Mental illness between subject and object: radical empathy and shared subjectivity in two contemporary performances

Abstract

This article discusses two contrasting contemporary performance pieces which explore mental illness: Laura Jane Dean’s Head Hand Head (2013), a solo autobiographical performance about Dean’s experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Theatre Témoin’s The Fantasist (2012), which combines the techniques of puppetry and Lecoq-derived physical theatre to explore bipolar disorder. Using performance analysis and interviews with the performers, it explores different ways of communicating the experience of mental illness to an audience. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theory, and research on empathy in cognitive science, it will suggest that while the performances partake of very different aesthetic frameworks, both function by manipulating the relationship between subject and object. Neither performance straightforwardly offers ‘insight’ into the experiences they are based on, but both rather transpose these experiences, creating a space of shared subjectivity. In this way, they bear witness to the complexities of mental illness, constructing their subjects as Others whose minds the audience can perceive empathetically, but not necessarily understand.