Month: February 2016

“In cabaret shows and musicals such as My Beautiful Black Dog, performers at the fringe are breaking the taboo of mental health”

I believe that  as a nation, the UK has never excelled at talking about its own state of mind. From discussions about depression to frank admissions of unhappiness, such matters have mostly remained taboo in favour of maintaining that very British stiff upper lip.

Bridgett Aphrodite says that people don’t want to talk about this stuff,  so  “I thought by putting it in the format of a musical it almost lures them into a false sense of security until they realize what the songs are about. I do feel like things are maybe changing a little but I know from experience there is still such a huge stigma attached when anyone even mentions depression.”

Grandeur, with humbleness. Pride, with soberness. Gladness, with regret. Peace, with finality. Understanding, with incompleteness. So many things are conjured in my mind as I hear this.

If you have never experienced depression, you wouldn’t know what it would be like to live with it each day. And I myself do not know. So I decided to research more about this mental illness. Bellow are anonymous account of people who have or are suffering from depression. After reading it I felt how incredibly lonely someone with depression must feel. The day to day struggles they must face, the complete frustration and pain would be unbearable. However, I found there accounts extremely  poetic and moving and I feel like they could provide me with a stimulus for my own performance.

.”Slipping into depression feels like falling down a dark bottomless shaft, wondering if and when your fall will ever be caught. And as you look back to where you fell from–which is where you know you need to get back to–you can see it receding further into the distance, the proverbial light becoming dimmer and dimmer, while the shaft into which you are falling becomes deeper, darker, and all the more enveloping.”

.”It’s like drowning … except you can see everyone around you breathing.” 

. “Depression is like swimming through treacle.”

.”Nothingness.”

.”Like mourning the death of someone you once loved–you. When you look in the mirror you see only dead eyes. There is no spark. No joy. No hope. You wonder how you will manage to exist another day.”

Theatre artist Brian Copeland’s one-man show The Waiting Period, which premiered at the Marsh San Francisco in 2012, is all about grappling with suicidal depression and what to do when you feel like nothing can be done. Despite the bleak subject matter, it’s a wonderfully funny show that explores some of the darkest depths of the human psyche. Copeland was having a particularly hard year in 2008. His grandmother died, his marriage fell apart, and he was badly injured in a car accident. Things got so bad that he bought a handgun with the intention of committing suicide. But in California, there’s a 10-day waiting period before you can actually take a firearm home, and during those 10 days Copeland got through the worst of his depression.

In The Waiting Period, he tells the audience all about what he went through during that time-span — and, most importantly, how he came out of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to not think of a human existence when listening to this song. When I listen to songs I try and piece together  chronologically everything that’s ever happened to me– birthdays and funerals, weddings and break-ups, workdays and trips abroad, all of it. Songs of the amazing will to evoke our deepest emotions. It can heal us, make us sad, make us happy and inspire us.

Anthony and the Johnson’s Hope There’s Someone, is where we experience the fullness of a lifespan in a few overpowering minutes. As the listener  it is hard for us to not think about death, to wonder where we will go after this life and who will look after us when we are gone? Its is incredibly beautiful as it is also about love and letting go, letting go of a loved one perhaps?  One of the lines reads “So he’s hoping I will not drown” this would work well in my performance, in regards to Virginia’s Suicide.