Tag Archive for: Big Issue North

The Lancet: Exceptional and extraordinary artists

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The Lancet: Exceptional and extraordinary artists

JUN 04 2016

When he attended a school for deaf children in the 1970s Mark Smith had to use sign language in secret to communicate with his friends. At the time, he had no idea why sign language was taboo. But thanks to a pioneering project that has brought artists together with medical museums in the  UK, he discovered that an 1880 international congress in Milan decreed that sign language should be banned in schools to force deaf children to integrate.

The conference is one of the forgotten tales from history that dancer and choreographer Smith, founder of Deaf Men Dancing, has interpreted in a fusion of dance, theatre, and sign language as part of the Exceptional & Extraordinary project. The initiative invited four artists—Smith plus playwright Julie McNamara, film-maker David Hevey, and comedian Francesca Martinez— to explore the collections of eight museums in the UK to create art which challenges negative ideas of disability.

Hevey’s film Fight for Life examines how people with disabilities today are affected by biomedical decisions and austerity cuts, while Martinez’s performance Wobbly Manifesto challenges audiences to accept diversity. The works will tour the partner museums this month and also be shown to students at Leicester Medical School.

Richard Sandell runs the Exceptional & Extraordinary project with Jocelyn Dodd at the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries. He argues that “medical museums have traditionally shown disability as a deficiency that needs fixing which clashes with the contemporary view of disability pride which has grown out of the disability rights movement. They have been operating in the shadow of the freak show.” Dodd explains that their project “aims to stimulate debate—among doctors as well as the public—about medicalised perspectives of disability using humour and live art”.

Smith has found the project fascinating: “I have discovered so much about the history of deafness.” He was shocked at the number of soldiers made deaf by cannon and guns in World War 1. “I feel it is my responsibility to retell the stories for the next generation”, he says. He was intrigued to find   artifacts too, such as Queen Victoria’s silver ear trumpet in the Thackray Medical Museum, in Leeds, and cumbersome box hearing aids like the one he wore clamped to his chest as a child. The work he has created, Let Us Tell You A Story, incorporates replica hearing aids and trumpets to tell five  stories inspired by the museum collections.

Julie McNamara, who describes herself as “a mad woman made good”, has also reclaimed forgotten history for her play Hold the Hearse! “I have always begged, stolen, and borrowed stories from museums”, she says. When she met the curators of the museums involved she asked each of them two questions: what would they crawl on hands and knees to save in a fi re and what item in the hidden collections most disturbed them. The replies fed her time-slip tale that meshes stories from the Hunterian Museum, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, and the Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability.

In her play, McNamara takes the role of Maudlin Mary who meets Walter Riddle, played by Eden Webber, in the house of 18th-century surgeon John Hunter. Mary wants to reclaim the bones of her child which have been preserved in Hunter’s collection. The story has a personal resonance for McNamara because an older sister was born with anencephaly in 1958. At the time doctors would not let her mother see the baby, who died, describing her as “a monstrous birth”. Having herself spent years “in and out” of psychiatric hospitals, McNamara says: “I hope people, especially doctors, will come away from the play with questions about current attitudes towards mental health but I also hope they will have fun.” She adds: “I write with a bawdy humour.”

Wendy Moore

www.wendymoore.org

Dates and information about Hold the Hearse!

This article first appeared on 4 June 2016 in The Lancet www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30694-8/abstract

 

The Big Issue North: Interview on Hold the Hearse!

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The Big Issue North Blog: Julie McNamara, Hold the Hearse!

JUN 06 2016

Three weeks into rehearsal and I’ve spent most of my time pinned to a specimen jar in one of the zaniest, most challenging stories I’ve presented. Hold the Hearse is my provocative response to investigations into the public and hidden collections of partner museums in Exceptional and Extraordinary.

Following Mat Fraser’s award-winning commission Cabinet of Curiosities, which that toured UK museums in 2015, Exceptional & Extraordinary invited four artists – dance company Deaf Men Dancing led by choreographer Mark Smith, film-maker David Hevey, comedian Francesca Martinez, and me – I’m an artist and playwright – to explore behind the scenes of eight of the UK’s most renowned museums with medical collections – including the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds. Initiated and led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester, Exceptional and Extraordinary is a collaborative project with experts in medical history, disability and museums.

I was 11 when I first visited a museum. I was disruptive in class and couldn’t sit still. So I was given a sketchpad and pencils, and packed off to Lady Lever Art Gallery over the road. I spent the afternoon mesmerized by a statue of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy and the embodiment of compassion. I was just entranced. Beneath the statue it simply said: “She who sits and waits.” So I did.

My work continues to draw upon lost voices in museum collections and archives clamouring to be heard. Crossings was a story about slavery that weaves three women’s voices across three time zones and continents. It began with a story I found on the walls of Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum and then rolled with further snippets from Te PaPa and Petone Settlers Museums in New Zealand.

I suspect Hold the Hearse might ruffle some feathers. What I have to say is not easy to hear. There are huge dilemmas at the heart of museum culture that need addressing if disabled and deaf people are to become central voices.

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Pullen’s giant: imposing power

As a survivor of the psychiatric system I know something about being silenced. This shapes the work I make and the work I’m drawn to. Of all the objects in the collections, I fell in love with Pullen’s Giant. Pullen was described as an idiot savant – a label I detest. He speaks to me as a quiet man with extraordinary ideas. His Giant is an imposing and militaristic embodiment of power that he could climb inside and manipulate from within. A little like me with this show.

In making the show, I chose two stories from the archives at Bethlem and Langdon Down Museums to develop the two characters in the piece. Mad Mary (lunatic, 40, cause of insanity: grief at loss of a child) and Walter Riddle (feeble minded, 17, mental defect) represent the two groups of people I feel are deeply stigmatised in society today because of the ongoing impact of previous biomedical research. Ideas that emerged in the anatomy labs and operating theatres in the 1800s have had a significant and negative impact on the perception of deaf and disabled people to this very day.

At the outset, I asked everybody showing me round their collections two questions – “What would you crawl on your hands and knees through fire to save?” and perhaps more loaded: “What inside your collection most disturbs you, or you’re most afraid of disturbing the public with?” I was often moved by people’s responses, and their intensely personal connections with the archived materials they protect. I was also baffled in equal measure by the things that people found disturbing. Most of the responses to my questions are woven into this show.

We arrive at any collection of artefacts with our own subjective political filters. If I were curating an exhibition from the collections I’ve witnessed, I’d present the same contents driven from the perspective of exclusion. I’d want the awkward questions out in the open. Whose stories are left out? Why are the majority of human skeletons used in teaching museums, small adult females allegedly from the Indian subcontinent? Why are the first images created of patients undergoing trepanning young, black and male? Does life come cheap in some areas of the world? Why do we value some lives more than others?

Presenting disabled and deaf people as spectacle for derision, ridicule or pity is still prevalent. Objectifying medical presentations where unruly minds and bodies were paraded before physicians and surgeons in their teaching theatres were no better than freak shows. All helped to educate the public about their place in the hierarchy of classes, races, civilisations, and nations that was so crucial to the 19th-century world view.

In 2016 we are fast returning to these toxic ideas with Disability and Capability Assessment Centres managed by Atos or Capita to weed out the useless eaters and demonise disabled people.

Dates and information about Hold the Hearse! 

This blog first appeared on 6 June 2016 online  www.bigissuenorth.com/2016/06/blog-julie-mcnamara-hold-the-hearse/18996