Dylan knows the drugs don’t work and he’s got other ideas for what will. Through a collage of music, 16mm film, performance, and a (thankfully) short-lived bit of nudity, he delves into the depths of mental health and our sick ways of viewing it.
You’re calling RECORD an ‘alternative opera’, but what is the whole thing exactly?
Well it’s a project that has a few different parts to it. The first part is this album I made over the past few years, then the album is the source material for a performance which combines the live music with a collage of other elements to tease out the material in the songs. I was interested in reconceptualising how live music is presented, blurring those boundaries between a gig, a theatre show, an installation, a performance, a screening, a lecture, a comedy gig. Then the third part of the project is a whole series of events – talks, debates, screenings – around the performance, all dealing with the subject of mental health.
It seems like you’ve mounted a one-man campaign to change the way we look at mental health and mental illness in this country. Where did that come from?
It came very much from my own experience of dealing with psychiatric services over many years, and just being profoundly dissatisfied with the way it explained to me and itself what mental health issues were about. So the performance in a way gathers all of that experience into an archive which is then drawn on for the performance. I use my psychiatric records which I got through Freedom of Information, which go back over quite a few years, to trace my own history of treatment and diagnosis, certain medications I was on, and the interpretation of me that is represented in these notes. The real motivation for me in the beginning was to get away from that frame of pharmaceutical drugs, of psychiatrists, that whole rigmarole, and try and use that as a springboard to share that information, to then open up that discussion wider in general. I wanted to say essentially that art can deal with mental health much better than medicine.
Did you in a way take advantage of the different way of being and seeing things that your “bipolar disorder” affords you, to shape things into a very original show? Was it in fact a positive force in its perceived ‘difference’ when it came to making art?
What I’m trying to propose in the piece is that bipolar disorder is a construct, it doesn’t exist. The psychiatric category of “bipolar disorder” is extremely subjective, it’s basically made up. What you’re essentially dealing with is just a manifestation of a crisis of the human condition of whatever variety, and that experience is who I am, so in a sense it was logical to me that I would delve into that experience. But also with the aim of creating meaning from it. Psychiatry will tell you that that experience has no meaning, it’s in the language itself, ‘disorder’, ‘dysfunction’, ‘abnormality’, something to be side-lined. While it is considered something negative [bipolar disorder] there is also a positive side, in that there’s an incredible amount of learning to be gained from that experience.
You say the system is inherently flawed, the medical model doesn’t work. Explain how, and what is the alternative you are proposing?
Essentially psychiatry treats a highly individual process in a very general way. And the biological conception of “mental illness” suggests that it’s down to a chemical imbalance, but that’s wrong, the evidence simply isn’t there. The first thing anyone discovers when they present themselves to a psychiatrist is that there isn’t any mental test of any kind. There is no objective test. What I am proposing is that people need to be supported and encouraged to arrive at their own interpretation of their own experience, rather than the interpretation being put upon them. The psychiatric model doesn’t encourage people to get to the ‘philosophical’ which is a huge component, it can’t be dealt with the medical way. I’m proposing that people construct their own asylum.
What does it feel like to have put out something so personal and exposing, and to have received a huge response, both from critics and audiences?
It feels very liberating to be honest. To see that actually putting myself at the forefront of it, that it’s me performing it, by being hopefully as brutally honest as possible about my own experience in itself sends out a powerful message that may inspire people to be as honest as they can. Unfortunately there is so much mystique and taboo around mental health issues. I suppose I want to contribute to a normalization of that experience- essentially for me it’s an identity issue, and it’s a human right to define your identity. But it does feel liberating.
What’s your favourite part of the show, the bit you look forward to every night?
Well the unexpected thing is that it’s a comedy, using humour as a subversive force became really important. But the bit I like the most – as the show goes on it goes from something very factual to something quite fantastical. As it moves into fantasy I start to imagine my own recovery which involves palm trees, beaches and beautiful women. That’s the most enjoyable moment, to inhabit that imagined recovery. That’s what I’m trying to say – that the imagined recovery is maybe more important than the facts, that being able to enact something through the imagination can become real.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A331HNdIVLk
Record runs at the New Theatre from the 2nd until the 7th October. Tickets available here.
Words: Roisin Agnew
