Over a five-year residency at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, Suvendrini Lena, Suvendrini Lena (a neurologist, writer, and professor at the University of Toronto who teaches a class called “Staging Medicine”) created an immersive performance called Here are the Fragments (2019), which is based on Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric writings on listening. The show is a combination of sensory experiences, which include archival materials, whispering voices, live acting, a running narrative, and interviews with people who have lived experience of schizophrenia. The show “reflects on the relationships between identity, history, racism, and mental health” and is meant to be experienced ambiently, so as to convey the open-ended experience of mental illness (“No Proscenium,” n.pag). One critic at The Star has called the production “a fascinating simulation of mental illness,” and indeed the show features many different kinds of simulated aural experiences, including a set of “headphones that echo whoever and whatever is speaking into a microphone at the other end of the room” (Maga, n.pag). In this chapter, I query the sonic dramaturgies by which Lena simulates mad listening.

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Staging Medicine and Sounding Madness in Suvendrini Lena’s Here Are the Fragments

  • Matthew Tomkinson

摘要

Over a five-year residency at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, Suvendrini Lena, Suvendrini Lena (a neurologist, writer, and professor at the University of Toronto who teaches a class called “Staging Medicine”) created an immersive performance called Here are the Fragments (2019), which is based on Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric writings on listening. The show is a combination of sensory experiences, which include archival materials, whispering voices, live acting, a running narrative, and interviews with people who have lived experience of schizophrenia. The show “reflects on the relationships between identity, history, racism, and mental health” and is meant to be experienced ambiently, so as to convey the open-ended experience of mental illness (“No Proscenium,” n.pag). One critic at The Star has called the production “a fascinating simulation of mental illness,” and indeed the show features many different kinds of simulated aural experiences, including a set of “headphones that echo whoever and whatever is speaking into a microphone at the other end of the room” (Maga, n.pag). In this chapter, I query the sonic dramaturgies by which Lena simulates mad listening.