Catatonia: A History (2016)

Live performance, 7 min 34 sec

Catatonia is a psychiatric condition marked by episodes of stupor and agitation, physical tics, repetitive speech, and imitative acts or mannerisms. In The Madness of Fear: A History of Catatonia (2018), Edward Shorter and Max Fink argue that catatonia is often triggered by fear and anxiety. When properly diagnosed and treated, catatonic episodes typically resolve within a few days. This transitory quality lends a strange whimsicality to a disorder with no clear point of onset and ever-shifting diagnostic boundaries.

The gestures associated with catatonia — involuntary, precise, charged — are abstract expressions of specific, tormenting memories. Catatonia: A History reenacts these gestures to suggest that trauma is a convulsion in time and motion, producing a singularity: a new form of movement that both emerges from and breaks with structures of repetition.

Catatonia: A History is performed by Noura Seif, with original music by Alaa Abdullatif. Text excerpts are taken from Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) by Daniel Paul Schreber. The work was commissioned by Art Dubai Projects in 2016.