ABSTRACT
I once showed a video of Spitting Mad to a group of first year students at De Montfort University. It was a mixed group of both dance and theatre students. They were new, I was new, we were incredibly wary of one another. I had yet to gauge where they were coming from, and had the mistaken view that they might be interested in experimental theatre and performance. I remember that I kept asking them if they thought various performances were ‘political’ and getting blank stares in response. It was a real education, for me, if not for them. When I turned on the classroom light after showing them the short film of you spitting out food to create a range of arts and crafts objects I was once again met by blank stares, I asked a few questions, and after an uneasy silence one of the more voluble members of the group offered that ‘well, she’s just mad isn’t she? Just a mad woman.’ I was completely stumped by this response as I had long dismissed this reading myself and come to celebrate all the subtle nuances and ironies in the work. This statement closed down the potential scope of further discussions and I seem to recall that we finished the class early. I resolved not to use material that I held dear again in class. In subsequent weeks I was struck by how readily the students dismissed experimental work as ‘abstract’ or ‘mad’, and I would labour to point out how the transgressions within the work pointed to a way of resisting traditional societal customs and conventions. Again, I doubt that I was very persuasive. Whilst studying Artaud one student indignantly
pointed out, ‘If Artaud was mad and on drugs and everything then why are we studying him?’ I began, hesitantly to talk about Descartes, about the mind/body dualism but these students were not ready for, or sympathetic to, anti-Enlightenment ideas. I resolved to only introduce ‘mad’ work into Year 2 or 3 of the syllabus. I wonder about your fostering of these performances of eccentricity; I have to admit that the first time I saw you canter around your garden, with bin-liners pegged to your apron, I did consider this rather an improper act for a woman of your standing. However, I do have to say that I admire the way you retain such an impeccable demeanour of composure whilst making yourself look completely ridiculous. Your façade of composure is sometimes betrayed by an awkwardly crooked leg, or a subtle rising of your eyebrows, but even those signs, I now imagine to be deliberate. These students’ insistence that the work should be dismissed as a manifestation of ‘madness’ alarmed me, as it made me realise how easily a great deal of people’s work could, and has been dismissed once they have been constructed as ‘unstable’ or ‘hysterical’. I am not just thinking of artists here, but colleagues and probably myself after I have been reduced to tears at work once too often. Reading back over my notes I see that a number of academics have picked up on your ‘making a spectacle of yourself’, of your Charcot-like representation of madness (with the exception that you are representing yourself rather than being represented). Had I only had those notes at my disposal in that De Montfort classroom.
