Join us for dancing st. elizabeths, a participatory performance event at the Riverside Arts Center.

November 3 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
part of the Disability Arts and Culture Gathering
hosted by Petra Kuppers, Stephanie Heit, and Alexis Riley

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 and featured in the play, Cry of Humanity. After witnessing a video of the dance, we will then work together to create a 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.

from the archive

Cry of Humanity opened at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital on May 2, 1955 in the hospital’s theatre, Hitchcock Hall. The audience was largely comprised of state hospital superintendents and other members of the American Psychiatric Association who had gathered to celebrate the hospital’s centenary. Three additional public performances were given in the following month—the third to an overflow crowd.

Later, the nearly two-and-a-half-hour play was condensed and featured in a short film sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association titled The March of Medicine. The program interleaved scenes from Cry of Humanity with footage captured at the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton, NJ, arguing that while much progress had been made in treating mental illness, greater public investment was needed.

This selection of historical documents, gathered largely from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., examines Cry of Humanity with a particular interest in the “Dream Ballet,” a dance developed and performed by people held at St. Elizabeth’s through the institution’s dance therapy program. Juxtaposing performance artifacts alongside historical documents illuminates the way people held at St. Elizabeth’s used Cry of Humanity to insert themselves into historical narratives of anti-carceral activism, all while framing performance as a form of disability historiography.

The names of these artists are unknown, their names withheld due to patient privacy laws that governed the publication of patient names. Still, their dance remains…

A hand-drawn black and white poster for Cry of Humanity. The image shows a hand holding a key unlocking a door. The text reads, "Come to see Cry of Humanity, a play by the patients."

Marian Chace, a woman with light skin and coiffed hair, leads a room full of women in a warm-up exercise. Together, they recline on the floor and cross one leg over the other, toes pointed. Two nurses, one with deep skin and one with light skin, join

A black and white still from the telecast for Cry of Humanity. The actor playing Dorothea Dix is pictured from the shoulders up. She has light skin and an updo topped with a large nineteenth century bonnet. Her face is crinkled in concern.

SCENE 1. A man, the NARRATOR, steps forward and speaks:

“I’m standing on a stage.

A black and white screenshot from the telecast of Cry of Humanity. A man, The Narrator, stands in front of a blank curtain. He has light skin and neatly combed hair. He wears a dark suit, white shirt, tie, and pocket square

Behind me, my fellow patients at St. Elizabeths are celebrating our centennial. They're performing a play written by ourselves. It's about our founder, Dorothea Lynde Dix, who lived back when Lincoln did and fought for better treatment for people like us. Each person in the play is a mental patient. Each one, and his doctor, and his guardian gave his permission that you might see us do it,

that you can better understand the present by understanding the past.”

A clipping of a 1955 newspaper title. The title reads "Where Dancing is a therapy."

A black and white image of Marian Chace holding hands with three patients holding hands and dancing in a line. All the women, save Chace, have black bars over their eyes, obscuring their identities.

Marian Chace began her work at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital shortly after she left the Denishawn company. Through explorations with people held in the hospital, she developed a mode of dance movement therapy that emphasized collective attunement and self-expression. Through dance, Chace carved out a place for herself within the male-dominated milieu of the psychiatric hospital. Moreover, while her contributions are often understood through medicalizing frameworks, Chace often wrote about her own experiences of depression. To what extent might we understand Chace’s work at St. Elizabeth’s as a mad dance practice, one specifically grounded in embracing (rather than rejecting) the nuances of mad bodily experience?

A black and white drawing of Dorothea Dix scanned from the St. Elizabeths Hospital scrapbook. Dix is shown from the shoulders up; her image is encircled by an ornamented oval frame.

SCENE 4. DIX addresses the legislature:

I've come to present the strong claim of
suffering humanity.

I come to place before the legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. With my own eyes I have seen human beings put into living quarters not fit for swine. I have smelled the stench of decaying flesh and all manner of filth. I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane, and idiotic men and women… The condition of human beings reduced to extremist states of degradation and misery cannot be exhibited in softened language, or adorn a polished page...

NARRATOR:

A black and white still from the telecast of Cry of Humanity. Dorothea Dix stands upstage center, hands clasped around her waist, as she addresses six men representing the state legislature. The men are positioned at a diagonal on either side of her.

Marian Chace, along with six women patients and two nurses, hold hands and dance in a circle. Chace and the nurse have light skin, while the other nurse has deep skin. Only Chace and the nureses' faces are visible; the others' faces are obscured.

Dorothea's one-woman fight to help us, the mentally ill, never gave her a moment's rest. Even when she caught a few winks of sleep, worn and weary from her struggles, she saw our need in her dreams…

the dream ballet

A black and white video of people filmed dancing on a stage. The footage begins by focusing on a large curtain. As people dance behind the curtain, their motions project large shadows that move and morph with each movement they make, creating silhouettes reminiscent of ink blots once used in psychological tests. After a few seconds pass, the camera then cuts to the other side of the screen, where dancers dressed in all black huddle together on the floor in the far corner of the stage. Behind them, a white woman, Dorthea Dix, sits at a desk in a white night dress and night cap typical of the nineteenth century, her face pained in frustration. Suddenly, one of the dancers, a white woman with shoulder length-hair dressed in a black leotard, turns and leaps forward toward the camera, her arms and legs extended then rapidly pulled inward as she crumples onto the floor. One at a time, other dancers enact similar motions as the camera cuts to Dix, who stands and acknowledges the dancers by raising her arms upward along with the ensemble. The camera then cuts to a trio located center stage who crawls towards Dix. One dancer, a Black man, curls upwards, tracing his hands along his sternum as he arcs his spine backward. The camera then turns back to Dix who turns to the ensemble, their backs turned, as together, they lean towards one another, raising their hands upward and outward in unison as their shadows dance on the nearby curtain.

The video is played on loop and without sound.

Production Notes

Ali Pappa

musician, improviser

Ali Pappa is an Austin-based musician, improviser, and arts administrator. They are a neurodivergent, disabled, trans non-binary person of color, and are naturally drawn to creating and performing works that reflect these lived experiences. These days, Ali leans into crip-time, focusing on his health, healing from burnout, and taking projects and collaborative experiences at a pace more in line with his values as a disabled anticapitalist. Their collaboration with Alexis Riley received a B. Iden Payne award for the University of Texas at Austin's kin song: ode to disability ancestors, a virtual performance ritual.

A female presenting person ~ moira ~ sits in an electric vibration of scribbled neon green lines and fuzzy medium green dots and splotches. moira is a disabled Indigenous person with shiny light colored skin.

moira williams

performance documentation

Ali stands in a field of bluebonnets, their hands on their hips. They have shoulder-length dark hair with aqua streaks. They wear sunglasses and smile at the camera.

moira williams (they/them) is a disabled artist, disability cultural activist, access doula, curator and dreamer of Lenni Lenape, Kickapoo and Sami descent. They believe in and initiate embodied research, access as art and celebratory crip resistance and joy in their daily relationships.

Their often co-creative work weaves together ritual making and sharing, and eco-somatics with participatory movement, gatherings and civic engagements.

Their ongoing co-creativity with bodies of water and people, unsettles ableist and ecological boundaries between bodies by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an expansion of Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy”

Most recently moira co-curated Crip’d Ecologies Unfurling Expanded Environments at Root Division in San Francisco, California with Jeremiah Barber. The exhibition and convening received an All California Humanities Grant.

moira has received a New York Humanities Grant, Movement Research AMP Fellowship, Disability + DANCE NYC Social Justice Fellowships, Leonardo Crip Tech Fellowship, a United States Artists Disability Futures Fund. Their work has been at Tangled Arts + Disability Gallery, Toronto, CUE Art Foundation and MoMA PS1 in New York City, Landscape Research, UK and ARoS Museum, Denmark.

They co-wrote an open access and accessible digital essay with Aimi Hamraie Remote Access: A Crip Nightlife Party 2023 CripPandemic Life: A Tapestry Issue 12.1 (Spring 2023), Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry.

moira is honored to be featured in Eliza Chandler’s upcoming book, “Disability Arts Across Turtle Island,” Routledge Press.