Joe Blog

This year the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital celebrates its 150th anniversary. This milestone marks the hospital as the oldest South African psychiatric facility that is still in use today. To help us remember the patients, Prof. Rory du Plessis composed poems for 25 individuals who were institutionalised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To restore the humanity of the men, as well as to memorialise their lives, Du Plessis investigated their case files to find fragments of information that aid us in appreciating their individuality: their connections with family and friends; their leisure and vocational interests; and their personality and agency. He used these fragments as inspiration for writing the poems.
The School of the Arts: Drama programme at the University of Pretoria, under the artistic guidance of Dr Lelia Bester and Dr Kristina Johnstone, used the poetry as source material to create a performance in which a larger fictional narrative captures their imagined impressions of each individual. With scenography by Nadine Minnaar and costume design by Cindy Nhlangwini, the work combines physicality, sound and text to offer a powerful and evocative response to the book’s provocation to speculate beyond the captured details of the archive.
Automaton(tik) will be performed at the Masker Theatre (University of Pretoria, Hatfield campus) from 4 - 6 December.

“As a collection, part biographical, part fiction, Automaton(tik) places us between what is knowable and what is unknowable. In a prescriptive and dogmatic world, it asks us to stay still awhile, tether all that is fleeting and fragile, bind ourselves to the invisible and lost. After all, is this not poetry’s greater gift?”
- Ashraf Jamal, Daily Maverick

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