts.
commonly vilified. We’re now labelled
to ignore overwhelming evidence?
Not just children, but everyone fares
‘elites’, generally by people who fit There is overwhelming evidence
well and truly into that category
that a life lived without free access to
themselves. There is nothing elite
enjoyment of, and participation in, the
about being an artist in this country,
arts is a life severely compromised.
I assure you!
Without exposure to high quality art
Official State and National art is
in any or all of its forms - theatre,
sanctioned, but for the tens of
music, dance, painting, literature -
thousands of practitioners whose
there is little available to ameliorate
vocation is to make art, and who
the effects of the madness.
want to develop their skills through
The arts help us to live our lives. There lies their wonder and potency. Beautifully made art, when executed at the highest level, brings peace - it reminds us that we are not alone, that we share more similarities than differences, that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is, or might not even be the way it seems. The arts teach us that everyone has a story. The arts allow us to reflect and consider. A work of art can have a palpable effect on our consciousness, and when it does, it stays in our memories forever. Madness manifests in the brain. Sufferers become detached from the real world. But what actually is the real world right now? The arts speak to our brains, but also more importantly, our hearts. They can restore and comfort tired spirits and help to address feelings of isolation and confusion. And God forbid, they can encourage a response
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practise, and who make a massive contribution financially and culturally to the country, the message is clear. Go away and get a real job. Most artists have a real job, and most of them work at it day and night. They’re just not paid for their work. In official terms, we have no value and are surplus to requirements.
Yet part of the madness is that many of us are doing just that - choosing to ignore the truth in favour of expediency or the preservation of power and privilege. Anything other than the official view is deemed fake. Which explains why the arts and artists are considered so damn pesky. Creativity doesn’t toe a line. Who knows where great art comes from, but anyone lucky enough to experience it can attest to its power. The character of Christie in Mother is the perfect example of someone not dealing with the madness and cruelty of the world. Hers is a life barely lived, due to familial and societal neglect, and through a lack of empathy and support. She is perceived as mad
And it’s a vicious cycle - how can we
because she is disconnected from the
argue for the value, the preservation
world and utterly alone. By choice.
and support of the arts when the public is constantly presented with ordinary examples, not the extraordinary?
With no advantages, no significant others, no education, and with her experience of life limited and compromised, she cannot and will not
Just as the knighthood for Prince
live in the so-called real world. She’s
Philip was deemed mad by many, the
one of the many people on the outer
recent further slashing of the ABC’s
peripheries of society who speak
budget to nigh on unsustainable levels,
the truth, and are called mad for
and the concurrent announcement of
their trouble.
nearly $50 million to commemorate Captain Cook’s arrival strikes me as gobsmackingly crazy. The removal of arts programs in schools, which all available evidence suggests are incredibly valuable,
The response to the play has been humbling. We have somehow managed to create a work which moves many people to feel empathy for all the lost souls in the world, sometimes for the first time.
With Daniel Keene’s beautiful text, Matt Scholten, my director and dear friend, and I have tried to create a safe space where you can spend a little while in someone else’s shoes. Where you can hear Christie’s story and begin to understand and to feel empathy. Empathy is in very short supply, or so it would seem. The arts remind us that it is in fact everywhere. We are all born with it. No child is born a bigot - it’s adults who create intolerance. And the arts, particularly theatre, can touch us in a way nothing else can, and connect us to our fellow human beings, showing us a way through the madness. Daniel Keene writes about people who fall through the cracks, those for whom hard work will never be rewarded by prosperity, and who need our help and compassion. At its bottom line, the play’s message is a plea for kindness and empathy, and I look for that in all the work I choose. I want to be part of stories that are worth telling, that add something useful to the sum of human existence. And the gift of Mother is the perfect vehicle for me to nail my colours to the mast. I’m grateful for the opportunity to perform it in my home state, and I look forward to your responses.
M OT H E R 7 to 18 Au gu s t 2 0 1 8 Crem o r n e Th ea t re, QPAC
LETHAL MAGICAL THINKING
BY GUY RUNDLE
That’s the legend. In fact, several military experts had warned that this would not be a war like other European conflicts; they had looked at the US Civil War, which had seen the first use of ‘Gatling’
The Western border of Germany,
machine guns and barbed wire, new types of cannon, ‘scorched
a summer night in 1914; grey
was coming. By mid-1915 it was there. Across Eastern France, both
clad troops cross the border, establish their forward defences.
earth’ destruction of cities and understood that something else sides dug trenches from Belgium to the Swiss border; they would eventually become multi-levelled systems, the line of defence of sovereignty. By 1916, they had become not protection, but
The twentieth century and the
mantraps, where shells rained day and night, and men went mad,
First World War had begun –
the Somme series of battles, saw twenty thousand men killed on
a week too early. The Germans
twisted and dying in the wire and mud. In 1916, the first day of a patch of brown earth. By now, the war had become an insanity, visible to those waging it, and running it, carefully hidden from
had crossed into neighbouring
general publics. By 1917 that was no longer possible. The stream of
Luxemburg a week ‘early’, and
weren’t merely torn up, they were broken. Those who expected
wounded coming back to the major cities of the belligerent powers,
had to back off somewhat. The
valiant heroes baring their wounds bravely found mad man-rabbits
embarrassment was not about
women patients: phobias, paralysis, screaming fits, anxiety, the
the invasion of another country,
consumed with the hysteria usually associated, in that era, with works. In Britain, the military psychologist Charles Myers coined the term ‘shell shock’ and used behavioural and physical techniques
the erasure of its identity;
– including electric shock – to get patients up and running, and
everyone knew the war was
government over themselves.
coming. It was not a war crime, but a breach of manners. The
back to the front, where they fell apart again immediately, losing all
But in Vienna, as the entire Austro-Hungarian empire came apart, another physician was having more success at putting people back
war would be a series of strategic
together. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis as a total
skirmishes, and exchanges of
anti-Semitic Habsburg regime. By 1917 they would try anything,
territory, everyone knew that.
system, had been viewed with suspicion by the anti-intellectual and and suddenly the advocate of a talking treatment for the bewildered bourgeoisie of middle Europe had thousands of damaged men, and
One way or another, it would
the resources of the military hospital system at his disposal. This
be over by Christmas.
the psyche would change dramatically, and this new approach – in
would have two major effects: Freud’s thinking on the nature of which the sexual drive was seen as being partnered by a new ‘death drive’ – would now be carried by state hospitals and health systems to every corner of social life. Psychoanalysis had already staked a claim in literature and the arts; now it would be applied en masse to social life – often in reductive and simplistic forms – from the 1920s into the 1980s. The new theory would match the century. Immersion in the mass death factory of the military system, the death of his daughter Sophie, and the work of Sabina Spielrein on sadism and destructiveness – unjustly neglected, though credited by Freud – convinced Freud that our drive towards non-being, towards a
53
"For Freud, the willingness of millions of men to kill strangers could not simply be explained by patriotism, propaganda, punishment or the will to kill; there was a will to die, as well, an embracing of death" state beyond the eternal lack of desire,
fascists would use it to hone their
that, there was the Second World War,
issued in destructiveness, of self and
propaganda techniques – which
a completion of the first, and one in
others. For Freud, the willingness of
included screeds against the theory
which both the madness of human
millions of men to kill strangers could
as ‘degenerate Jewish pseudoscience’;
destructiveness and the theorisation
not simply be explained by patriotism,
in 1935 Alcoholics Anonymous was
of it came together. To say that the
propaganda, punishment or the will to
founded, with a religious content
Holocaust was mad is to speak of only
kill; there was a will to die, as well, an
– surrender your will to God,
one dimension of it of course, and
embracing of death. Our destructive
however you see him – but with a
many object to such a characterisation
drives would thus take centre stage
psychoanalytic form, surrendering the
of an event that was radically evil,
from the 1920s on in explaining
internal ‘superego’ control of behaviour
committed by participants who knew
things like irrationality in personal
to a more concrete belief, in order to
they were doing such. But it was mad as
relations, sexual and emotional
allow the ‘ego’ – the meaning forming
well, the idea that the glory of Germany
masochism, addiction, dependence.
self – to reassert its integrity and
could be restored by throwing small
The techniques of psychoanalysis
stabilise its boundaries.
children into a gas chamber at
would be ‘reverse engineered’ to create
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Treblinka, lethal magical thinking,
modern psychological marketing by
This would all reach its apogee in
for which a Freudian approach could
Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), in
the 1960s and 70s, with the self-help
supply an explanation: the total
his 1928 book Propaganda; surrealism
movement and the ‘me’ decade,
surrender by a whole nation, of their
was saturated in it; by way of Germany
whose dominant fads – from the hit
moral judgement to a fuehrer, who
it would come to popular cinema
book Games People Play analysis to
would give them a fully meaningful
in the film noir genre (Freud had
‘primal screaming’ – all had roots in
existence – a world without doubt –
popularised cocaine use in the 1880s;
psychoanalysis, however mutated the
in exchange.
he is truly the father of Hollywood);
branching tree became. But before
The US government definitely thought so. Mid war they
sexual satisfaction to a good life, and the rough idea that
engaged the exiled intellectuals of the Frankfurt School –
the absence of such produces a certain type of cramped,
a group of theorists, the most prominent being Theodor
rigid, joyless personality type is something most of us apply
Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who combined Marxist and
to encounters, a sort of barefoot psychoanalysis. Even as
Freudian theories – to make a study of German culture and
psychoanalysis itself has faded from view we take its terms
psychology, to determine how deep rooted the appetite
or derivation – guilt-trip, denial, repressed – and use them
for Nazism was in the nation, and ways that it could be
at the office, the family BBQ, watching the latest US school
‘denazified’ after defeat. The Frankfurt School, were
shooting on a screen. We would not do so had two wars
engaged directly by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and
produced sufficient madness to require whole governments
came up with a volume entitled The Authoritarian Personality,
to fuse themselves to a minor medical-philosophical
which went further than its commissioners had anticipated,
movement, and propagate it across the whole of modernity.
identifying the roots of a submission to authority in the manner in which corporate and industrial capitalism
The purported cure survives; so too perhaps does the
turned society into a series of ‘instrumental practices’
trauma. Medieval and traditional societies have everyday
– from the factory floor to government –
violence in much greater occurrence than ours. But it was
in which moral or value questions are never asked. The volume would be one source of
"MEDIEVAL AND TRADITIONAL
policy for occupied Germany, but it
SOCIETIES HAVE
would be equally influential on the
EVERYDAY VIOLENCE
US ‘New Left’ – thinkers in the 50s who saw that political liberation as involving personal liberation, in terms of sex, gender, love, values – and that in turn would help shape what we know as ‘the 1960s’. As knowledge of the Holocaust became more general through the 1960s and 70s, the question of how human beings could be so unlimitedly cruel to others, in the millions, became a preoccupying one. The century came to be assessed through the lens of something it
IN MUCH GREATER OCCURRENCE THAN OURS. BUT IT WAS ALMOST ALWAYS AT THE LEVEL OF THE HUMAN BODY,
almost always at the level of the human body, the violent encounter. We are the successors to a century which has a meat grinder at the centre, which churned for thirty years, from 1914 to 1945, the violence of machines on people, treating the human body as contingent object. Nations deployed it, then movements. There had been nothing like it for centuries; there may be, please God, nothing like it for centuries more. The ‘world war’ may have the same status for us as the war against Troy had for Homeric Greece and hence for the West. We may be living in its aftershocks still. Would our popular culture be so obsessed with particular scenarios of
THE VIOLENT
violence and retribution if not as an echo
ENCOUNTER"
of random strangers occur as a solution to
had produced: a psychoanalytic key
of such an event? Would the mass shooting life’s problems without it? Did it create two
concept, ‘the return of the repressed’, that desires stifled,
generations in which millions of men were so irremediably
will come back in another, often cruder and more violent,
damaged that the return of their repressed – violence,
form. The Communist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich had
coldness, rage – created an idea of what masculinity is, and
been arguing this since the 1930s, and his simple view
should be. Would we now be so concerned with our own
that maximum sexual liberation and satisfaction would
boundaries, our self-sovereignty in safe spaces, against the
dissolve much political oppression - an idea quite contrary
impingement of the Other, were fear not such a dominant
to Freud’s idea that a significant amount of repression
mood of the era? The wars, the madness are not over.
(and with it, everyday unhappiness) was necessary for
They have barely begun.
meaningful life – became hugely influential. Even as the prospect of radical political liberation rose and fell – its high point perhaps the Paris uprising of May 1968 – the idea of sexual/personal liberation remained. Today, the idea sells a million magazines and TV shows. The centrality of
ARMISTICE SPECIAL EVENT 10 & 1 1 Novem b er 2 018
56
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Unamplified
WITH LISA GASTEEN
Madness is almost immediately dramatic and can play out on stage in multiple forms. The madman unhinged from reality and railing against things others don’t see, the heroine unravelled by betrayal, the collective main of the village mob. These may manifest as a frantic dance solo, a soaring aria that punches you in the heart or the pathos of Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heavens!’ In the joys and sorrows of opera, the raw power of unamplified voices, there is fertile ground to examine the human experience. Indeed, there is a long interconnection between the opera and madness. Story spoke with internationally acclaimed Wagnerian soprano Lisa Gasteen AO about some of the delights and challenges of opera and the work of the elite opera coaching school she founded in Brisbane in 2011, the Lisa Gasteen National Opera School.
STORY: IS OPERA MAD?
brother-in-law was an opera virgin and one time he came
LISA: Opera is not mad. But it can promote madness in
along to a performance with my sister and he absolutely
performers. If you’re not mad to start with, you will have
hated it. Hated it, thought it was the most naff drivel
periods of madness.
he’d ever seen, and for years he didn’t come back. Then we managed to convince him again to come when I was
I was living out of a suitcase for 18 years. That’s pretty
singing in Tristan und Isolde, singing Isolde, which you
mad, anyone who would do that. Even when I was at
would think that’s a hard ask, he absolutely loved it!
home the suitcases were always on the floor, always open. You’re living out of a suitcase constantly. You’re subjecting
So I can’t tell you what the magic formula is but if you’re
yourself to people who have no personal interest in you,
going to try and switch someone on to opera, it’s got to be
so you’re just a commodity or a circus animal for them
different enough from what they’re used to getting to be
to thrash. You have incredible highs and huge lows. The
of interest to come back. And I do think free tickets help!
lifestyle, the travel, the loneliness. Who else is going to subject themselves to that sort of punishment? Only a mad person. We do it for the music, for the love of the music. When it comes down to it, that’s really what opera’s about, it's about music. It mystifies me why theatre directors, or drama directors, are attracted to opera. Let’s face it, the stories, they’re not gripping plots generally. They’re not great drama. The libretti are often very weak. Without the music it’s just bad, most of the time. It’s really about the music and I do wish that the music was given its due in modern day. I think we’re losing what is actually special about opera. By trying to make it popular, we’re actually losing what’s special about it. Not always but often. STORY: WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT IT? LISA: The quality of the music. If you amplify an opera, for example, you can go and see opera on the beach, and I did it, it was fun, it really was fun. But the music suffered, the art suffered, but it was a fun event. I think as long as those sorts of things are balanced, with true acoustics and with an orchestra and conductor and everybody in the same room, it works. You know, what does it do for the art form when the orchestra is located a block away? There’s no cohesion and if it’s all amplified then it’s all on one level so you don’t have the nuance. That’s what’s special about it. So as long as we’re mindful of what we’re taking from it. STORY: HOW WOULD YOU CONVINCE SOMEONE TO TRY OPERA AS AN AUDIENCE MEMBER FOR THE FIRST TIME? LISA: Here’s a story…years ago I was going down to Melbourne to sing a lot with the Victorian State Opera and Opera Australia on tour, I was doing Carmen (not singing Carmen, I was Frasquita). At the time, my
It really comes back to music again. The music has to be really, really of a very high quality because that’s what touches people, it’s the music, it’s the vibrations, it’s the quality of voices unamplified. That has a really profound effect on some people and they can’t explain it away. It’s appealing. People are affected by the vibrations and the sound wraps around you. It’s not like it’s just a big wall of amplified noise. There’s something else about it. It affects your body. It has an effect on people. It transforms them, it takes them out of their ordinary existence. These days our ordinary existence is full of electronic, amplified and artificial sound. STORY: WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST ABOUT TRAINING OPERA SINGERS? LISA: I love it when they come and they’re absolutely hungry for knowledge, hungry for input, hungry for experience. I love it when they’re receptive and open to instruction and they run with it and they feel the difference and you can see their persona change. Walking down the corridors, at the end of the first week, some of them are quite transformed because they’re having an experience that they have not had before. It’s what they’ve been hungering for, but just haven't had access to the right people to experience it until now. That’s really, really gratifying. Then for them to make the contacts and travel overseas and be introduced to things as students, to be in contact with people who can get them into dress rehearsals and free tickets, and they get to see a lot of high, high quality music and singing, that’s a great thing. That’s very broadening and not something you have access to in this country.
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STORY: YOU’VE HAD THE ENERGY AND DRIVE TO START
STORY: IT’S CONSIDERED A SLIGHTLY UNUSUAL
THE SCHOOL, YOU MUST HAVE A PARTICULAR ANSWER
WORK ISN’T IT?
TO THIS OVER ASKED QUESTION - WHAT DOES IT TAKE
LISA: Well, that was Strauss. It’s very clever, the way he
FOR STUDENTS TO BECOME GREAT?
wrote it. I guess for him it was challenging. I often think
LISA: Incredible tenacity and hard work. There’s no magic,
that Strauss just wrote stuff because he could.
it’s really, really hard work. Of course, with that is the right instruction. For a person, it’s really not easy to find or know
I think he was a show off. I used to think when I was
what the right instruction is. I always count myself as lucky
studying some of his music, I used to think why is this man
because I had a very, very fine teacher from when I started,
even bothering with a key signature because every half bar
so I knew what was right. I think a lot of people don’t have
it’s changing, there’s new accidentals everywhere, so why
that advantage and then they go away and they don’t actually
does he even bother with a key signature? I suppose just
know what is good for them.
because he had to, but I just thought no, you’re just a show off Mr Strauss. I often think that and thought oh come on,
It’s work. It’s work, work, work. We are our own instrument.
give us a break.
We can’t change a string, we can’t re-felt a hammer, we can’t change our reed, we are our voice. It’s a very complicated
As a singer I would always learn my lines. I can’t play the
instrument, the voice.
piano so it would be really I would be just learning my melody and it would often have not a lot of sense to it.
STORY: TALK ABOUT EMOTIONS AND THE IMPACT
But then of course, when everything comes together it’s
ON THE VOICE.
glorious. It just shows you the intellect of the man.
LISA: We were talking about the madness before. You think of it, when you cry, when you start to cry, what’s the first thing that goes? Your voice.
It’s unfortunate but I don’t believe that this work is understood terribly well in Australia. I think people think it’s Strauss so it must be dramatic, and it’s huge and all that.
So if you’re in an emotional state – and you’ve got to
It’s actually a lyric opera. It’s lyric and it’s ideal. Apart from
remember that with a lot of the roles they’re not straight
the three main big roles there’s lots of opportunity for
forward characters always. A lot of the time, the director on
young singers. We have done excerpts from Ariadne
a daily basis is trying to wrench from you every ounce of
previously in the school.
emotion and sadness that you’ve ever experienced in your life. So that’s always on the surface. You’re always actually living with that, whereas most people can suppress it and swallow it and just pretend it’s not there, or it’s there in the past and that was horrible, but they’re living now. But performers don’t do that because it’s being dredged up all the time. So you actually have that with you the whole time… very, very present. You can never separate your voice because it’s your body.
Ariadne came about because I’ve been after (conductor) Simone Young for years to come and do some work at the school and since she finished full time at Hamburg she now has more time. So we met and had dinner in London and she said, ‘Okay, I’ve got these two weeks in late November/ December, could we do something then? What about Ariadne?’ I’ve always wanted to do it because it’s one of my favourite operas. STORY: YOU HAVE PERFORMED THE ROLE OF ARIADNE?
It’s not all bad, I have to just put that in. A lot of it’s great,
LISA: Yes with opera companies in Strasburg and Berlin.
a lot of euphoric moments, a lot of great joy, a lot of huge
For me it’s a dream role. It’s one of those roles that you just
satisfaction when you get something, and it feels good.
want to sing, and sing, and sing. It’s a really beautiful thing
In the opposite way to sadness, joy also colours the voice.
to sing. It’s very lyric and takes a lot of discipline. There’s no complicated emotion to mess you up, mess with your head.
STORY: LGOS IS PRESENTING ARIADNE AUF NAXOS
It’s just beautiful singing, that’s how I found it, just lovely.
LATER THIS YEAR, WHY DO YOU THINK THAT’S SUCH
It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous thing to sing.
A POPULAR STORY? LISA: Love, death, renewal. That’s the eternal theme. A R I A D N E AU F N A XO S 9 & 1 1 Decem b er 2 0 1 8
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C on s e r va t or i u m T he a t re , Sou t h Ba n k
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C’s A QP
Behind-the-scenes - Fanfare
Interview with author Andy Griffiths
Five minutes with Sarah McLeod
Resistance by Professor Jacqueline Rose
Fred Leone on songlines and dreamtime
Behind the Scenes – an acrobat’s warm up
Paul Grabowsky AO on improvised jazz
Everybody Moves – a doco about dance
A Life Through Music
Dive deeper. Be fearless in thought. Ask the question. Form an opinion. Discover. Learn. Provoke. Bask in creativity. Take time, wonder about stuff. Be curious and imagine. Get sweaty, create.
qpac.com.au/the-creatory
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19 – 20 JUL
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11 AU G
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18 AU G
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I N F O R M AT I O N CO R R E C T AT T I M E O F P R I N T I N G .
6 SEP
QUEENSL AND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BEETHOVEN’S 7TH SYMPHONY
CONCERT HALL
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QUEENSLAND BALLET’S CINDERELLA
L Y R I C T H E AT R E
20 – 22 SEP
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IN THE MOOD
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BILL BAILEY – EARL OF WHIMSY
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14 – 18 NOV
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20 & 21 NOV
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23 NOV
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SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
CONCERT HALL
65
Image credits Brief ly
Welcome
GISELLE DIES OF A BROKEN HEART AND JOINS
Stor y is a magazine curated by
THE WILIS…A GROUP OF FEMALE SPIRITS WHO HAVE
QPAC for the creative and curious.
BEEN SCORNED AND OCCUPY A HAUNTED WOOD. IT'S A FRIGHTFUL SIGHT THAT EVENTUALLY LED
Arts is integral in our society. Often the focus is on how art makes
TO THE COMMON PHRASE ' GIVES ME THE WILLIES '.
And so it was we found ourselves on a quest to consider
Melbourne based illustrator Maeve Baker has created a
us feel: inspired, uncomfortable, excited, challenged, relaxed. More
madness from multiple directions, led by the most delusional
contemporary take on the traditional Giselle story arc of
than that, art helps us to make sense of the world around us, to make
figure in literary history, the knight errant Don Quixote.
betrayal, heartbreak, unravelling and forgiveness. QPAC
sense of each other, to find meaning and help create harmonious
He is a prominent feature in our program. Teatro alla
“Cultures and climates differ all over the world,
Scholar in Residence Professor Judith McLean reminds
but people are the same. They’ll gather in
communities. Learning through art enables students and anyone
Scala Ballet Company will perform Rudolph Nureyev’s
us of the hard work consciousness requires and recounts
take on the wandering nobleman’s quest to revive chivalry
a personal experience of ‘stepping into the light’.
public if you give them a good place to do it.”
Toowoomba’s Dallas Baker references his latest play
- Professor Jan Gehl, Danish architect & urban designer
solvers able to think creatively and to be resilient.
we bring together ideas, people, musings and moments so that we may know ourselves better, see others and imagine possible futures. I hope you enjoy this edition of Story.
in its November season. In fact, madness also infiltrates the company’s second production Giselle. In this case, the madness borne of heartbreak.
performance artist, designer and legend of the 1980s
In May 2018, the Queensland Government announced
How to set the field for this discussion, so broad in its scope?
London club world. In his piece The Road from Normal,
a $150 million investment in a new theatre to be built at
Dallas explores constructing visual façades and the intricate
Lisa Appignanesi allowed us to publish a section of her book from 1800 to Present. In it are many stories of depression, anguish and addiction, some famous like Virginia Woolf or Zelda Fitzgerald and others not. It maps how we have viewed mental disorders and other states of mind over two
John Kotzas Chief Executive QPAC
centuries. Lisa Appignanesi very generously took time out from chairing the Judging Panel of the Man Booker Prize International to write us a new introduction especially for this edition of Story.
In this edition In the opening line of Patti Smith’s lyrical and restless book M Train, she recounts an observation made in a dream that she recently had: ‘It’s not easy to write about nothing’.
Ghosts of Leigh about Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant
British writer and former Chair of the Freud Museum Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors
All of our contributors have taken different paths and arrived in different places in relation to madness.
new works.
collection of reflections on life and art. In the final pages she
headlines around Australia. The Victorian Government
closes the loop on the dream challenge she described in the
announced funding to build a contemporary art wing as Southbank and South Australia will have a new arts and cultural destination in Adelaide, transforming the former
‘Dreams beget wishes that beget lingering questions…
Royal Adelaide Hospital site.
Perhaps it’s not where we are going but just that we go’.
It’s easy to look at an entertainment juggernaut like
As we approach the centenary of the First World War
Netflix, or social media platforms like Facebook and
Armistice, Guy Rundle’s Lethal Magical Thinking takes
think that everyone is in their own bubble consuming entertainment and “socialising” without having to interact
us through to the present via multiple wars and cultural
psychoanalysis.
Editor
Australian legend Noni Hazlehurst has written beautifully
rebecca.lamoin@qpac.com.au
uncomfortable, it’s a subject that makes people twitchy.
part of The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne’s
repeats. And then, sage and poet that she is, she quietened any lasting uncertainty I had about exploring madness.
I was reminded of it when we began discussing madness as the through line of this edition of Story. People were nervous,
Queensland isn’t alone. Arts infrastructure is making
book’s opening. ‘It’s not so easy writing about nothing,’ she
Rebecca Lamoin
IRL (in real life). But humans are social animals. We are hungry for stories, hungry to connect with people, hungry for ideas. Our public spaces should facilitate this. Public spaces are integral to cities. They serve as
and directly about chaos and sanity, the central role of
Madness is real and imagined. Everything and nothing.
art and creativity in the lives of children and about the
Light and heavy. Fleeting and eternal. Individual and collective.
magnificent one woman show Mother written especially
I thought about Patti’s dilemma. It made me wonder how we
for her.
surprise that her comments were captured, dissected, reproduce and discussed at a rate of knots. The reactions were widespread and polarising. Her TV network ABC she created and starred in, Roseanne.
moved swiftly to cancel the show People variously excused her, praised her, condemned her, chided her, called her out, unfriended her.
meeting places and community hubs, places for people to congregate. Whereas once community was synonymous with geographic location, now when we are more connected than ever, public spaces like our
choose subjects to write about, or in a lot of cases, how they
theatres and art galleries serve as important beacons
choose us. QPAC’s program over the coming six months is
for communities of interested people to come together.
rich with folly, joy, eccentricity, delusion and in some cases psychosis. Madness by any other name.
As the cries of ‘censorship’ grew in
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT DON QUIXOTE
volume, some brave souls reminded us about nuance and complexity.
Published between 1605 and 1615, the novel Don Quixote is
While the beginning of Patti Smith’s M Train came back to
us back to the Western border of Germany and then pulls shifts including the invention of the term ‘shellshock’,
former Obama administration senior advisor, it must have come as no
IN THE ARTS WORLD
Robin Gibson’s vision for the Centre and provides space for QPAC and local companies to create and present
me quickly, I confess I had forgotten how she concluded the
the intellectuals of The Frankfurt School and growth of
No stranger to this, when Roseanne Barr tweeted late at night about a
NEWS & VIEWS MAKING HEADLINES
QPAC by 2022. A fifth theatre completes QPAC architect
relationship between our outer and inner worlds. And there is so much more.
I love a killer opening sentence and this one stuck with me.
correction isn’t commonly available and so instead most of us must live and die by what’s on record.
CULTURAL HOTSPOTS
who is curious to discover and develop empathy, to be problem
In these pages and beyond through our digital portal The Creatory,
the day. In 2018 that level of
Documentary maker Michael Moore
considered a founding work of modern Western literature,
who said ‘Roseanne…is a person who
arguably the greatest work of fiction ever published. It has
long ago broke through and brought
been adapted and reinterpreted across various art forms
an authentic voice of working women
since it was written. The tale of a knight errant searching
and men to television via one of
for adventure and who is intent on proving that chivalry is not dead, has been cited by many including literary legends William Faulkner and Ben Okri as the best book of all time. Adaptation is an art form in itself. With a work as rambling and grand as Don Quixote, what hope is there for those who dare to dream and chase windmills?
THE MYTH OF THE ‘MAD’ GENIUS Creativity has long been linked with mental health issues. Increasingly, many artists and creatives are very open about their experiences of various mental health disorders
The adventures of Don Quixote have been told in many art
including bipolar, schizophrenia,
forms. There are books based on characters and vignettes
depression, anxiety and ADHD.
from the original, music, opera and dance including
Many historical artists are now
Rudolph Nureyev’s athletic ballet masterpiece which will be
being retroactively fitted with
performed in the 2018 QPAC International Series by Teatro
modern diagnoses.
alla Scala Ballet Company in November. And dozens of film adaptations dating as far back as 1906.
The idea of a link between ‘madness’ and ‘genius’ is an old one dating as
Screenwriter, director, actor and comedian Terry Gilliam
far back as the Ancient Greeks who
has spent a large portion of the past three decades trying to
believed that creativity came from
get his movie version of Don Quixote on screen. His efforts
the muses (gods). This notion carried
have mostly been famous for their failure, suffering casting
forth to the Romantics and settled
and funding difficulties and literally fire and flood. Many
into general use through the link
also said to see the world in different ways and so therein the link has
ignored, ridiculed or patronized those A plethora of studies throughout the
of us who grew up in the working
20th and 21st centuries have looked
class. Roseanne changed that.’
at this and tried to definitively establish a link between creativity
It remains to be seen what happens
and mental illness. They’ve given
with the show Roseanne and whether
rise to ethical and moral questions
it can continue without her. The
about leaving mental health issues
controversy comes at a time when
unaddressed so as not to hinder
we’re questioning (again) whether or
creative outputs. Assumptions and
how to separate artists from their art…
stereotypes abound. Science has
or their madness.
offered multiple connections but is not definitive. The romantic notion of the ‘tortured artist’ is long lasting…
TWEET STORM In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of
have called the project cursed. But after 29 years, Gillam’s
that creativity is akin to originality in
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote premiered at the 2018
that it allows one to see what others
Truth ensures that history is accurate
cannot. Those with mental illness are
according to the propaganda of
Cannes Film Festival. It received mixed responses.
the greatest TV series of all time. It was ground breaking because the TV industry had historically either
been made.
DISCOVER MORE STORIES AND READ RELATED ARTICLES AT
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INSIDE COVER
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Don Quixote Illustrator: Önder Kılavuz
La Scala Giselle. Photo: Brescia & Amisano
John Kotzas, Chief Executive, QPAC Photo: Mindi Cooke Rebecca Lamoin, Story Editor & Associate Director – Learning & Public Engagement, QPAC Photo: Judith McLean
L'ingénieux hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche par Miguel de Cervantès Saavedra; illustrations de Dubout, 1938
Can I tell you a story about my son? I grew up in Texas, bleak west Texas, which is one colour, brown. It’s just dirt.
Bad & Sad – from which an extract follows on the next pages - I wanted
1. Around 20% of the world's children and adolescents have mental disorders or problems
both to inquire into the ways our current understandings of madness what in our highly medicalised age we call mental illness – had come into being. What I discovered in the process were the ways in which various
Neuropsychiatric disorders are among the leading causes
age of 19 have the poorest level of mental health resources.
Mental health is more than the absence of mental disorders. It is an integral part of health; indeed, there is no health without mental health. Mental health is determined by a range of socioeconomic, biological and environmental factors. Cost-effective public health and intersectoral strategies and interventions exist to promote, protect and restore mental health.
gaze, inevitably impacts on women’s self-understanding.
Mad, Bad & Sad
Most low-income and middle-income countries have only one child psychiatrist for every 1 to 4 million people. 2. Mental and substance use disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide About 23% of all years lost because of disability is caused by mental and substance use disorders. 3. About 800,000 people commit suicide every year Over 800,000 people die due to suicide every year and suicide is the second leading cause of death in 15 to 29 year olds. There are indications that for each adult who died of suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. 75% of suicides occur in low-income and middle-income countries. Mental disorders and harmful use of alcohol contribute to many suicides around the world. Early identification and effective management
commissioned by writer Henry Adams to honour his wife Clover Adams. Saint-Gaudens named the figure The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth but it became commonly known as Grief . Adams rejected all naming and in a letter to the artist’s son declared:
These include physical restraint, seclusion and denial of basic needs and privacy. Few countries have a legal framework that adequately protects the rights of people with mental disorders. 8. Globally, there is huge inequity in the distribution of skilled human resources for mental health
treatment and care in low-income and middle-income
W I T H D O U G L A S M C G R AT H
countries. Low income countries have 0.05 psychiatrists and
9. There are five key barriers to increasing mental health services availability there are five key barriers that need to be overcome: the
Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair and The New York Times. McGrath and his collaborator Woody Allen were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay for Bullets Over Broadway, he also wrote and directed the adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. In lots of ways he was the perfect choice when producers wanted someone
Governments, donors and groups representing mental to increase mental health services, especially in low-income
health service users and their families need to work together
to write the book for the musical about legendary singer-songwriter Carole King. Story had some fleeting moments with him.
needed are relatively modest: US$ 2 per capita per year
treatments for mental disorders, there is a belief that they
in low income countries and US$ 3-4 in lower middle
are untreatable or that people with mental disorders are
income countries.
Then I realised he’d never seen a musical before. So he
The French artist Jean Dubuffet took the Surrealist
had no idea that if you have a feeling, instead of telling someone your feeling, you sing it. I thought, “Okay, you
obsession with Outsiders to a new level by daring to
need to get with the program here Henry because this is a great art form”. He stuck with it and about 15 minutes
collect and exhibit their work. Not only did he champion
taking his eyes off the screen and he whispered, “I think
the artwork of schizophrenics and local mediums, but
she likes the captain”. Then I thought, “OK we’re in!”.
he also celebrated art made by eccentric isolates and
A musical itself is a form of madness because if madness is the rejection of rationality or reality or what we know,
self-taught laborers. Dubuffet recognized in the work of
there’s nothing madder than a musical!
“I’ve got a huge collection of artwork at home, and try to paint daily. Art is very good for my health; it is very uplifting for the spirit
THE CREATIVE PROCESS….
and it works to communicate good vibes for people.”
This was such a wonderful experience, Beautiful, but it was
difficult, not intelligent, or incapable of making decisions.
the first musical I’d written and so I was very, very lucky it
you’re essentially writing by yourself. Your editor might make a suggestion or two but it’s really up to you.
MensLine 1300 78 99 78 | Suicide Call Back 1300 659 467 Your local GP or treating psychologist / psychiatrist if you have one.
11
Outsiderartfair.com
When you’re writing for print, like my political satire,
WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION WWW.WHO.INT
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Grief monument, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington DC. Flickr. com/people/martinpro Photo: Martin Prochnik, © 2009
Artwork: John Doherty
Douglas McGrath Photo: Jim Lee
Artwork: John Doherty
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these divergent groups one unifying trait: a raw quality
Outsider Art Fair, Paris
CRISIS SUPPORT If you or someone you know needs immediate help, please contact:
untouched by academic rules or current trends.
- JOHN DOHERTY, ARTIST.
was fantastic.
Emergency 000 | Lifeline 13 11 14 | Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800
10
he turned to me and said, “Well, she’s weird”. I was just horrified. “What do you meeeean?”.
later, early in the story still, he turned to me, this time not
lack of public mental health leadership. 10. Financial resources to increase services are relatively modest
and middle-income countries. The financial resources
Outsider Art
son and I’m showing him this wonderful movie. I’m a
a glance over at him and this is what I saw. Just like this
and the implications for funding; the current organisation of mental health services; lack of integration within primary care; inadequate human resources for mental health; and
Misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental ill
I was so excited. I thought I can’t believe it, I’ve now got a
(facial expression of boredom). He felt me looking at him so
Rates of mental disorder tend to double after emergencies.
other diseases such as HIV, cardiovascular disease,
the mountain comes one of the great musical stars of all time, beautiful Julie Andrews. She flings out her arms and she drops her jaw and out comes that peerless voice
Douglas McGrath is effervescent, in the way Americans often are,
5. Mental disorders are important risk factors for other diseases, as well as unintentional and intentional injury
6. Stigma and discrimination against patients and families prevent people from seeking mental health care
the aerial shots all over the city and then it finally ends up on the mountain and it’s beautiful and clear? Then over
and is a superb storyteller. It’s a talent he’s utilised as a playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. In the early 1980s, and right out of college, he landed smack in the heartland of American satire, Saturday Night Live. Presumably this is where he sharpened his wit and honed his political jabs which now feature on the pages of some of the United States most respected publications including The New
Mental disorders increase the risk of getting ill from
I put him in the chair and we got it going. I put it on the big TV screen and you know that wonderful opening with
that by this point he was sufficiently enraptured. I stole
high income countries is 170 times greater and for nurses is 70 times greater.
In order to increase the availability of mental health services,
thought he was ready to see The Sound of Music. It’s a little early, but when you’re a parent there are certain things you can’t wait to share with your kids.
creative person, so I’m also needy. I wanted to make sure
0.42 nurses per 100,000 people. The rate of psychiatrists in
absence of mental health from the public health agenda
and everything gorgeous, I was just…wow. It’s a wonderful musical. So when Henry our son was three or four, I
of hers.
Shortages of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists and social workers are among the main barriers to providing
4. War and disasters have a large impact on mental health and psychosocial wellbeing
health are widespread. Despite the existence of effective
"Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption— Grief, Despair, Pear's Soap, or Macy's Mens' Suits Made to Measure. Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx."
A beautiful thing
of healing. 7. Human rights violations of people with mental and psychosocial disability are routinely reported in most countries
are key to ensuring that people receive the care they need.
diabetes, and vice-versa.
The Adams Memorial featuring allegorical sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
So when I saw The Sound of Music, which is lush and green and Julie Andrews and her blue eyes and the pink lips
health system, people are too often treated in institutions which resemble human warehouses rather than places
world with the highest percentage of population under the
on a time’s expectations of behaviour. This was perhaps more the case experts and thinkers. Such description, together with the male medical
This stigma can lead to abuse, rejection and isolation and exclude people from health care or support. Within the
About half of mental disorders begin before the age of 14. Similar types of disorders are being reported across cultures. of worldwide disability in young people. Yet, regions of the
diagnoses – together with the dividing lines between what is considered normal, what aberrant – were historically specific and depended greatly for women, a gender that has always been subject to description by male
BY LISA APPIGNANESI
MUSICAL THEATRE IS A KIND OF MADNESS…
10 FACTS ON MENTAL HEALTH
When I set out to research and write the book that became Mad,
Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales
and I. All outcasts in our small conservative town, and
then that the idea is hard to dislodge, despite the fact
they never dare cut the rope and be free”
all so disconnected (perhaps alienated) from other
that there is no substantial evidence linking mental
– Nikos Kazantzakis
The road sparkled in the morning sun like a strip of was just the glitter of millions of tiny shards of glass from broken headlights embedded in the bitumen. The highway curved between low hills blanketed in wild, golden grass, separating the paddocks on one side from those on the other with a dark, glittering slash. The paddocks stretched back in every direction under a luminous blue sky. Every now and then, far off in the over by a lightning-struck gum tree. The Darling Downs, my home.
that empty landscape. My mother steered the car with one hand and wound down the window with the other. She angled her face to let the cold air dry the tears that rolled freely down her cheeks. They just kept coming and she’d grown tired of wiping them away. She was heartbroken over something. I didn’t know what. It was one of the saddest things I’d seen in my whole life. Even though I was only fourteen years old, I was sure I could live to a hundred and not see anything that sad ever again.
madness and femininity is evident in everyday life. The few creative professions most people encounter on
lone adventures in the middle of the night; barefoot and
a regular basis—such as hairdressing, window-dressing,
wearing only a nightgown. I grew my hair long and put
interior design, dressmaking and beautician—have long
on my mother’s make-up and an op-shop kimono and
been seen as feminine. The men who participate in these
went for long walks in the countryside; a gender-bending
professions are deemed effeminate by default. The same
bush-baby.
is true for men who participate in the more rarefied arts of ballet, opera and theatre. The figure of the ‘artsy
To outsiders, the things my grandmother did and the
effeminate’ is a cultural stereotype that persists despite
things that I did were in the same category: stuff only
the fact that male dancers, singers and actors are often both masculine and heterosexual. It is because of this
serious. But if on occasion sympathy was shown to my
persistent association between creativity and femininity,
mother or grandmother, none ever came my way. People
between madness and the effeminate, that men who
seemed to think that I’d chosen to be different, to be a
don’t look how men are supposed to look, whose gender
freak. Whereas they thought my grandmother was born
presentation (or visual façade) defies gender norms,
crazy, they believed my own actions and choices had
are often perceived as hysterics, as lunatics. More to
made me that way. And somehow my crimes were more
the point, they are also often perceived as scary and
taboo, because mine were crimes against gender. It was
dangerous. Leigh Bowery played up to the notion of the
as if they thought I was being different (being myself)
scary effeminate with sublime irreverence and turned his
to spite them, as part of a willing refusal of their sense
(powdered) nose up at all social norms around gender.
of what was normal, right and good. Whatever they believed, my behaviour and gender presentation
In fact, he made these things the basis for all of his
weren’t about rebellion, or trying to set myself apart.
(unconventional) art.
sensitive and a little bit sad. She turned on the radio and
She started singing along, the tears still streaming down. This was the moment I understood that some people’s minds are quite different to everyone else’s; that one person’s way of thinking and perceiving can be as unlike another person’s as moonlight is to the harsh gleam of stadium floodlights. It was also the moment I realised that there is beauty in that difference. There is pain and loneliness, yes, but also something tender that is worth cherishing.
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness” – Allen Ginsberg The kids in my neighbourhood called my grandmother ‘the mad witch’. She was a paranoid schizophrenic in a time when hardly anyone had heard that term let alone knew what it meant. They called me ‘the sissy freak’. Everyone knew exactly what that meant: queer.
differently; of not having the same (restricted) sense of
In an interview with Ian Parker in London’s The
what was normal that everyone else had. I just didn’t
Independent1, Bowery described his artwork as, ‘both
believe in gender the way other people did. For me it
serious and very funny. It's decorative, but there's
was something to be played with, something fluid and
something underlying [it] that's maybe tragic and disturbing. There's a tension between the two.’ The
fun, a performance. Playing with gender was how I expressed myself. Because of that I was drawn to other
tension between the two is the tension between
people whose approach to gender was much the same.
normal and abnormal, sane and insane, male and
vicissitudes of their life. For me, the best interviews are the ones where the person doesn’t try to tell a victory narrative leaving out the warty
a young (1980s) Leigh Bowery, says this: ‘There is always
on the right track
a price to pay for being different, always, and sometimes it’s a high price, but it’s worth it. Besides, the price you pay for hiding who you really are is much higher. Sometimes it costs you your life.’ In a lot of ways this play had its genesis in that Datsun 120Y, on that empty road slicing through the Darling Downs when I was 14. I knew then that I was not like everyone else and that as a result I would experience loneliness, and perhaps pain. But I also knew that I wouldn’t conform and be like everyone else, even if I could. If I did, then I would lose the tenderness that comes from being an outsider, the tenderness that makes an ordinary country road seem like a thread of glittering black diamonds. Leigh Bowery was the role model I used for negotiating the pain and loneliness, and for how to be myself, how to preserve the
‘Look out there, Dallas,’ my mother had said on that morning, motioning with her head out to broad skies and acres of golden grass. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered, raising my voice a little over the wind flooding in the window. ‘It’s really beautiful.’ She smiled, wiping the last tear away. ‘Not everyone
female, between the banal and commonplace and the
sees it, but I knew you would.’ She hit the accelerator.
extraordinary. Bowery’s crafted visual façade reads
The little 120Y lurched forward, its tires whirring on the
on the outside as outlandish, as mad, but it rests on an inner philosophical architecture that is profoundly
another place; a place where people like us could feel at
logical. Through outrageous costumery and a flirtation
home and dance to the beat of a different drum.
Leigh Bowery, a genius of shock and outrage whose
with the limits of acceptable behaviour and dress,
drag-inspired costumery spoke to me (and woke me)
Bowery is highlighting two things: 1. That gender norms are deeply conservative and conformist; and 2. That most individuals unconsciously adhere to a rigid (and
bits, but rather reveals their vulnerabilities, their frailties and foibles. Frankly, perfection bores me. When I was invited to be a guest on a similar program (Hi-Fidelity on ABC 612), I spent many nights listening extra carefully, trying to determine what sparked the interviewer’s imagination. Certainly it was the stories that left me perplexed asking, ‘how could they think or do that, that’s just madness, are they crazy?’ that fired my imagination. The Talmud is recalled here: ‘we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are,’ pointing to the possibility that we all seem slightly mad to one another. I realised that creating a lifeline
undertaking cognitive therapy, talking
punctuated by music was an opportunity
with a counsellor, a life coach, or a
to reflect and bring to light motives
intense effort in attempts to understand ourselves. Nobel Prize winning physicist
and the associated life consequences.
David Bohm supported this when he
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says
stated, ‘you’ve got to give a lot of attention
touch of madness” – Aristotle to madness is literally as old as Aristotle. That’s a fair bit
of which our society is ignorant. It assumes consciousness requires no attention.
of deep emotional reckoning is not often
But consciousness is what gives attention.
credited as exertion or effort. Reasons
Consciousness requires very alert attention
include privacy, people don’t talk about
28
or else it will simply destroy.’
it fearing others’ judgement, stigma, 1
2
addressing mental issues makes others
‘A bizarre body of work’ (Sunday 26th February 1995)
uncomfortable, suspicion or a person
Running Wild (1988)
seeking help may have deep pathologies.
Bohm goes onto to argue that normally our thoughts have us rather than we having them. This is the rider (ego) and elephant (id) metaphor, thinking we are in control
own inner impulses or desires, which is, in itself, a kind
Whether it’s talking honestly in the
of this unruly beast (unconscious), when
of (imposed) madness or forced inhibition. It’s as though
media, reflecting on a lifeline, meditating,
essentially we haven’t much of an idea
that made by author J.G. Ballard when he wrote, ‘In a
PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT
totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.’ 2
From 26 September 2018
Bowery’s costumes were a visual declaration similar to
more than a two thousand year tradition of linking
to consciousness. This is one of the things
the light’. It does require work, really hard emotional mental work. This kind
hierarchical) dress code as opposed to following their
The idea that genius, especially creative genius, is linked
psychiatrist, becoming conscious requires
behind choices I had made or perhaps more interestingly choices I had not made
getting conscious is like, ‘stepping into
BY JUDITH MCLEAN
glittering road that stretched far away from normal to
Dead or Alive and Divine. And it was through my genderbending fandom that I encountered the unforgettable
“There is no great genius without some
Island Discs. Many of you will be familiar with such programs that invite people from all walks of life to select music that delineates the
we are deemed mad, perhaps even dangerous. In my stage play, Ghosts of Leigh, the lead character, the ghost of
An expression of this was my record collection, which
in ways nothing else had before.
for deep listening; a favourite is the BBC Radio 4 podcast Desert
pay a price just for being ourselves, especially when being ourselves confronts sacrosanct norms like gender. When we do that, when we break or transcend taboos,
in the 1980s contained barely a single gender-normative performer. It was all David Bowie, Boy George, Marilyn,
One of the pleasures of insomnia is that it offers uninterrupted nights
Ironically, to be free does not come without a price. We all pay something for our freedom. Sometimes we
tenderness within.
It was simply the outflow of an atypical mind, of thinking At best, outsiders read my mother as not quite normal, at
cranked up the volume. Do You Really Want to Hurt Me by
of writing, but to understand it fully, we sometimes need to track that beat back to its source, to the moments and experiences that led to its creation. To understand my play Ghosts of Leigh, you need to go back to the 1980s and take a ride in a Datsun 120Y through the rolling grasslands of the Darling Downs.
illness with creativity. Madness, in the form of hysteria, has long been associated more with women than men. The connection between creative genius (or talent),
went to bed for days in depressed, hypochondriac fits. My grandmother spoke in riddles and often went on
lunatics did. My mother’s sins were not seen as quite so My mother’s little Datsun 120Y rode on the sparkling blacktop almost silently, the noise of the engine lost in
Culture Club was playing. One of our favourite songs.
Writing is like dancing, it’s moving (or making marks) to a beat, a beat inside. The things that are written—novels, poems and plays—hold those rhythms in them, ready to be released when read or performed. That beat doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the echo of the writer’s experiences, their loves and losses. It’s easy enough to hear the music in any piece
people’s expectations that we just did what we wanted; unconcerned by others’ reactions, unfazed by the risk inherent in being different, in standing out. My mother
distance, a lonely farmhouse sat on the horizon, watched
worst, they read her as hysterical. In reality, she was just
BY DALLAS JOHN BAKER
“A person needs a little madness, or else
We were quite a trio, my mother, my grandmother
– Friedrich Nietzsche black diamonds. Beautiful, even though the sparkle
The road from normal
artists, writers and performers to ‘lunatics’. It’s no wonder
“Those who dance are considered mad by those who cannot hear the music”
Lyric Theatre, QPAC
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Australian Road Photo: Getty Images
Leigh Bowery file #1863 Photo: Werner Pawlok
Silhouette faces Illustrator: Jackie Elliott
Author and Illustrator: Maeve Baker
Physical spaces offer tiny glimpses, insights into the people who occupy them and the things that happen there. Elements seen every day are seen anew by someone else’s eyes. A worn spoon is suddenly
Madness thrives on chaos.
are actually devoid of reality, but
Sanity depends on peace.
which eerily crawl into the zeitgeist to become a new reality.
more evocative, a sign more poignant, corners
Madness has different meanings
sharper or noises more acute.
for different people.
Although the research into the
I can only describe my own
of our current technology
developmental effects on children
What happens beyond the realm of the public
definition of it - one that has
gaze? What do you, say or value in private that you do not in public?
early days, in the studies already done, the conclusions are clear. A
us - particularly children - of the
Story invited friends who are resident at West End’s Common Ground to bring new ways of
expense of human interaction has a detrimental outcome for children.
Even an occasional opportunity for peace is better than none. But we live in a state of chaos, especially in cities, where the madness is magnified. Our environments are
Ways of Seeing
Mother
BEHIND THE SCENES
And while we try to do what we can to protect our children, our eyes are fixated on screens. We don’t make eye contact with each other. We’re trying to stay out of trouble, and working hard to pay off the debts
us from, or alert us to, news of
we’ve chosen to accumulate. And
imminent disaster.
there’s such a preponderance of
So what is it doing to our children?
BY NONI HAZLEHURST Children are growing up more engaged with the world than any previous generation. But they’re also clearly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that they’re not always able to assimilate
Daniel Keene’s deft and poetic work on a woman untethered from
or contextualise, given their limited experience. It’s almost impossible
the everyday. Using Mother as a starting point, we invited Noni to consider ideas of madness.
for our kids to find peace. Ways of Seeing
The prevailing ‘popular culture’ experienced by children today focuses on reality shows which
BRISBANE OPEN HOUSE
all on our individual treadmills,
we go, we’re surrounded by screens and headlines, which either distract
The pressures of our world drive
and awarded for her work across music, stage, television and film.
self harm and worse are almost becoming de rigueur for younger and younger children.
greyness, with only perfunctory and confined examples of nature
adults crazy. We know that.
For several years she has been performing Mother, playwright
And the ever growing statistics show that anxiety, depression,
defined by constant bombardment of all the senses, hard surfaces,
to soften the landscape. Wherever
Noni Hazlehurst is an artist, educator and activist. She is beloved
dependence on technology at the
overly judgmental and reductive demands of our way of life.
seeing to some of the hallways, orchestra pits, nooks and crannies backstage at QPAC.
dominated lifestyles is in its
changed over the years. I’ve learned lessons about the effects on all of
horrifying news that we retreat to our fortressed cells and lock ourselves in to rest, before donning our armour to do it all again tomorrow. The madness everywhere makes us fearful. We know there are people who’ve been driven to the point of craziness by the madness, and we try to avoid them. It makes us feel overwrought, overcome, even paranoid. Everything is a fight. It’s US v. THEM. There’s no peace. It’s war. That’s no way to live.
13 & 14 October
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43
QPAC and Brisbane wide
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48
49
PAG E 42 & 43
PAG E 44 & 45
PAG E 48
Backstage at QPAC. Photos: Residents of Common Ground Queensland
Backstage at QPAC. Photos: Residents of Common Ground Queensland
Noni Hazlehurst in Mother at Belvoir Theatre. Photo: Brett Boardman
Everyone needs and wants to feel
which triggers reflection on the status
while providing $250 million for
With Daniel Keene’s beautiful text,
connected. Separation and isolation
quo and on our own perceptions of
school chaplaincy programmes is
Matt Scholten, my director and
play a big part in madness. As nature
reality, which can lead to a desire
positively bonkers.
dear friend, and I have tried to
demonstrates, we need each other.
for change. Not just children, but everyone fares
spend a little while in someone
better if the arts are a meaningful
a light into dark corners, which is the
component in their lives.
bleedingly obvious reason why arts
Without leaving the city altogether,
nature bestows, is exposure to and
budgets are being slashed, and artists
Surely it is the definition of madness
involvement in the arts.
commonly vilified. We’re now labelled
to ignore overwhelming evidence?
‘elites’, generally by people who fit There is overwhelming evidence
well and truly into that category
that a life lived without free access to
themselves. There is nothing elite
enjoyment of, and participation in, the
about being an artist in this country,
arts is a life severely compromised.
I assure you!
Without exposure to high quality art
Official State and National art is sanctioned, but for the tens of thousands of practitioners whose
there is little available to ameliorate
vocation is to make art, and who
the effects of the madness.
want to develop their skills through
The arts help us to live our lives. There lies their wonder and potency. Beautifully made art, when executed at the highest level, brings peace - it reminds us that we are not alone, that we share more similarities than differences, that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is, or might not even be the way it seems. The arts teach us that everyone has a story. The arts allow us to reflect and consider. A work of art can have a palpable effect on our consciousness, and when it does, it stays in our memories forever. Madness manifests in the brain. Sufferers become detached from the real world. But what actually is the real world right now? The arts speak to our brains, but also more importantly, our hearts. They can restore and comfort tired spirits and help to address feelings of isolation and confusion. And God forbid, they can encourage a response
Yet part of the madness is that many of us are doing just that - choosing to ignore the truth in favour of expediency or the preservation of power and privilege. Anything other
in any or all of its forms - theatre, music, dance, painting, literature -
BY GUY RUNDLE
That’s the legend. In fact, several military experts had warned that
The Western border of Germany,
machine guns and barbed wire, new types of cannon, ‘scorched
this would not be a war like other European conflicts; they had
create a safe space where you can
The arts speak truth to power, shining
the only way to provide the sustenance for the mind, body and spirit that
practise, and who make a massive contribution financially and culturally to the country, the message is clear. Go away and get a real job.
than the official view is deemed fake. Which explains why the arts and artists are considered so damn pesky. Creativity doesn’t toe a line. Who knows where great art comes from, but anyone lucky enough to experience it can attest to its power. The character of Christie in Mother is
Most artists have a real job, and most of them work at it day and night. They’re just not paid for their work. In official terms, we have no value and are surplus to requirements.
the perfect example of someone not dealing with the madness and cruelty of the world. Hers is a life barely lived, due to familial and societal neglect, and through a lack of empathy and support. She is perceived as mad
And it’s a vicious cycle - how can we
because she is disconnected from the
argue for the value, the preservation
world and utterly alone. By choice.
and support of the arts when the public is constantly presented with ordinary examples, not the extraordinary?
With no advantages, no significant others, no education, and with her experience of life limited and compromised, she cannot and will not
Just as the knighthood for Prince
live in the so-called real world. She’s
Philip was deemed mad by many, the
one of the many people on the outer
recent further slashing of the ABC’s
peripheries of society who speak
budget to nigh on unsustainable levels,
the truth, and are called mad for
and the concurrent announcement of
their trouble.
nearly $50 million to commemorate Captain Cook’s arrival strikes me as gobsmackingly crazy. The removal of arts programs in schools, which all available evidence suggests are incredibly valuable,
looked at the US Civil War, which had seen the first use of ‘Gatling’
LETHAL
else’s shoes. Where you can hear Christie’s story and begin to understand and to feel empathy. Empathy is in very short supply, or so it would seem. The arts remind us that it is in fact everywhere. We are all born with it. No child is born a bigot - it’s adults who create intolerance. And the arts, particularly theatre,
a summer night in 1914; grey clad troops cross the border, establish their forward defences. The twentieth century and the
human beings, showing us a way
a week too early. The Germans
visible to those waging it, and running it, carefully hidden from
had to back off somewhat. The
Daniel Keene writes about people
MAGICAL
who fall through the cracks, those for whom hard work will never be rewarded by prosperity, and who need our help and compassion. At its bottom line, the play’s message is a plea for kindness
be part of stories that are worth
women patients: phobias, paralysis, screaming fits, anxiety, the
the erasure of its identity; coming. It was not a war crime,
skirmishes, and exchanges of
telling, that add something useful
territory, everyone knew that.
And the gift of Mother is the
One way or another, it would
perfect vehicle for me to nail my colours to the mast.
THINKING
I’m grateful for the opportunity to perform it in my home state, and I look forward to your responses.
The response to the play has been
valiant heroes baring their wounds bravely found mad man-rabbits consumed with the hysteria usually associated, in that era, with
the term ‘shell shock’ and used behavioural and physical techniques
war would be a series of strategic
to the sum of human existence.
general publics. By 1917 that was no longer possible. The stream of wounded coming back to the major cities of the belligerent powers, weren’t merely torn up, they were broken. Those who expected
embarrassment was not about
but a breach of manners. The
and empathy, and I look for that in all the work I choose. I want to
a patch of brown earth. By now, the war had become an insanity,
the invasion of another country, everyone knew the war was
be over by Christmas.
"For Freud, the willingness of millions of men to kill strangers could not simply be explained by patriotism, propaganda, punishment or the will to kill; there was a will to die, as well, an embracing of death"
mantraps, where shells rained day and night, and men went mad, twisted and dying in the wire and mud. In 1916, the first day of the Somme series of battles, saw twenty thousand men killed on
Luxemburg a week ‘early’, and
through the madness.
eventually become multi-levelled systems, the line of defence of sovereignty. By 1916, they had become not protection, but
First World War had begun – had crossed into neighbouring
can touch us in a way nothing else can, and connect us to our fellow
earth’ destruction of cities and understood that something else was coming. By mid-1915 it was there. Across Eastern France, both sides dug trenches from Belgium to the Swiss border; they would
works. In Britain, the military psychologist Charles Myers coined – including electric shock – to get patients up and running, and back to the front, where they fell apart again immediately, losing all government over themselves. But in Vienna, as the entire Austro-Hungarian empire came apart, another physician was having more success at putting people back together. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis as a total system, had been viewed with suspicion by the anti-intellectual and
bourgeoisie of middle Europe had thousands of damaged men, and the resources of the military hospital system at his disposal. This would have two major effects: Freud’s thinking on the nature of
to every corner of social life. Psychoanalysis had already staked a claim in literature and the arts; now it would be applied en masse
sometimes for the first time.
included screeds against the theory
which both the madness of human
as ‘degenerate Jewish pseudoscience’;
destructiveness and the theorisation
in 1935 Alcoholics Anonymous was
of it came together. To say that the
propaganda, punishment or the will to
founded, with a religious content
Holocaust was mad is to speak of only
kill; there was a will to die, as well, an
– surrender your will to God,
one dimension of it of course, and
embracing of death. Our destructive
however you see him – but with a
many object to such a characterisation
drives would thus take centre stage
psychoanalytic form, surrendering the
of an event that was radically evil,
internal ‘superego’ control of behaviour
committed by participants who knew
things like irrationality in personal
to a more concrete belief, in order to
they were doing such. But it was mad as
relations, sexual and emotional
allow the ‘ego’ – the meaning forming
well, the idea that the glory of Germany
masochism, addiction, dependence.
self – to reassert its integrity and
could be restored by throwing small
The techniques of psychoanalysis
stabilise its boundaries.
children into a gas chamber at Treblinka, lethal magical thinking,
modern psychological marketing by
This would all reach its apogee in
for which a Freudian approach could
Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), in
the 1960s and 70s, with the self-help
supply an explanation: the total
his 1928 book Propaganda; surrealism
movement and the ‘me’ decade,
surrender by a whole nation, of their
was saturated in it; by way of Germany
whose dominant fads – from the hit
moral judgement to a fuehrer, who
it would come to popular cinema
book Games People Play analysis to
would give them a fully meaningful
destructiveness – unjustly neglected, though credited by Freud
in the film noir genre (Freud had
‘primal screaming’ – all had roots in
existence – a world without doubt –
– convinced Freud that our drive towards non-being, towards a
popularised cocaine use in the 1880s;
psychoanalysis, however mutated the
in exchange.
he is truly the father of Hollywood);
branching tree became. But before
Cremorne Theatre, QPAC
50
others. For Freud, the willingness of millions of men to kill strangers could
would be ‘reverse engineered’ to create
to social life – often in reductive and simplistic forms – from the 1920s into the 1980s.
daughter Sophie, and the work of Sabina Spielrein on sadism and M OT H E R 7 to 18 August 2018
that, there was the Second World War, a completion of the first, and one in
from the 1920s on in explaining
the psyche would change dramatically, and this new approach – in which the sexual drive was seen as being partnered by a new ‘death drive’ – would now be carried by state hospitals and health systems
mass death factory of the military system, the death of his
moves many people to feel empathy for all the lost souls in the world,
fascists would use it to hone their propaganda techniques – which
not simply be explained by patriotism,
anti-Semitic Habsburg regime. By 1917 they would try anything, and suddenly the advocate of a talking treatment for the bewildered
The new theory would match the century. Immersion in the
humbling. We have somehow managed to create a work which
state beyond the eternal lack of desire, issued in destructiveness, of self and
53
Unamplified
PAG E 40 & 41 Author and Illustrator: Maeve Baker
STORY: IS OPERA MAD?
brother-in-law was an opera virgin and one time he came
LISA: Opera is not mad. But it can promote madness in
along to a performance with my sister and he absolutely
performers. If you’re not mad to start with, you will have periods of madness.
hated it. Hated it, thought it was the most naff drivel he’d ever seen, and for years he didn’t come back. Then we managed to convince him again to come when I was
I was living out of a suitcase for 18 years. That’s pretty
singing in Tristan und Isolde, singing Isolde, which you
mad, anyone who would do that. Even when I was at
would think that’s a hard ask, he absolutely loved it!
home the suitcases were always on the floor, always open. You’re living out of a suitcase constantly. You’re subjecting
So I can’t tell you what the magic formula is but if you’re
yourself to people who have no personal interest in you,
going to try and switch someone on to opera, it’s got to be
so you’re just a commodity or a circus animal for them
different enough from what they’re used to getting to be
to thrash. You have incredible highs and huge lows. The
of interest to come back. And I do think free tickets help!
WITH LISA GASTEEN
lifestyle, the travel, the loneliness. Who else is going to
Madness is almost immediately dramatic and can play out on stage in multiple forms. The madman unhinged from reality and railing against things others don’t see, the heroine unravelled by betrayal, the collective main of the village mob. These may manifest as a frantic dance solo, a soaring aria that punches you in the heart or the pathos of Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heavens!’
a mad person. We do it for the music, for the love of
In the joys and sorrows of opera, the raw power of unamplified voices, there is fertile ground to examine the human experience. Indeed, there is a long interconnection between the opera and madness.
for example, you can go and see opera on the beach,
subject themselves to that sort of punishment? Only
Story spoke with internationally acclaimed Wagnerian soprano Lisa Gasteen AO about some of the delights and challenges of opera and the work of the elite opera coaching school she founded in Brisbane in 2011, the Lisa Gasteen National Opera School.
the music. When it comes down to it, that’s really what opera’s about, it's about music. It mystifies me why theatre directors, or drama directors, are attracted to opera. Let’s face it, the stories, they’re not gripping plots generally. They’re not great drama. The libretti are often very weak. Without the music it’s just bad, most of the time. It’s really about the music and I do wish that the music was given its due in modern day. I think we’re losing what is actually special about opera. By trying to make it popular, we’re actually losing what’s special about it. Not always but often. STORY: WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT IT? LISA: The quality of the music. If you amplify an opera, and I did it, it was fun, it really was fun. But the music suffered, the art suffered, but it was a fun event. I think as long as those sorts of things are balanced, with true acoustics and with an orchestra and conductor and everybody in the same room, it works. You know, what does it do for the art form when the orchestra is located a block away? There’s no cohesion and if it’s all amplified then it’s all on one level so you don’t have the nuance. That’s what’s special about it. So as long as we’re mindful of what we’re taking from it. STORY: HOW WOULD YOU CONVINCE SOMEONE TO TRY OPERA AS AN AUDIENCE MEMBER FOR THE FIRST TIME? LISA: Here’s a story…years ago I was going down to Melbourne to sing a lot with the Victorian State Opera and Opera Australia on tour, I was doing Carmen (not singing Carmen, I was Frasquita). At the time, my
It really comes back to music again. The music has to be really, really of a very high quality because that’s what touches people, it’s the music, it’s the vibrations, it’s the quality of voices unamplified. That has a really profound effect on some people and they can’t explain it away. It’s appealing. People are affected by the vibrations and the sound wraps around you. It’s not like it’s just a big wall of amplified noise. There’s something else about it. It affects your body. It has an effect on people. It transforms them, it takes them out of their ordinary existence. These days our ordinary existence is full of electronic, amplified and artificial sound. STORY: WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST ABOUT TRAINING OPERA SINGERS? LISA: I love it when they come and they’re absolutely hungry for knowledge, hungry for input, hungry for experience. I love it when they’re receptive and open to instruction and they run with it and they feel the difference and you can see their persona change. Walking down the corridors, at the end of the first week, some of them are quite transformed because they’re having an experience that they have not had before. It’s what they’ve been hungering for, but just haven't had access to the right people to experience it until now. That’s really, really gratifying. Then for them to make the contacts and travel overseas and be introduced to things as students, to be in contact with people who can get them into dress rehearsals and free tickets, and they get to see a lot of high, high quality music and singing, that’s a great thing. That’s very broadening and not something you have access to in this country.
59
54
PAG E 51
PAG E 52
PAG E 55
PAG E 58
Noni Hazlehurst in Mother at Belvoir Theatre. Photo: Brett Boardman
War Mask Photo: Getty Images
Timeline Illustrator: Sally McRae
Singing illustration Illustrator: Jackie Elliott
W H AT ’ S T H E M A D D E S T T H I N G YOU’VE EVER DONE? Written my new podcast which talks very honestly about my family, my dad’s closeted sexuality, my mum’s victimhood, my lover’s death. I don’t know why I’m dragging it all out. Well, it’s the writer’s eventual destination. Memoir.
FIVE MINUTES WITH
John Cameron Mitchell John Cameron Mitchell is a writer, director and actor that
Perhaps some healing is coming.
W H AT ’ S T H E M A D D E S T T H I N G ABOUT HEDWIG? That something so damn queer has infiltrated uptight (but gorgeous) cultures like Korea and Japan. I’ve actually been chased down the street by gangs of fans in Korea.
I F YO U R L I F E WA S A P E R F O R M A N C E , W H AT G E N R E W O U L D I T B E ? I hate genres. They were invented by marketers. Life is a comic, tragic, romantic, melodramatic, mysterious, farcical, porn film.
W H AT A R E Y O U R R I T U A L S B E F O R E Y O U G O O N S TA G E ? 20 minute meditation, vocal warm up, brown rice salmon sushi, kissing my stagemates. Oh, and the ‘show dump’. Must clear the passages.
we’ve seen on stages and screens from infamous New York City night clubs, Broadway theatres, HBO and Sundance Film Festival. He is the co-creator of the cult musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Celebrating 20 years in 2018, Hedwig
allows me to be spontaneous and instinctual. And reminds me I’m not alone. But in a safe way, as I’m on stage!
started out as a drag show at New York City club
DISCOVER MORE - READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AND OTHERS, AT QPAC.COM.AU/STORY
Hedwig grew into an off-Broadway hit and eventually a
OUR VENUES
(07) 3840 7444 | qpac.com.au/story ABN: 13 967 571 128
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The Queensland Performing Arts Trust is a statutory body of the State of Queensland and is partially funded by the Queensland Government: The Honourable Leeanne Enoch MP, Minister for Environment and the Great Barrier Reef, Minister for Science and
QPAC has four theatres suitable for a range of performance styles:
Minister for the Arts Director-General, Department of Environment
Lyric Theatre (2,000 seats) is designed primarily for opera, ballet
and Science: Jamie Merrick QPAC respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Lands across Queensland and pays respect to their ancestors who came before them and to Elders past, present and emerging.
comedy and presentations; Playhouse (850 seats) is primarily designed for theatre and dance; and Cremorne Theatre (277 seats) is an intimate and versatile black box theatre space.
CONNECT
him Best Director at Sundance Film Festival and a
68
staff, we have become a trusted curator, presenter and host; a place to come together to relax, reflect, share stories and celebrate.
(1,600 seats) is a versatile space, designed primarily for orchestra
film co-written, directed and starring Mitchell, earning
Tony Award after reprising the role on Broadway.
the best in live performance – the world renowned alongside the heart of each production. Through the warmth and expertise of our
performances and also used for contemporary music, stand-up
mid-90s, in a time when there were still small pockets of
Golden Globes nomination. In 2015, he received a special
C O N TA C T PO Box 3567, South Bank, Qld, 4101
leading centres for live performance. Welcoming over 1.3 million visitors to approximately 1,200 performances each year, we embrace
and large-scale theatre events such as musicals; Concert Hall
SqueezeBox, located in the far west of the Village in the
Manhattan not yet shiny and gentrified.
A B O U T Q PAC Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) is one of Australia’s
emerging, local and new – and connect to the stories and ideas at the
W H AT D O E S B E I N G A P E R F O R M E R MEAN TO YOU? I’m a very premeditated, slow-moving, tortoise-like Taurean writer. Performing reminds me I have a sensual body and
@ ATQ PA C
Story is published by QPAC. Printed in Brisbane, Australia. Contents of Story are
@Q PAC
of the publisher is prohibited. The publication of editorial does not necessarily
subject to copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission
THE ORIGIN OF LOVE – THE SONGS AND STORIES OF HEDWIG 17 July 2018
constitute an endorsement of views or opinions expressed. The publisher does
@ ATQ PA C
not accept responsibility for statements made by advertisers. All information was correct at time of printing. Story welcomes editorial contributions or comments.
Q PAC T V
They should be sent by email to story@qpac.com.au. Printed in July 2018.
Concert Hall, QPAC
PAG E 68 & 69 John Cameron Mitchell Photo: Matthew Placek QPAC Photo: Darren Thomas
67
W H AT ’ S T H E M A D D E S T T H I N G YOU’VE EVER DONE? Written my new podcast which talks very honestly about my family, my dad’s closeted sexuality, my mum’s victimhood, my lover’s death. I don’t know why I’m dragging it all out. Well, it’s the writer’s eventual destination. Memoir.
FIVE MINUTES WITH
John Cameron Mitchell John Cameron Mitchell is a writer, director and actor that
Perhaps some healing is coming.
W H AT ’ S T H E M A D D E S T T H I N G ABOUT HEDWIG? That something so damn queer has infiltrated uptight (but gorgeous) cultures like Korea and Japan. I’ve actually been chased down the street by gangs of fans in Korea.
I F YO U R L I F E WA S A P E R F O R M A N C E , W H AT G E N R E W O U L D I T B E ? I hate genres. They were invented by marketers. Life is a comic, tragic, romantic, melodramatic, mysterious, farcical, porn film.
W H AT A R E Y O U R R I T U A L S B E F O R E Y O U G O O N S TA G E ? 20 minute meditation, vocal warm up, brown rice salmon sushi, kissing my stagemates. Oh, and the ‘show dump’. Must clear the passages.
we’ve seen on stages and screens from infamous New York City night clubs, Broadway theatres, HBO and Sundance Film Festival. He is the co-creator of the cult musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Celebrating 20 years in 2018, Hedwig
W H AT D O E S B E I N G A P E R F O R M E R MEAN TO YOU? I’m a very premeditated, slow-moving, tortoise-like Taurean writer. Performing reminds me I have a sensual body and allows me to be spontaneous and instinctual. And reminds me I’m not alone. But in a safe way, as I’m on stage!
started out as a drag show at New York City club SqueezeBox, located in the far west of the Village in the mid-90s, in a time when there were still small pockets of Manhattan not yet shiny and gentrified.
DISCOVER MORE - READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AND OTHERS, AT QPAC.COM.AU/STORY
Hedwig grew into an off-Broadway hit and eventually a film co-written, directed and starring Mitchell, earning him Best Director at Sundance Film Festival and a Golden Globes nomination. In 2015, he received a special Tony Award after reprising the role on Broadway.
68
THE ORIGIN OF LOVE – THE SONGS AND STORIES OF HEDWIG 17 July 2018 Concert Hall, QPAC
A B O U T Q PAC
C O N TA C T
Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) is one of Australia’s
PO Box 3567, South Bank, Qld, 4101
leading centres for live performance. Welcoming over 1.3 million visitors to approximately 1,200 performances each year, we embrace the best in live performance – the world renowned alongside the emerging, local and new – and connect to the stories and ideas at the heart of each production. Through the warmth and expertise of our
(07) 3840 7444 | qpac.com.au/story ABN: 13 967 571 128
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
staff, we have become a trusted curator, presenter and host; a place
The Queensland Performing Arts Trust is a statutory body of the
to come together to relax, reflect, share stories and celebrate.
State of Queensland and is partially funded by the Queensland
OUR VENUES
Government: The Honourable Leeanne Enoch MP, Minister for Environment and the Great Barrier Reef, Minister for Science and
QPAC has four theatres suitable for a range of performance styles:
Minister for the Arts Director-General, Department of Environment
Lyric Theatre (2,000 seats) is designed primarily for opera, ballet
and Science: Jamie Merrick
and large-scale theatre events such as musicals; Concert Hall (1,600 seats) is a versatile space, designed primarily for orchestra performances and also used for contemporary music, stand-up
QPAC respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Lands across Queensland and pays respect to their ancestors who came before them and to Elders past, present and emerging.
comedy and presentations; Playhouse (850 seats) is primarily designed for theatre and dance; and Cremorne Theatre (277 seats) is an intimate and versatile black box theatre space.
CONNECT @ ATQ PA C
Story is published by QPAC. Printed in Brisbane, Australia. Contents of Story are subject to copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission
@Q PAC
of the publisher is prohibited. The publication of editorial does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of views or opinions expressed. The publisher does
@ ATQ PA C
not accept responsibility for statements made by advertisers. All information was correct at time of printing. Story welcomes editorial contributions or comments.
Q PAC T V
They should be sent by email to story@qpac.com.au. Printed in July 2018.
MAYBE THE GREATEST MADNESS IS TO SEE LIFE AS IT IS, RATHER THAN WHAT IT COULD BE.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE
P U B L I S H E D B Y Q U E E N S L A N D P E R F O R M I N G A R T S C E N T R E A S PA R T O F Q PA C ’ S P U B L I C E N G A G E M E N T & L E A R N I N G S T R AT E G Y
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