I had seen Edwin before at the Chevron gas station at the corner of Venice and Lincoln Blvd. He didn't talk to me last time. I pump gas at this station every two weeks or so. Today he approached me as I struggled to fill gas at the pump. I was annoyed at first and tried to reach into my purse to find some money and get rid of him. It was money that he needed but not that he wanted. He just wanted to chat.
I am almost done with this book (detour in 4D). I get tired of it because it is a little monotonous although it describes a lot of bipolar personalities--a good resource. I keep pulling out of it and into the other book about hypergraphia and writer's block. It is has been hard to keep on track and work on the thesis shows and on a paper I have due on Tuesday. I am determined to get to it even if it takes awhile. The project is taking shape in my head but I have to pull away from it as often as possible for my own sanity. Some things that are too close to home have to be just ripe for harvesting. You have to be not-too-close and not-too-far from it. So I keep taking detours.
Even though I have been busy as hell, I am still continuing to do research in bipolar disorder. I am leaning toward some kind of networked performance right now and I have some more theatrical scenarios worked out but in the meantime, I am now reading the following:
- Detour : My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D
- The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
- An Unquiet Mind : A Memoir of Moods and Madness
(correction: - Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is on my to read list but I don't have it yet)
Between those and my scheduled trip to Greece in late May with my bipolar mother, I will have a better idea of how to proceed on this project. It may be time to start interviewing some people or making contact with a specialist at USC. The things that I am interested are: mental illness, identity, distance, women and family ties. It would be amazing to act out an interactive play between here and Japan that encapsulates the conflict. I am torn between a 24-hour real-time performance with a loose narrative structure and something that is more interactive and requires audience participation. We shall see...
There is never enough time for me and that is very frustrating. I wish I were on a 9 month contract...
This just in:
Over 27% of adults in the EU suffer from some form of mental illness every year. Depression and anxiety disorders are the most common mental problems experienced, and studies have estimated that by 2020, depression will be the highest ranking cause of disease in the developed world. In terms of economic impact, mental ill health costs the EU 3-4% of its GDP through lost productivity and additional burdens on sectors such as health, education and justice.
http://www.welcomeurope.com/default.asp?id=1300&idnews=2373
From 2001:
Mental Disorders in America (NIMH study)Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 22.1 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about 1 in 5 adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.1 When applied to the 1998 U.S. Census residential population estimate, this figure translates to 44.3 million people.2 In addition, 4 of the 10 leading causes of disability in the U.S. and other developed countries are mental disorders—major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.3 Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time.
At the same time, the definition of 'mental illness' is not quite pinned down. On the Thalassemia board that I moderate, patients are often prescribed Prozac instead of real treatment of their anemia which is actually causing the depression. Our medical system is suffering from seeing the tree but not the whole forest. That makes me depressed and it makes me wonder about appropriate funding sources for my project.
Adding to my database of mental illness movies for the last two months: Trauma ,The Machinist, K-Pax
Meanwhile, my insomnia is growing.
Interestingly enough, I have found this database (a bit outdated) but useful. Almost every movie describes some kind of mental or cognitive disorder. I suppose strangeness is what makes life interesting.
Apparently, bipolar disorder is snubbed from films since schizophrenia is so much more eventful. Manic episodes in bipolar disorder can contain acute paranoia and even insomnia induced hallucinations similar to schizophrenia, which is why so many bipolars are misdiagnosed, including my mother in the early 90's who was turned into a vegetable for several months by a negligent psychiatrist. Add misdiagnosis to social stigma and it is no wonder why so many people with mental illness don't want to ask for help.
p.27 from Surviving Manic Depression:
As early as 1973, a study of patients with mania reported that 60 percent had grandiose delusions, 42 percent had paranoid delusions, and many had both. It is a relatively short leap, after all, from believing that you are the president of the United States to also believing that foreign agents are after you.
Also from the same book, p.298
And during 1999, at the same time that NIMH was funding only 7 research grants on clinical or treatment aspects of manic-depressive illness, it was also funding 7 new grants to study pigeons, 8 new grants to study songbirds, and 4 new grants to study fish. Clearly, something is fundamentally wrong with the priorities of the federal agency, and individuals with manic-depressive illness bear the consequences of these misplaced priorities.
(Irina - tone these first two down a little and adapt for D's personality.)
p.28, Surviving Manic Depression, a Manual on Bipolar Disorder for patients, families and providers.
As Kraepelin described it: The patient sings, chatters, dances, romps about, does gymnastics,, beats time, claps his hands, scolds, threatens, and makes a disturbance, throws everything down on the floor, undresses, decorates himself in a wonderful way, screams and screeches, laughs or cries ungovernably, makes faces, assumes theatrical attitudes, recites with wild passionate gestures."
p.30. <<
Most of us who provide care for individuals with severe psychiatric disorders have received letters in which the envelopes are covered with various messages, often written with different colored pens, at odd angles, and with messages on top of rach other. Mania is the only psychiatric diagnosis that can be determined with 99 percent certainty without even openining one's correspondence.
Notes from: "A Brilliant Madness"
p.14
I remember myself in rage and acting very wicked. I had and incredible command of the language at these times, and I was doing alliteration stuff --"horrible, hateful, hideous Harry"-- just spewing it out of me. I had insights I would never have had at any other time, and in the rage I was feeling I didn't edit any of them. Some of them were really vicious.
***
During the next year, I am passionately working on two pieces of work that are pushing me over the edge mentally and physically. I anticipate that many crazy things will appear on my blog as I immerse myself in research, inner images and emotions and I encourage you to give me feedback even when some things seem too hard to touch.
Similar to the 'method' acting approach, I tend to produce art by immersing myself fully in my work. My approach is not unusual and I assume most artists follow a similar pattern. An emotion or idea sparks my interest and I immerse myself into an experience that temporarily alters my perception. I want my work to be experienced by me as a first-person experience before anyone else experiences it. It is a selfish approach that works for therapeutic purposes. Third-person experience design is what I do for commissioned projects. (This is why your MFA should be a deeply personal experience or you're wasting a lot of time and money for nothing.)
Although a lot of my work initially falls under the category of 'personal narrative', the end result may become very neutral in emotionality for myself, yet will paradoxically seem more personal to others. Sometimes, I forget completely the 'why' and 'how' and other times I embrace an appropriated experience as my own. In fact, going back to 'To The Loss of Innocence' (a project for a small audience and very intimate screening), I can hardly remember what part of the narrative I wrote and what part I appropriated because I lived it when I did the piece. Every time I look at it, besides noticing my crappy editing job on a linear system (I don't edit cleanly), I experience various emotions that I was oblivious to before. Suddenly what I thought wasn't personal actually is, and it is out there for the world to see.
And I will be damned if I have to apologize for being cold, emotional, or melodramatic at any given time.
***
The first piece I am working on now is not clear in my head yet, and will probably be delayed a little more as I try to isolate myself from it emotionally to develop it. This piece is named 'Soulmates' as a dedication to my dear friend John 'Hoi Yee' Lau who passed away last year. This is an interactive dance theatre performance for five dancers/actors using touch sensors on hands, with video/audio depicting flashbacks that are triggered as partners exchange in an abstraction of a waltz. I am collecting these flashbacks to make concrete pictures in my head and I am noting down the specific auditory experiences. In and out comes the sound of a respirator and heart monitor, slowing down to a halt, slowly, patiently and sweetly just as my friend slipped away.
The significance of hand gestures and movement phrases emphasizing the exchange is related to the flashbacks. Besides the fact that I am Greek and we are a touchy feely culture (and yes women hold hands in the streets), I naturally have a strong memory of hand holding during this whole experience of death but it is both interesting and suprising to see who holds whose hand at which occasion.
'Soulmates' will actually strive not to be melodramatic nor hopeful in any false way (to be fair to John). It will not be about closure either because I believe in circular energy flowing through the universe.
Irina C. Poulos of Oxymoros will be choreographing this and the next piece.
'Conversations with my mother' (as some in the immersive lab email list probably saw already) is a solo interactive performance of a woman's struggle with bipolar disorder. This is a strongly personal piece but I am doing the research to do it justice because I have to address the inadequacy of our health system to properly diagnose and treat this mental health disorder. As I immerse myself into this project, I often wonder whether I have lost my mind and question nature vs nurture and behavioral patterns. Obviously, to be an artist one has to be a little insane so I will plead guilty just to that... Sadly my type of anemia will imitate mild cyclothymic disorder at times but experiencing real patients of bipolar disorder helps me understand the suttle differences.
[from the list]:
'Conversations with my Mother' is a non-linear confession about all the things lingering in my mind since my earliest memories of listening to my mother talk for hours on end. Conversations can be short or last for hours but they revolve around the same topics and obsessions, they are random in sequence and they revolve around objects and people. At short doses, my mother is funny and witty, but spending lots of time with her reveals the illness within. As she chooses her actions without logic or reason, one watches her struggle in making decisions that define her future. The cycle never really ends as the decline itself feeds the illusion of progress.
'Conversations with my Mother' replay themselves in my 'virtual' set in three different languages (Greek, English and French) to deter the audience from fully understanding context (and so that I can quote some really cool authors.) The goal is to protect people whose stories are revealed within the conversations and to emulate my mother's paranoid obsession with secrecy and innuendos.
My mother has bipolar disorder with unpredictable recurring episodes of depression and mania that manifest themselves randomly and cannot be predicted. I have spent most of my life denying her illness -- even while medicating her I listened to her patiently,-- but in recent years I had to confront her reality in order to save myself from the same fate.
My mother is obsessed with objects and she clutters her space and hoards memorabilia for as long as she can. Her past tortures her not only mentally but physically in the photographs and objects she chooses to display and cling to. Objects and photographs shift meaning as her thoughts shift in mood and tone.
It is hard to compete with her in conversation as one cannot predict what will set her off and what direction conversation will go because she may switch from being funny to being sarcastic, bitter and offensive at the blink of an eye and soon after she will become melancolic or self-pitying or randomly violent. The most common denominators in all her moods are a heavy dose of denial and fabrication.
'Conversations with my Mother' is conceived as an interactive performance with projections on objects and one performer or interactor. Recorded narratives play back as images on objects change context and mood in an ever-shifting configuration of a state of mind. The recorded narrative includes only one voice mixed with environmental or domestic noises e.g. cooking, television, bus stop, etc, because in all truth it is difficult to hear oneself speak while talking with my mother. Everyone has the right to be moody and it is hard to draw the line where normal ends and bipolar disorder begins so this piece aims to make the viewer doubt even for a few seconds where their draw that line and wonder whether my mother is truly ill or just really true to her inner voice.
This piece is partially influenced by the female character in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 'flow'-type written narrative in various works by Helene Cixous.
***
Phew. Now I can turn off the butter churner and sleep.