The Assessment @ The Arches

SMHAFF present Mental and Mirror Mirror

My enthusiasm for SMHAFF comes not just from the diversity of arts that are part of the festival (they usually have a nice slot for physical theatre, which gives me my not-quite-dance shot for October). I have been generally impressed by the theatre pieces' attitude to mental health. Following on from nearly two thousand years of negative approaches from tragedy to comedy, SMHAFF's companies tend to be sympathetic and realistic.

The problem is usually a lazy attitude towards 'madness': it is a generic state, a bit like being sad or happy, and more likely to be a plot point than a character trait. Chekov said that if you see a gun on stage, it had better be shooting someone by the last act. Hollywood movies foreshadow a character's death from some illness by having them cough, once, in the first five minutes. Most theatre might as well have a rule that if a character has a prescription for anti-depressives, they are going to be howling by the interval, and probably killing people by the finale.

Anyway, SMHAFF avoids all of that, I am proud to present their double bill at Tramway...

Mental

The Metropolitan Police call him a Domestic Extremist. The NHS have described him as 'highly disturbed' and labelled him as Borderline Personality Disorder. 'A real and present threat to the safe running of our lawful business' is how E.ON described him at the Royal Courts of Justice. He prefers the term Mental.

Mental is an autobiographical one-man performance staged in a bedroom for an intimate audience. Spanning 13 years of the artist’s adult life, the story follows the turbulent experience of mental illness, suicide, social isolation, stigma, police and corporate surveillance and the dynamics of power present in such contexts.

Using the Data Protection Act, the vacuum cleaner has reclaimed all of the information that the State holds on him. Psychiatric records, police intelligence files and social services reports are woven together with personal stories and photographs that counter the ‘official’ version of events, creating a performance that is challenging and highly informative, at times tragically sad and at others profoundly
funny.

Mental has been acclaimed by audiences as a unique story and form, bringing together timely themes of undercover police and acute mental distress, told from a person that has lived through and survived such difficult challenges.

 

Mental was made with support from Arts Council England, Artsadmin and In Between Time.

 

Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror is a new documentary dance theatre piece on the subject of eating disorders for the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival 2013 (Festival). The audience is led in to a space in which carnival mirrors hang and the stage is marked out by fashion magazines…

 

Down the Rabbit Hole is a dynamic, Scottish-based theatre company that is carving a distinct path within the documentary dance theatre genre. It aims to raise awareness of mental ill health through entertainment has had sell-out shows in Glasgow for the last two years.

SMHAFF: Three Films at the GFT

At the risk of sounding like somebody who thinks about the consequences of what he says before he says them, I have always had a concern about the representation of mental health issues within art. My beloved theatre is a special offender: 'madness,' even in the hands of the most capable writers and directors, frequently becomes a generic craziness, more important for moving the plot forward than addressing the challenges of mental health disorders.

When Shakespeare uses it like this in King Lear, it's like theatre has permission to throw the lunatic on stage with no worries about how this representation influences the audience's perception of, say, bi-polar.

This means I like the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival (SMHAFF). I find their brochure impossible to navigate, and the mixture of professional performance and community workshops is bundled together. It's so big, so comprehensive, but somewhere there is some important theatre that does understand why theatre can't keep on caricaturing the 'crazy.'

I know that Barrowland Ballet are presenting Tiger as part of the festival, but it is probably better to redirect readers to the website. Until I get a better handle on the events, I'll just slap up a few selected highlights as I receive press releases.

The mighty GFT is hosting a few films: ' three cutting-edge documentaries on the theme of reality.' The subject matter took me by surprise: Alzheimer’s disease (First Cousin Once Removed),  and I Am Breathing which looks at 'the final few months of the life of Motor Neurone disease sufferer Neil Platt.'

The surprise is that I don't especially associate these illnesses with mental health. Yes, I am ignorant: I am glad the festival is making the obvious connection. It pulls away from the usual idea that mental health is all about that difficult illnesses that have psychiatric textbook symptoms (and hog the headlines whenever mental health is discussed).

This is why I like the SMHAFF - it challenges my lazy expectations. Plus there's a film about Mariel Hemmingway, and I have had a crush on her since I first saw Manhattan at the age of twelve.






Press Release Begins:

Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival:
Sunday 6 – Sunday 20 October
The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival returns to GFT for 2013 with three cutting-edge documentaries on the theme of reality.
Alan Berliner makes a deeply personal statement with his latest film First Cousin Once Removed (Sunday 6 October, 17.30), a portrait of his friend and mentor, the poet Edwin Honig who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Berliner, an experimental documentary filmmaker whose films have received awards at many major international film festivals, will host a master class at GMAC at 13.30 on Sunday 6 October and then take part in a Q&A after the screening at GFT.
The final few months of the life of Motor Neurone disease sufferer Neil Platt are recorded in powerful documentary I Am Breathing (Monday 14 October, 18.00), which will be followed by a discussion that asks: who cares for the carers?

Double Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple brings us Running from Crazy (Sunday 20 October, 19.45), an insightful documentary about Mariel Hemingway, the actress and grand-daughter of writer Ernest Hemingway, and her struggles to understand her family’s history with mental health issues. 

We hope to be joined by Barbara Kopple for a Q&A following the screening.

Piece of Mind

I have about half a dozen articles unpublished in the blog store on the theme of theatre's failure to address mental illness in a meaningful manner. Mostly, they slip back into the draft file, either too angry to print or just another iteration of a theme better expressed elsewhere.

Quite a few of them praise the Scottish Mental Health Film and Art Festival. I might not be entirely happy with the name - the notion of celebrating Mental Health is strange, and I do have a habit of getting confused about what Mental Health might mean.

Luckily, Piece of Mind even addresses this problem. It is a clumsy interlude in a generally coherent and dynamic hour, but that one of the performers, perhaps voicing one of the many young bi-polar volunteers who helped to script this slice of intelligent physical theatre, actually mention the problematic nature of talking about Mental Health warmed my bitter heart.

Ever since theatre realised that it didn't have to be all about kings and their strange family relationships, the pressure has been on to make performance relevant and meaningful. Token gestures towards rewriting the classics into a contemporary context rarely cut it - it's tough to recreate Euripides' sympathy for Medea when she is reduced to a single mother hacking up her kids on a new build housing estate - but Piece of Mind has a modest goal: to represent the bi-polar experience in a non-sensational, sympathetic manner.

A mixture of devised and physical theatre, using conversations with young people diagnosed as bi-polar, Piece of Mind has a gentle flow, between more painful recollections and hopeful presents. Bi-polar is examined not simply as wild mood swings, nor as a heightened consciousness, but a recurring mental challenge that infects both good and bad times.

Although the non-judgemental approach is an old stereotype of "issue based" theatre, Coffey and Paine allow the stories of the various contributors to speak for themselves. Sensitively using choreography to illustrate some of the monologues and conversations, speaking together or alone, manipulating the set to  mark the beginning and ends of various scenes, they simply roll out the narratives and refuse to either draw conclusions or trivialise the often painful memories.