MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Recently the Canadian video artist Althea Thauberger organized a production of the Marat/Sade, a 1960’s play by Peter Weiss turned by Peter Brook into a cult movie, set in the Charenton Asylum in the early 19th Century, with actors playing inmates as characters. Thauberger mounted performances in an actual asylum, Bohnice near Prague, with actual patients as spectators – and in two cases, as unintended participants.
Bohnice, also founded in the early 19th Century, under the Communist regime became a prison for political protesters, but is still operating as a mental asylum today; and its political background is echoed interestingly by the politics of the play. However, its history points back both to Charenton but also to the Victorian sanatoriums founded by John Langdon Down (the doctor who identified Downs syndrome). Both Bohnice and Down’s sanatoriums contained theatre stages, using performance as therapy – and one of Down’s Victorian buildings served as a model for the setting in a recent ENO/COC staging of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. This nexus of productions – and Thauberger’s video has been presented at the Liverpool Biennale as well as at Harbourfront Toronto and in Vancouver – raises fascinating questions about the significance of mental illness in society; the political exploitation of performance; connection between female sexuality, paternalistic hierarchy and madness; the nature of asylum art, and the distinction between actors and audiences in such contexts. The discussion will be illustrated by short clips from Thauberger’s video.