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Budapest W5: Performing Arts - No one ever listens

· Rebecca Loukes, “No one ever listens’: Body, Space, and History in RedCape Theater’s The Idiot Colony,” in A. Harpin & A. Foster eds., Performance, Madness, and Psychiatry(Palgrave, 2014)
"This chapter explores the relationship between history, space and the body and how the interplay of these elements was negotiated to create The Idiot Colony" p.137
"We learned that the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act described four grades of ‘Mental Defective’: ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble-minded’ people, and ‘moral defectives’ defined as: ‘[P]ersons who from an early age, displayed some permanent mental defect cou- pled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment had little or no effect ... Unmarried mothers also became absorbed into this category.'" p.139
"As I argue throughout this chapter, it was precisely the space between fact and fiction, grounded in a solid research process but also permitted to play, that allowed the audience to relate to the stories told in The Idiot Colony. p.141" 
"Kerry Davies comments on the design of asylums that: ‘Space and place were ordered for the purposes of classification, socialisation, and therapy. ... Within hospitals a certain internalisation of spatial hierarchies by patients and staff was expected and relied on.’" p.147
"As Dolly Mackinnon and Catharine Coleborne point out, ‘Identities for staff and patients formed within institutional spaces were ... constructed through power relations.’" p.149
"The characters yearn for a past which never existed, and their actions, witnessed by the audience, are attempts at testimony, or to conjure their memories, to re-tell these stories as they wished they had been." p.153
"We concluded that, over-riding the question of to whom the stories belonged and who should tell them, was the issue of telling them at all – letting them be heard before they disappear forever." P.157





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