Brief Amaze | 1990

BRIEF AMAZE, Dobřany Psychiatric Hospital, Dobřany, Czechoslovakia, 8.8.90

I drive down to Dobřany Hospital in the late morning, meet Drs. Leoš Horák and Jíří Bláhovec who take me to see their proposed performance site, a small auditorium. The sexual deviants are throwing a disco party there when we arrive. The place is hopping. They do this about once a month and charge patients (ambulatory unconfined patients with other diagnoses) money to get in. Most of the other patients do pay and attend, because apparently the sexual deviants throw a really good disco party.

I insist on touring as much of the facility as possible, and so we spend hours going through most of the wards, dayrooms, dormitories, isolation cells etc. This hospital is the oldest and second largest in Czechoslovakia: 1500 patients, 20 doctors. Large early 19th-century buildings set in a vast fenced-in park, woods & gardens, long covered arcades, hedges, Baroque architecture; everything is straight out of Foucault.

Inside, the wards are another story. Ugly yellow walls, beige linoleum floors, dingy and depressing in spite of lots of windows. Living conditions inside many wards are pretty grim. Usually a large room with up to twenty metal & spring beds, thin mattresses. A bathroom, two stalls with no doors, smoking permitted only in bathrooms. Table and chairs six feet from toilets, overflowing ashtrays and clouds of smoke.

Some are locked wards. We are let into the male sex-criminals' ward, door locked behind us. The men seem very tall and sinister as they quickly crowd around us in shabby hospital gowns. They speak very rapidly and insistently to Leos and Jiri. They are asking for help; their bathroom is repulsively filthy, excrement staining walls and floor, toilets malfunctioning. They are asking the doctors to help them get soap, cleaning materials, paint. They will take care of their space, but have so far been denied the means. One patient says that he knows that he was sick when he was put here, but that after three years in this small ward he is really and truly crazy. In the wardroom, very old men walk slowly in circles. Their eyes don't seem to see anything around them.

Taking me around the hospital gives Leoš and Jíří the opportunity to speak with many patients whom they don't ordinarily deal with. Leoš and Jíří are known as caring, progressive doctors and the patients take advantage of their visit to ask for various forms of assistance. The administration and much of the staff is quite conservative and prefer drugs and incarceration over attempts at rehabilitation. Average length of patient stay is 20 years. Many are simply senile elders abandoned by families. One man is Sudeten German, been here since 1945. Shell-shock. Speaks only German.

I am overwhelmed by my emotional response to the ward visits. I know that there is no possibility of constructing a performance through my usual process. Any attempt to quickly absorb, analyze and regurgitate this experience is bound to fail. The possibility of failure is always present in this work, and while failing isn't fun it is usually neither something to particularly worry about. Here, however, failure promises to have different consequences. For "normal" audiences, even those unfamiliar with the style of work I was doing, there is nonetheless some kind of consensual conceptual frame that contextualizes my activities. Any failure is mitigated by its being contained within this frame. When you come right down to it, in most cases neither I nor the audience have all that much at stake. Unfortunate but true. But today I have strong reservations (born partly of ignorance) about how this audience might engage with my work. I don't want to patronize them, terrify them, confuse them, use their impairments as a gratuitous focus for the piece. I don't want to be laughed at, ignored. At the same time, however, I can't ignore the situation which they and currently I found orselves in. I have to address this; this was what the piece is made for and to weasel out of it would be unconscionable.

I decide that the only thing I am capable of in that circumstance is trusting my instincts completely. I put everything out of my mind and, having decided for convenience' sake to perform in the auditorium after the disco party finished, I simply crawl on hands and knees into the room in my street clothes, with my suitcase on my back and no plan at all.

When I get to the center of the room, I let the suitcase slide slowly off my back, open it and manically thraw my props and costumes willy-nilly around the room. I let the objects, memories and subconscious intentions of the piece lead me from there.

From the very beginning I can tell that the patients are completely absorbed. Aside from the catatonics in the room, the patients exhibit none of the behavioral reservations I normally see in audiences. They seem to be breathing with me, their muscles seem to tense and release when mine do and they seem to be discovering the same "story" which I am discovering as the piece unfolds within and around me. In only two or three other instances have I ever came anywhere close to experiencing such generosity from an audience. They give me far more than I give them - and I am giving them everything I have.

I feel extremely good after the performance finds an ending. I exit, clean up, come back in and sit down. Many patients come up to me and ask questions, make comments. One man wonders if I had been "describing" a prison or a hospital. I ask what he thought. He says he thinks it might be either one. That maybe they are the same. We talk for awhile about prisons inside and prisons outside, then we are interrupted by a young man who says he's been having recurring hallucinations for seven years and I would have just acted out some of them.

I exchange addresses with four patients. I'm repeatedly asked for my autograph - a physical artifact - and i am given artifacts in return: patients ran back to their wards to get and give me Civic Forum buttons, a Virgin Mary medallion, paintings and drawings they have made. The disco party disc jockey, also a patient, asks me if they can play music again. I say of course. He dedicates the first song, their favorite, to me. Michael Jackson's "Beat It." We end up dancing for two hours to Czech rock/disco music, all of us, patients, doctors, my friends from Plzeň. The patients are generous with their emotions. As with most populations with little to give, they give everything they have without reservation. At some point, after hours of dancing and talking, Franta tells me it is time to get going. I follow him outside the building and there it hits me - where I am - here is the tragedy and the price of this exceptional experience. I am leaving and so many of these people can't. We'd danced together but we can't walk any further together. I barely make it through hurried goodbyes and out through the big iron gates before I break down, sobbing convulsively, my face covered with my streaming tears. All my "normal" friends go to the pub down the road. I walk through fallow adjacent corn fields for half an hour before being able to join them.



concept / realisation :
Scott MacLeod