The Weyburn Project: Excavation of Silence and the Discourse of Madness

This paper discusses aspects of an interdisciplinary, site-specific performance, staged in the abandoned wing of the Mental Hospital, Weyburn, Saskatchewan.  Built in 1921, then the largest building in the British Empire, it served the mainly rural population of south-central Saskatchewan. At optimum use, in the 50’s, it housed 5000 staff and patients; the widespread acceptance of pharmaceuticals, including LSD, allowed the de-institutionalization of its population in the 70’s. It now stands abandoned and deteriorating and represents a vexed past. The building speaks for itself.  Its architecture and monumentality are not mute on notions of utopianism and modernity; it is a graphic articulation of an edenic, if paternalistic, social project. Its decay frames the discourse as a failed project of modernity; its abandonment represents a denial of the loss and abuse that still echoes. Site-specific performance uses “found space” as the starting-point for devised work that is inseparable from the site. Using an overlay of historical and contemporary detail, it creates an open work that combines the myth/memory/dream embedded in the “host” building, reveals the interpenetration of space, place, culture and history.  Through performance, 40 multi-disciplinary artists and 25 retired nurses gave a reading of the building that explored subjectivity, identity, privacy, control, and the steps/missteps in defining and treating mental health within the institution. The project exemplifies how site-specific performance addresses national/global issues through local/specific concerns while working to bridge and heal diverse, occasionally polarized populations.