Last Stop: Leeds
The Trephination Tour’s final stop (for now) at Thackray Museum was so very special.
The Amanda that walked to call time in the frostbitten sunshine said it succinctly & best.
I’m sitting in the lobby of my hotel, trying to decide how to best convey how wonderful the last two days have been. Leeds, you are magical.
Even donning make-up and wardrobe for this final Trephination Tour performance (for now), with the same old playlist I’ve used to prepare since 2022, became a blurry-eyed ritual.
The show was, frankly, fantastic.
It was an honour to be in such a beautiful city, with fellow human beings so eager to bear witness to the things I had to let out.
It was an honour to work with Thackray Museum of Medicine, who share my commitment to telling the truth about what ‘treatment’ has meant throughout the ages.
It was an honour to share a pre-show coffee with Daisy; to meet Ross, Jamie, George, and the rest of the team, all of whom made me feel truly special and valued.
The incredibly attentive audience at Thackray asked so many curious [and flattering] questions. I thought I’d transcribe a few of them, and my answers, below.
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One of the great gifts Trephination gave me was the ability to set a goal to do as many things as possible acting teachers have told me not to do because they wouldn’t be recognisable to wider audiences as ‘natural’. Understanding my brain from an expert angle changes very little about my performance, but having a relationship of empathy and paying attention to my mind has freed me to be reactive in ways that are natural to me. I’m much more fun to watch, because I’m allowing the audience to meet my experience.
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Psychology and I have seen each other for quite some time, and sometimes—particularly at my first diagnosis—I found the systemic treatments provided from mainstream psychological research incredibly helpful. That acknowledged, as I’ve matured, I’ve grown to value our individual attempts to understand each other’s special and universal experiences of life far more than the analysis offered by big-P Psychology™. Trephination has stopped using Psychology to explain myself to neurotypical people, and encouraged me to ask them to explain their equally strange and illogical experiences to me.
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Yes! I’m keen to bring Trephination to as many practising mental health service providers as possible, and have approached mental healthcare organisations both in the UK and abroad. None have responded to enquiries. There is still real hesitation to platform vocally mad people in treatment spaces across a lot of the medical industry, but the presence of so many psychology professionals in the audience at Thackray makes me hopeful these boundaries are slowly being broken. If you’d like to bring Trephination for the Twenty-First Century to your operating theatre or residential treatment centre, please get in touch here!
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First of all, I'm absolutely humbled. [The highlight of tour was having my performance compared by this audience member to Jodie Comer's in Prima Facie. Bless you.] I actually have approached the National Theatre's New Works department with Trephination for the Twenty-First Century, and they decided the piece wasn't for them. But who knows? Maybe one of you know someone who can help get this project out into the world!
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See the blog post on “Mad Grief: Place” — I extend my maddest gratitude for the gasp that rippled through the crowd at the idea someone would call the experience we shared a ‘reputational risk’.
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Yes.
This project is the one I’m most grateful to share, because I have watched it change things, one person at a time.
Our incredibly thoughtful and inquisitive post-show conversation on care was graciously facilitated by Jess Corner with their characteristic investigative humour.
You might recognise Jess as the voice consultant for the #TrephinationTour—fellow mad artists who struggle with body presence & breath work, Jess is the practitioner for you!
I’ve not got it in my tired, grateful, inspired, drained, moved body to formally wrap the Trephination Tour—or, at least, this leg of it.
I can say, Leeds, you’re gorgeous. Thank you for having me. Let’s do it again soon?
London, I love you.
‘Twas a glorious night bringing Trephination home to the Old Operating Theatre.
Trephination for the Twenty-First Century has concluded its second tour stop, returning to London’s most underrated historical gem, The Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret in Southwark. The show was conceived here in 2022 with the generous faith of the Old Op staff, particularly Monica Walker, who was the first conservationist I could get excited about letting a crazy lady touch her stuff. Maybe it’s our encouraging and mutually enthusiastic history together—or the warm wood with which the theatre was built in 1822—or the fact that I can walk to the infamous spiral staircase with my suitcase of magic from Borough in 6 minutes flat—but performing in the Old Op always feels like coming home.
Fantastic friend and fellow mad storyteller Sammy Trotman facilitated our post-show care conversation.
Check out Sammy’s show, That’s Not My Name!
The audience for this show was primed to care from the first glance we shared. The kindness and curiosity and understanding flowing between all of us in this room was a balm for the soul, and our post-show conversation on care ran well over its allotted 15 minutes as strangers shared their intrusive thoughts, diagnostic experiences, and theatrical breakthroughs. Every single audience member stayed to hear their fellow human’s hearts.
'the epitome of care... so poignant and relatable'
'the epitome of care... so poignant and relatable'
London audience reactions
London audience reactions
'captivating, empathetic and, gosh — yes, brave'
'captivating, empathetic and, gosh — yes, brave'
Trephination audiences are universally kind and open-minded. They always meet the work with ‘the greatest willingness’ I request in the prologue; they are the reason I have such fyeaith in humanity.
I would be observationally ignorant to leave these audiences, who come from different communities, enticed to join us by different communications, and not believe in people.
To our sponsors, thank you so much for making sure everyone in the audience could make it.
To everyone who attended, thank you from the bottom of my mascara-stained heart.
As I take my leave of London to travel onwards to Leeds,
The Old Op says it best.
P.S. Meet the new friends I found waiting at my make-up station!
P.P.S. I got home to this cryptic crossword clue…
Mad Grief: Place
Or, ‘Why Trephination Isn’t Coming to [Insert Famous Former Asylum Here]’
I am sitting in the Wellcome Collection’s sterile Rare Materials room, attempting—and failing—to pore over a magnificently yellowed copy of Hospitals and Aslyums of the World (Burdett, H.C. 1891). I feel sick, and sad, and angry, and all of these things in shameful and confused doses.
Tracking down former operating theatres & lunatic aslyums for Trephination to reclaim for mad people has been a challenge, to say the least. Contact has been made with somewhere between 20 and 30 organisations, and research done into far more. There was ‘an asylum in every county’ of the UK by the end of the 19th century. MH 94 documents over 2.5 million admissions to psychiatric wards and hospitals between 1846 and 1960 alone. Buildings and structures dedicated to the ‘treatment’ of lunacie, idiocy, and madnesse were everywhere.
And suddenly, with the advent of de-institutionalisation, they vanished.
These places seem, from my searchings, to follow one of three paths from the 60s forward.
The institution or hospital is recognised as a historical site and preserved to contextualise history. This is the least frequent route taken.
The institution or hospital is quickly washed of all traces of the asylum era. Locals often want to preserve the architecture they can see from beyond the front gate, but the inside, where atrocities—or simply daily lives of the inmates housed there—occurred, is gutted, sterilised, and re-purposed. Many NHS mental health wards were re-purposed in this way.
The institution or hospital is left to decay, until it becomes a hotspot for morbid-curious urban explorers to document with an SLR for a thrill. When it becomes unsightly enough, the skeleton is demolished. The stories within are buried in yellowed book pages behind secure glass walls, and in rubble.
Trephination’s tour stops are all from the first category of places. Each is dedicated to contextualising the work, positive and destructive, that happened within its walls, so that human curiosity has a natural outlet—one to meet it with fact. Madness is present, and acknowledged, and curiosity about it is encouraged, so that open conversation can occur. I am so lucky that these institutions have welcomed me in and allowed me to speak about the mad experience from a place of subject-matter expertise.
Many wonderful, well-meaning colleagues have approached me on the journey and asked, “Why aren’t you stopping at [insert famous still-standing former asylum here]?” And the answer is that these places, from the second route, either ignore my attempts to connect, or—sometimes—decline to host Trephination entirely. One curator put a bold voice to these rejections, saying that Trephination would invite ‘reputational risk for you as well as us’. The concern in these moments is centred on the judgment of those who support the hypothetical mission of reclamatory spaces but who would be uncomfortable with the actual reclamation of surgical terms by someone who would have undergone them.
I suppose my response to these situations is that I already undergo reputational risk, day by day, by openly being mad. I have no choice. This tour has broken my faith in institutions I had great respect for, because they are only willing to share the mad experiences that are palatable to the neurotypical people consuming them. It doesn’t matter that the content of the show has been received as thoughtful and well-held; it doesn’t matter that I hold an honours degree in Psychology. I am not trusted to share my madness in these spaces, and these spaces are not willing to undergo the actual public scrutiny mad people face every day, in spite of being ‘for’ them.
The third route is the one that leaves me restless, wandering from hall to hall up here in my ivory research tower. I’m 5; I know I’m a freak; I feel alone. I’m 13; I’m diagnosed; I have a community. I’m 18; I read about what happened to people like me; I want to know, and to be known. I’m 26; I try to make a pilgrimage; my sacred places have been razed.
So often, our human response to being told we have done something wrong is to remove the evidence these things ever happened. We hope, if our community extinguishes the remainders of these crimes, that we can slowly move on as if we have grown from them. A graveyard becomes a luxury housing development, behind a shinier, newer gate.
There is nowhere for those left behind to mourn.
It would be one thing if the mad community came together, organised a summit to vote upon the fate of these asylums, and unanimously (or in an overwhelming majority) elected to burn them to the ground. [I was always drawn to arson.]
But we all know that isn’t what happened.
Someone in an office sneered a dreadful sneer, waved a hand, made it all go away.
Just like they did to us.
Just like they do to us.
“Even this moment is an attempt at not being palatable.”
I am so grateful for people who see mad people as fellow humans, as experts in their own right, and platform authentic mad stories.
I am so grateful that these books and drawings and photographs still exist to prove these things happened.
I am so grateful for all my audiences who feel their curiosity with madness and brain surgery and death makes them a little evil.
It isn’t evil to want to know these things. It’s evil to silence them—and the silencing only begets more hunger to know.
I’m really looking forward to seeing you in London and Leeds; the opportunity to care and be cared for in these spaces with you is not lost on me. I’ll keep looking for the next one.
With care, always. x
First Show Down!
Peterborough, I love ya.
I am the cozy filling of my double-weighted-blanket ravioli in London, having just returned from a wonderful inaugural tour performance in Peterborough.
The greatest honour of performing in these operating theatres is sitting where my mad ancestors once sat, and spending a pre-show moment being present for the space itself. I am not a particularly spiritual person, but I do believe in energy, and try to make space in my pre-show nerves to appreciate the view from where am I—particularly as most Victorian operating theatres were equipped with skylights to render surgery properly visible.
My view for last night’s load-in was absolutely stunning. Waiting for the audience to arrive, I caught glimpses of the surgical tool display, my own body, cars passing outside the open (original) windows, and the stunning lamps suspended from below.
I was more nervous for this show than I’ve been for anything in a long while: lest anyone doubt that I am as funky-headed as the show would have you believe, I cried of overstimulation at the TK Maxx a few hours before my scheduled line-run. The build-up to this tour has given me a lot of practise in sitting with discomfort; something I’ve carried from this work into my consulting practise is that even when my brain knows my work is good and people like me and I have nothing of which to be afraid, my body will still hold onto and perpetuate fear responses. And the only way to escape that conditioned adrenaline-cortisol response is to make space for, and refuse to be ashamed of, it. I’d love for you to think this tour went off without a hitch, but I’d be doing a real disservice to a) the labour it requires of me and b) the labour all personal art requires of all artists. Pushing against my own trauma responses is an immense gift offered to me by this tour, but it is challenging, and I don’t want to glaze over that.
In moments of crisis management—particularly when I require an attitude adjustment—I find the nearest large birds to sit with, since being loud and honky won’t be of disturbance to them. Luckily, the River Nene is thriving with swans.
“a fascinating evening that I’m still thinking about.”
The performance itself was magnificent. There were aspects of me that only appeared with this audience, which was largely comprised of self-professed mental health service users (like me). To be able to perform a Trephination for them, in such a special part of their home, and hear their experiences with care afterward, so beyond affirmed the work Trephination for the Twenty-First Century seeks to do in communities. A group of strangers—some recently diagnosed in adulthood, some long-spurned by the system—came together and discussed the ins and outs of mental illness and neurodivergence with candour and care for each other that constantly blows me away. I’m so, so grateful for those who came out and made the tour kickoff so very special.
“This was brilliant. Thought provoking, emotional, profound.”
Aimi, the Arts Development & Community Outreach Officer for Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, was the first and loudest venue advocate for the tour of Trephination outside its first home at the Old Operating Theatre, and I rest much easier as someone dancing between the worlds of psychology and drama knowing there are people like Aimi vouching for the platforming of mentally ill voices. If you’re ever in Peterborough, please give her, Eric, and the entire staff my warmest gratitude.
Joyous aside: the #TrephinationTour prints & Lobotomy zines were also received enthusiastically!
If you’re not near a tour venue, you can get both the limited, hand-signed-and-numbered Tour prints and lobotomy zines on my Etsy.
The tour will be re-commencing after a festive break in January at The Old Operating Theatre in London and Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds. If you know of an operating theatre or asylum I should be visiting, please…
The tour has begun!
Chaos abounds, but I’m happy to be here.
Thanks to the gracious donations made to the #TrephinationTour fund, I have arrived in Peterborough. The journey was one of confusing omens: I caught sight of an exploded fake-snow machine, fluff covering the floor, walking past Hamley’s to catch my train from London Bridge, and arrived just in time for a bomb scare in the centre of town.
I realised, while packing, that I haven’t traveled, spent the night anywhere but my flat, since I immigrated to the UK in 2020.
The chaos makes sense, in a way: in the final moments of morning-of-travel packing, throwing my phone charger and kids’ toothpaste (faithful friends know I choke on peppermint) in my bag, I made sure to draw my tarot—the “fun” part of my daily centring work—and was met with the Five of Candles and the Wheel of Fortune. Officially, I don’t believe in divination—but it gives me something to focus on for the day, and man, did the day follow through.
I decided early on that one of my access needs for this tour would be a day of space before the first tour date, to accustom to my environment and work through any brain chaos in advance of returning publicly to this piece a year after its premiere. Perhaps the external chaos set my mind at ease, or perhaps I’m simply getting the hang of rocking and rolling in the moment, but I feel fine. I believe this day of adjustment and calm was so needed—but, having had it, I’m ready to meet the tour’s first audience members tomorrow.
It may have helped that I snuck a reccy into tomorrow’s operating theatre. It’s stunning. The space is blunt and honest and open, and it will hold me and this story so well.
I'm so grateful to be here.
I'm so grateful to be here.
Until tomorrow, friends.
UK Tour Dates & Ticket Info
Hot off the presses, here are the Trephination Tour’s confirmed show dates.
Hot off the presses, here are the Trephination Tour’s confirmed show dates.
11th January 2024 @ 18:00
London
Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
Old Operating Theatre (est. 1822)
Performance tickets here.
Trephination Workshop
15th January 2023
Tickets coming soon.
18th January 2024 @ 18:00
Leeds
Thackray Museum of Medicine
Replica Operating Theatre (est. 1997)
Performance tickets coming soon.
Tickets are priced to best serve the needs of each venue, but no ticket will be above £20 across the tour.
I sometime receive sponsors for tickets along the tour. If ticket cost is a barrier to you, please e-mail sponsoratrephination@gmail.com with your city. Sponsored tickets for Trephination for the Twenty-First Century are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
I can't wait to see you.
I can't wait to see you.
See you in Leeds…
Trephination has a new tour stop!
It’s a joy to finally say that Trephination for the Twenty-First Century will be stopping at Thackray Museum of Medicine this winter!
Details coming soon!
Watch this space.
Details coming soon! Watch this space.
The #TrephinationTour fund is open!
With four months before Trephination for the Twenty-First Century embarks on tour, a lovely little Crowdfunder is up and running to collect all your spare pennies in the service of paying artists, obtaining transportation, and publishing workshop participants’ own “trephinations” in a post-tour zine.
I have something to let out.
Trephination for the Twenty-First Century is going on tour.
Trephination for the Twenty-First Century is going on tour.
Did you hear that, world?
I'm going on tour!
I'm going on tour!
The journey begins at
The Victorian Operating Theatre
Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery
Peterborough, UK
9th November 2023
6 p.m.
and ends where it started at
The Old Operating Theatre
London, UK
11th January 2024
6 p.m.
Further dates and locations TBA.