Editor’s Note: In this article, which first appeared on Mad in Argentina, Alan Robinson reviews a 30-year journey working with his voices and visions in directing actors and creative writing.
Some of my artistic experiences were called psychotic outbreaks and treated in a compulsive, coercive and violent way. Today I describe these experiences as invisible, spontaneous or impulsive theatre. The process of renaming psychotic outbreaks as theatrical expressions took me years of research and different therapeutic stages to achieve a change of perspective and narrative about what science describes as a lack of awareness of illness and adherence to treatment on my part.
The perspective of human rights in general, such as freedom of conscience and expression in particular, were the foundations in this path of knowledge that allowed me to become aware of what was really happening in my body. To do this, I had to begin by questioning what a body is, when its behavior becomes ill and how its behavior heals.
When we find ourselves in situations that deny human rights, it is important to maintain critical thinking about the decisions we make every day in creative processes from an ethical perspective because certain situations can put our lives at risk, for example in public spaces or in involuntary treatments. In critical thinking we do not necessarily have to agree, but we should be able to question what was established as normal by the prevailing common sense.
From a human rights perspective, it can be a challenge to access freedom of conscience and expression when our body is involuntarily affected by psychopharmacological drugs. These substances, in addition to producing dependency, act directly on the nervous system, altering the way we perceive reality. The altered states of consciousness in these cases are precisely altered by psychopharmacological drugs in the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. The perception of the environment is a biological process that occurs based on how stimuli and information circulate from our five senses to our brain.
The process of describing a psychotic outbreak as an artistic experience requires reflecting on the body, movement and behaviour based on experience-based knowledge, because evidence-based knowledge can only describe certain bodily expressions as psychotic outbreaks that must be treated urgently because they represent, according to the norm, a danger to society. Evidence-based knowledge differs from experience-based knowledge transmitted from generation to generation.
At the time of writing this text, 30 years have passed since my first experience that was called by psychology and medicine a psychotic outbreak. I still remember the physical sensations I experienced in the first seconds in which my perception of conventional reality expanded towards other realities. The first experience of visions or voices that spontaneously appear before a person is disruptive. The idea of what is real, as well as the idea we have about how our perception works, are altered in an instant because in this type of experience we become aware that there are other realities. There is something that happens suddenly, that imposes itself, making real situations that until that moment were exclusive to the field of fantasy and imagination. Therefore, from this perspective, hearing voices and the presence of visions is more of a philosophical and artistic problem than a medical and psychological one. Scientific thought promotes the idea of avoiding all types of psychotic experiences, whether through psychoeducation, segregation in specialized institutions or coercive mental health treatments.
According to current Argentine legislation on mental health and addictions, involuntary treatments against a person’s body in a state of crisis are regulated, considering that body dangerous to itself and to third parties. From this arises the need to urgently intervene against the freedom of expression and consciousness of the body in a state of crisis. This is the psychomedical view of the states in which bodies articulate with society. But in states of crisis, there is not always necessarily an urgency or an emergency. The discourse that psychomedicine supports about these states consists of describing them as states where consciousness is lost, altered or reduced. Here, I propose to review these experiences from another narrative. From an artistic perspective, it can be said that consciousness is not lost, altered or reduced. On the contrary, what happens is something that we could describe as an expansion of consciousness.
Both clairvoyance and clairaudience were personal experiences that gave me the opportunity to design physical exercises to train these capacities for aesthetic purposes. I developed these exercises on body perception as a training director for a group of actors and actresses between 2001 and 2005. These states have been associated with parapsychology and paranormal phenomena, but in the experience of the Gota.Teatro group they were capacities that we access through acting training with the aim of exploring forms of communication between performers during the scene. At that time we based ourselves on the premise that the stage performer is a medium for the character to express himself freely. The poetic search was related to being able to see the invisible and hear the inaudible within the limits of space and time of the scene, the performance or the rehearsal.
Many body training exercises show us the importance of developing attention in an extra-daily way that operates directly on a modification of body awareness, as being aware of the body in a situation. These exercises aim to train the ability to become aware in the present of a given situation, whether alone or in company. Even breathing exercises allow us to become aware of the respiratory process associated with the diastole and systole phases of the body’s cardiac cycle for different purposes.
The first exercises to become aware of my way of seeing and hearing the scenes during rehearsals were carried out in accordance with my role as director. My notebook, my diary of dreams and nightmares, as well as the restraint expected from the group in my role, allowed me to pay attention to what I saw and heard in the scene. This four-year process in which I occupied the role of director, allowed me to relate to the visions and voices in a poetic way. This is how I understood that listening to the subtexts of a scene is listening to what the characters do not say, just as recognizing a vision is discovering what they do not show. This process led me many years later to recognize that in my poetics metaphors are not constructed but are seen or heard, as visions or voices. Hence the importance of clairvoyance as the ability to see clearly, and clairaudience as the ability to hear clearly.
Patience, persistence and obstinacy in valuing knowledge based on artistic experience allowed me to move these skills from directing theatre with casts to writing plays in the solitude of my studio. At first, out of prudence, I began to write only some of the voices I heard as dialogues of the characters. Again, the act of writing, dramatic literature or dramaturgy as a bridge, channel or medium that goes from the voices one hears to the paper. (Some time later, when I wrote my first novel, I dared to describe some visions that recurred in my daily life, such as that of a psychiatric colony on fire, which was published in my novel Jorgino: Passion and Madness by Jorge Bonino.)
I consider it important to differentiate visions from images, as well as from the voices of the inner dialogue. Images and inner dialogues occur in the internal field of fantasy and imagination. That is to say, they function within the limits of the body, separated from the outside as an external world differentiated from the internal world. Whereas voices and visions do not respect this limit between the inside and outside of the body. In fact, it could be said that they seem to originate from outside the human body. The difficulty with voices and visions is precisely that they can occur outside the moment when one is preparing to write. It is very difficult to hear voices or have visions by one’s own will or spontaneous generation. Whereas the exercise of imagining or fantasizing is more susceptible to being controlled during work in a creative process.
Throughout my various experiences as a playwright, theatre director, actor and dancer, I have been developing different ways of becoming aware of the processes that the body goes through when it is about to create. The situation in which someone is about to create something is particular because it requires that the stimuli be regulated in a way that is not the everyday one. The environment where one is about to write a text, or direct an acting exercise, is intended to facilitate us getting out of the comfort that everyday routines provide us.
In the performing arts, awareness of training is especially important. By understanding all artistic training as a short, medium and long-term process, those of us who go through states of crisis can change the health narrative about our poetics. So, when we are told that there are delusions and hallucinations, we simply observe that voices and visions are just another resource of our poetics, like imagination, fantasy or free association.
The pedagogical dimension of these creative experiences had a very important value in that it allowed me to systematize this knowledge as well as share it with other people who could help them in their creative processes. On one occasion, the actor Alejandro Urdapilleta declared that “madness can be lucid and result in a path of knowledge,” something that I have decided to take literally. In this path it is possible to relate in a different way to voices and visions, to learn to live with them in the task of literary creation. Pedagogy allows us to approach these poetics in an ethical, collective and safe way for those who want to approach creation from the awareness of a poetics of madness, in which voices and visions are as important as fantasy and imagination.