"Drama and Psyche: stage expressions of the mind" , A study day organised by The Research Seminar on Early Modern and Contemporary Drama, Laboratoire Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes, EA180, 7th May 2009

This study day is one of the corollary conferences on European Contemporary Drama being held at the University of Toulouse during the 'Universcenes' festival in May 2009. This year, the English play to be performed during the festival is Christopher's Hampton's The Talking Cure (2003): a play about the complex relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, a patient suffering from hysteria. Torn between duty and emancipation, love and jealousy, childhood and adulthood, the conscious and the unconscious, the characters become the loci of a dramatic attempt at recapturing the exploration of the dark continent.
This conference aims at discussing the theoretical and practical relationships between drama and the exploration of the conscious and the conscious. We will observe how playwrights attempt at comprehending this dangerous venture in the dark continent of the psyche through the acting body and scenographic choices. Putting bodies under duress verbally and/or visually, challenging dramatic conventions and trying to invent a language of the mind onstage are the signifiers of a deep fascination for the hidden signifieds of the mind. This tense relationship between sense and symbol is best exemplified onstage; drama is the versatile instrument of the exploration, the symbolic expression of the mind.
Focuses on the textual aspects as well as scenographic attempts at staging the mind, its disorders and its explorers are welcome.
Suggested topics but non exclusive:
- Representing hysteria and other disorders.
- Madness onstage from the 'Scènes de folies' in operas to Sarah Kane's dramatic disposal of emotional burdens.
-the relationships between doctors and patients, guardians and patients -representing the psychiatric environment onstage.
-troubled minds, troubled bodies: corporeity and mental duress.
-the psychiatrists as demiurges or victims -the combination of dance and psychiatry -theatre as a talking cure, as a cure...

Organisation : Nathalie Rivère de Carles.
Communications en anglais ou en français.
Propositions (300 mots maximum) à envoyer avant le 1er avril 2009.
Contact : nrivere@univ-tlse2.fr