mad conductors
co-created with Stephanie Heit
Mad Conductors is a collaborative performance project that arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric medication brain zaps. Through performance, we explore electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being.
what is your personal relationship with electricity?
charred
metal teeth
open mouth
sharp tickle
spider legs
write on my hand
email myself
smell a box of crayons
play a song
Ashwini Bhasi, Slade Billew, Beth Currans, and Sarah Park Dean create a memory score during a Mad Conductors workshop. Photo courtesy Stephanie Heit/Turtle Disco.
sift through medical records
seventh grade
where I put the remote
if I told you this already
what have you forgotten?
how do you remember?
Stephanie Heit
co-director
Production Notes
Mad Conductors events happen in community settings, universities, nature, and especially with people with lived mad experiences. We lead workshops. We give conference presentations. We offer participatory performances. Most importantly, we hold small two or three person gatherings, making house visits or meeting for brunch, meeting in mad fellowship. Together, we work to create supportive spaces to tend to ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.
Previous Mad Conductors venues include the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), National Dance Education Organization (Virtual), RiversideArts Center (Ypsilanti, MI), The Center for Mad Culture (Chicago, IL), and Turtle Disco (Ypsilanti, MI).
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 a shock/psych system survivor, bipolar, 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. Website: https://stephanie-heit.com