As a broad question, I’m interested in looking at the relationship between imagination and mental health, i.e., what role does imagination play in mental health?
I also want to look at prodromal behaviour that can indicate the onset of mental illness. What is the nature of this behaviour? How does imagination in this behaviour compare to imagination in other circumstances?
I am also interested in looking at the issue of normalcy, and the pitfalls and benefits of normalizing behaviour. What is the range of “normal” use of imagination? What are “normal” limitations people put on their relationship to their imagination/imagined worlds? Are there times that these limitations are transgressed in “normal” behaviour? What are the effects of both excesses and deficits in imagination in a person’s life?
Please comment on these, with alterations or suggestions or anything you think relevant, and read the further project brief for more information.
The play
The play in development is inspired by a short story by Conrad Aiken, entitled Silent Snow Secret Snow. In this story, a young boy (Paul) wakes up one morning finding that he has access to a secret world of his own. Over time, he becomes more and more enthralled with the new world, and spends an increasing amount of time there. His parents and teachers find the change in Paul’s behaviour troubling. As he struggles to keep his new world from his teachers, friends and parents, everyone else begins to get worried about his strange behaviour. It comes to a climax when his parents and a psychiatrist stage an intervention for him in which he eventually has to decide once and for all between the two worlds.
Paul’s experience of the fantasy world comes largely through sounds, sensations, temperatures, colours, and smells. Everyone else experiences the same things that he does, but in a very normal, everyday way. This story strongly interests me because it deals with the difference in how people experience life, and deals with the root of imaginative life. Taken literally, Paul’s experience and struggle represents the price we pay for independence as it charts his journey moving between childhood and adulthood. However, in the context of the author’s own childhood experience the story explores another dimension of human experience. As a young man, Conrad Aiken witnessed his parents’ suicide and murder before his eyes. In this light the story can also be seen as an exploration of PTSD in a child. There is also ample literature on this story linking Paul’s experience to early indicators of autism and early onset psychosis. His use of fantasy and his real experience of his imagined world provides a fascinating point of study for an artist/researcher. Creativity, imagination and their relationship to mental health is a profound question that has particular relevance to artistic creation.
For this project, I am developing two plays (approx 50 min each)—one from the point of view of the boy, one from the point of view of the outside world of the parents/friends/teachers/psychiatrist. These two plays will use one narrative in two radically different ways. The child’s experience unfolds in a largely sensorial, visual and physical theatrical language. The play from the others’ perspective will be largely text based and realistic. The outputs will be discrete theatrical products that can be viewed in sequence of either order or on their own. Much of our devising will focus on an exploration of the differences in the way people experience imagination and experience reality. Beyond Aiken’s story, through interviews and workshops in the London community, we intend to gather stories and artifacts on imagination to enrich the devising process.
Integration of participatory project
A series of participatory projects will provide material to further the development of the plays. Interviews and imagination workshops with individuals from the education and mental health sectors will provide content in the form of personal stories, visual artworks and performances. There will also be an integrated web-component in which visitors to the project blog can contribute their own experiences of imagination. These outputs will be fed back into the rehearsal room and to the wider creative teams to use in the multiple aspects of developing these pieces of theatre. The workshops and interviews will follow a similar format as the initial fieldwork done by the artists involved in the early stages of devising the plays.
As an integrated part of developing a play, the workshops will be run with people across different sectors. We will look at the question: How do people experience imagination differently? As a basic outline for the workshops, I will take fragments of a story, and ask people to imagine what happens next, what happened before, or to put pieces in different orders. Their responses could be explored through the form of performances, verbal responses, creative writing, or in visual art works. The form would depend on how the workshop could be set up as well as how the people would be most comfortable responding.
Because of the content of the story I’m adapting, I plan to engage people from the following groups:
young people with interest in arts and science
Mental health professionals, with a particular interest in prodromal indicators
Young people with mental health and special needs issues
The goal is to engage a range of people in exploring the limits of imagination. What is within the range of normalcy and what can be considered pathology? When applied to creative activities, is this difference helpful?
It is often said that the line between genius and madness is fine. Imagination is an experience that lives equally on both sides. It thus seems the ideal place to investigate both in the community and through the arts, what imagination can be for us as artists and as individuals.
Collaborators
The creative team currently includes Rachel Barnett (writer), Jonny Woo (writer/dramaturg), Erin Hunter (Actress/Producer) Elizabeth Boag (Actress) Mollie McClelland (Choreographer and Video Artist), Emma Mallinder (Marketing Advisor).
About me (Rachel Parish)
I have recently completed an MA (with distinction) in Performance Practices and Research at the Central School of Speech and Drama in which I developed an interactive multimedia installation with a strong web-based interactive component. I was also trained on the NT Studio’s 2007 director’s course. I also recently directed a successful run of Salsa Saved the Girls at the Old Red Lion, and received a bursary to present at an international theatre conference, and a travel grant from the AHRC to conduct performance research in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. I am director/producer on this project.
May 16, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Each sentence/question is worthy of thought if not comment; condenses across disparate fields of psychiatry/psychology, philosophy, especially esthetics, and literary everything; and risks eliciting blather. I suppose standards of relevance and quality will evolve.
The words used here might strongly frame the responses: mental health vs mental illness being distinct constructs for example; “imagination” being normal if subjective, “imagined worlds” heightening and constraining the phenomenology drastically. Awake or asleep? Important or common? Why these questions? Do they matter? If so, to what end?
That said, imagination seems to be close to universal, cross-culturally prevalent, realted to dreaming, normally distinguisable by the individual from “reality” through a process of reality testing, and is often construed as contibuting to problem and conflict resolution, emotional release, rehearsal for life, and fun. As we sometimes detect the normal by comparison to the deviant, so normal might be seen as not disordered. Certain mental disorders include inability to contain imagination, detect it as such, or manage the associated feelilngs (affects).
May 19, 2008 at 3:07 pm
There is a long history of “normal” being defined as within ranges that facilitate, or at least do not harm, social functioning. One can be eccentric as long as one causes no harm to social systems; once one causes harm, then one becomes deficient and there is societal pressure toward “repair” of behavior. Imagination, as a specific example, can be as eccentric so long as one does not fail to distinguish between imagined and actual realities, for such failure makes it difficult (and eventually harmful) to interact socially. Thus, one starting place for considering the “limits” of imagination would be the limits of causing harm to individuals and/or social systems.
May 22, 2008 at 1:51 am
imagination is the breath of life. without it we are doomed to live in a grey whirleds of banality. creative thought can bee the freeing release that a fractured imprisioned mind can find in the sparkle eye of another that turns a habitual well worn walk to the shops into a living game of the spice of life. a mind that is free can turn any situation into a loving game of life…
too many narrow boxes segment modern life into ‘TRAP A’ and ‘TRAP B’- thought forms we seek tempt ourselves into to feeling the ‘safety’ of conformity. balancing 200 cans of paint full of imaginative colours on your head and allowing them to fall and burst into a myriad of freeform mental hues will allow the beautiful creative accidents to happen that help to free our spirits.
life is more interesting in colour. praise bee freedom for the mind in all its glorious outlets. music to stir the heart and release tension of the day, books to dream into, magical films to transport us into new mindscapes of wonderful possibility and polar opposites to remind us that there is always another option.
creativity rocks!
June 17, 2008 at 11:54 am
Implicit in creative imagination is the ability to access feelings, thoughts, and senses not apparently connected to reality, and to bring these out in a way that connects the audience with the imaginer in a meaningful way (i.e., leading to meaning for the audience). Simply to hallucinate or to experience private thoughts/feelings/sensations without being able to help others make the connection is autistic, not artistic. However, for another to attempt to gain insight into such autistic experiences and so to make these available to an audience of even a single third party is artistic, and this is what Silent is about for me.
The boy is having autistic (not clinically autistic, but private) experiences, as he is unable to share these in a way that connects him to others. Just the opposite, his experiences are dissociative, creating a split between him and external reality, and separating him from those around him. Are these healthy? Certainly not, as little use is made of them to further his relationships or other ways of “living in the world.” Healthy imagination is, to paraphrase Freud, regression in the service of the ego, not merely regression. The boy’s experiences are not in the service of his ego, that is, furthering his worldly experiences.
In my opinion, Rachel, what you are doing, at least in part, is helping those outside Paul’s experiences begin to make meaning of them, not as he experiences them, but as his experiences create new meaning for their worlds. Will they struggle to understand him, and to communicate with him, to learn of his inner life? Will they attempt to suppress what they do not understand? Both impulses, to understand and to suppress, are present; how will they be reconciled? How will this struggle to reconcile these impulses shape their future views and appreciation for their own inner worlds, and for the inner worlds of those whose inner realities are not immediately accessible to them? We are all much more like Paul than otherwise, being driven by inner emotional lives of which we are at best dimly aware through dreams and such. Perhaps such a struggle to understand is worthwhile not just as it affects relationships with Paul. Perhaps, as we get better at such understanding, the unconscious world around us becomes even richer and more meaningful.