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Budapest W9: Performing Arts - Performing Depression

Kirsty Johnston, “Performing Depression: The Workman Theatre Project and the Making of Joy. A Musical. About Depression,” Text and Performance Quarterly 28 (1-2), 2008:206-224

 "By focusing on the individual’s experience of mental health services, the membership rubric aims to resist labeling individuals by medical diagnosis." p.208

 "The process aims to challenge stigma of mental illness, respect the voices of people who have experienced mental illness, innovate with new strategies for representing mental illness on stage, and engage the public in mental health issues and concerns." p.208

"Mentally ill characters were thus not only wholly embodied onstage but also accompanied by hyper-embodiments of antidepressant side-effects." p.215

 "Each of the individual representational choices in Joy may seem merely to reiterate longstanding madness cliche ́s such as erratic behavior, diminished affect, or slowed movement. However, by enlarging some elements and minimizing others, the effect was to destabilize any single representation and suggest greater complexity in depression experience." p.218




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