Welcome to Mad Conductors, a collaborative performance project that arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric medication brain zaps. Mad Conductors is an exploration of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being.
What happens when energy is transferred? Who or what conducts the ensemble? How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? What resources do mad ancestors and archives offer?
Join us to investigate and play with these questions through writing, movement, doodling, sound, and other mediums we invent. We will work together to create a supportive space to tend ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care. We are excited to create offerings in community settings, universities, nature, and especially with people with lived experience.
Check below for future virtual and in person offerings and sign up for the Turtle Disco Newsletter, which will include all upcoming events.
Directors of Mad Conductors:
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), invites readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. Her poetry collection The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference.
Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white disabled psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary artist-scholar from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). Grounded in disability culture and rooted in feminist praxis, their work blends practice as research and applied theatre methods to center mad bodies as sources of pleasure, connection, and care. Her current performance series, The Mad Memory Project, applies this focus to the archives and spaces of medical incarceration. Recent writing and creative projects have been featured in Theatre Topics (2019), QT Voices (2022), Liminalities (2024). Alexis is currently a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan.. IG: @madmapsproject
Check out more about Mad Conductors as well as Alexis’ other projects here: www.madmemoryproject.com
Mad Conductors is generously supported by the Research, Catalyze, Innovate grant from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance.
Recent Workshops & Performances
Disability Arts & Culture Gathering
Mad Conductors & Crip/Mad Archive Dances
with Nazifa Islam, Stephanie Heit, Alexis Riley, Jennifer Lickers, and Petra Kuppers [in person]
Saturday, November 2, 2024
11am-1pm
Riverside Arts Center, upstairs in dance studio, accessible space, elevator entrance is from outside
76 N Huron St. Ypsilanti, MI 48197
Mad Conductors
Join us for a participatory performance that explores memory, remembering, and forgetting. How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? We’ll explore improvisational scores that invite us to investigate and play through writing, movement, doodling, sound, and other mediums we invent. You are welcome to witness and/or to participate to whatever level you wish. We will work together to create a supportive space to tend ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.
Crip/Mad Archive Dances
A screening of an experimental documentary with the same title. 35 mins, dir. Petra Kuppers, 2024. How do disabled and mad people survive, dance, insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain? This experimental documentary charts disability culture archives and embodied gestures of survival and creative expression. It draws on community with human and non-human others: media clips as performance gifts, archival footage from dance archives, environmental embedment and grounding in trees, water, desert and lakes. Together, we dance, and spring our binds. Please note: This experimental documentary shares instances of medical incarceration including insulin violence. It offers survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation. The film is fully subtitled in English. A full audio-description track is available on SoundCloud. The documentary uses “crip,” and “mad” as in-group signifiers, aware of stigma and histories.
dancing st. elizabeth’s with Alexis Riley and Ali Pappa (documented by moira williams) [in person]
Sunday November 3, 2024
11am-12:30pm
Riverside Arts Center, upstairs in dance studio, accessible space, elevator entrance is from outside
76 N Huron St. Ypsilanti, MI 48197
Come immerse yourself in the archives of disability art! Together, we’ll explore “The Rorschach Ballet,” a dance piece created by disabled people held at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in 1957. After witnessing a video of the dance, we will then work together to create an improvised performance of our own, using our bodies and movements to play with projections of shadow and light. We’ll conclude with some time for quiet writing, doodling, and shared reflection.
This workshop is open to all. No previous experience or skill required.
Mad Conductors & Crip/Mad Archive Dances
with Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Alexis Riley [in person]
Friday, November 8, 2024
Performance 7pm, Opening 5-9pm
The Center for Mad Culture
410 S. Michigan Ave #419 Chicago, IL 60605
Performance as part of Dunning exhibition opening, see descriptions above
Tending Mad Ancestors with Matt Bodett, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, and Alexis Riley [in person, outside]
Saturday, November 9, 2024
11am-12:30pm
on-site of old asylum grounds at Read Dunning Memorial Park
Chicago, IL FREE
Join us in an action to honor and remember those who were incarcerated in the Dunning Insane Asylum. We will meet on the old asylum grounds at Read Dunning Memorial Park, one of the sites where inmates were buried in unmarked graves. We’ll use our breath and bodies to witness the land and its presences and absences. Together we’ll respectfully activate the space with gestures of remembrance and care, through space and time, into the present moment.
Past Mad Conductors Offerings
Memory Lanes ~ A Mad Conductors Workshop with Stephanie Heit & Alexis Riley [in person]
11am-1pm Saturday, May 25,2024
Turtle Disco in Ypsilanti, Michigan (College Heights Neighborhood, address given upon registration)
FREE
Join us for a workshop to explore memory, remembering, and forgetting. How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? We’ll explore improvisational scores that invite us to investigate and play through writing, movement, doodling,sound, and other mediums we invent. We will work together to create a supportive space to tend ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.
Bring: writing/art materials you desire (journal,pen, colored pencils, computer etc.). Dress in layers to support movement and stillness.
Access Info: Free. No experience necessary. All are welcome. We especially want to extend an invite to people with lived experience of psychiatric systems and/or madness, mental health difference, or however you choose to identify. Wheelchair accessible space.
Covid info: Masks welcome. Air purifier used in space.If you are sick or experiencing symptoms, please do not come.
Registration: Limited number of spots, so please register by emailing Stephanie: stephanieheit@gmail.com
Mad Conductors: Dancing New Mental Health Futures [virtual]
as part of the National Dance Education Organization
Disability and Dance Virtual Summit
Saturday, April 6, 2024
online 30 minute session, 3:30-4pm Eastern
Join Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley for an experiential presentation about their community performance project, Mad Conductors, that arises from lived psych experiences and explores electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being.
Mad Conductors Workshop [in person]
Thursday, February 8, 2024
10:00am -11:50am
Guest artists in Tzveta Kassabova’s Movement II class in the theater department at University of Michigan
a collaborative performance project by Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley that arises from our lived psych experiences and explores electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being.
Queer Mad Electric ~ A Mad Conductors Workshop as part of Co-Dreaming: Improvisation Toward Liberatory Worlding [in person] with pateldanceworks
October 16-20, 2023 Queer Dance Improvisation Residency
Mad Conductors Workshop
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Township Commons, Engagement Park
Oakland, California
A note on the origins of Mad Conductors
Originally, this project began with the intention of making a performance piece based on Stephanie’s book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS, which shares her lived experience of shock treatments, psychiatric wards, suicidal ideation, and extreme bipolar states. Alexis was going to collaborate as a dramaturg for the piece. As they started working together, something new wanted to emerge.
One important realization Stephanie had as she and Alexis were driving to meet a community participant, who also has lived experience with ECT (electroshock), was that in the nearly twelve years since her “treatments,” she hadn’t actually spoken in depth with anyone else who had had ECT.
Of course, she’d talked with other people while she was in the psych ward but, even then, that was more about procedure details and not the impact to their lives. Basically, after discharge, there weren’t many opportunities to chat.
On this first meeting, some of the questions explored and reflected on were:
What has supported you in healing from shock treatment?
How have you integrated the experience?
How have you worked with memory loss?
What do you wish people asked you about your shock experiences?
Mad Conductors intends to create a space for people to witness their own psychiatric histories in connection and in community. This feels especially important when so many of these experiences happen in isolation and in silence.