The Weyburn Project: Exploring What’s Left of a Paradigm for Psychiatric Care, One Story at a Time

In August and September 2002 Knowhere Productions, a multi-disciplinary performance company of which I am a director, created a site-specific performance in a vacant wing of the former Weyburn Mental Hospital. In exploring the histories within the walls of this magnificent building, The Weyburn Project featured a unique collaboration between artists, mental health care professionals, and communities of southern Saskatchewan. When it opened in 1921, the Weyburn Mental Hospital was on the cutting edge of mental health care. The Hospital’s treatments developed from ‘work and water’ through insulin, electroshock and lobotomy treatments, to the 1950s when Dr. Humphrey Osmond performed the first experiments with LSD (and coined the phrase ‘psychedelic’). But the Hospital also became a depository for those who ‘did not fit in’ such as unwanted children, wives, or elderly parents. The vacant building, with its echoes of both nightmare and nostalgia, stands as a manifestation of the modern, utopian project of universal public health care; its decay evoking the failures, the missteps, and the abuses of this project. In this paper I will examine the various ways in which site-specific performance practices were utilized in The Weyburn Project, and furthermore how the performance is seen to explore the often paradoxical relationships between local identity, as expressed through specific forms, and their placement in a site of global agendas and issues.