Multimedia Projectin collaboration with artist and dance professor Cássia Charrison
In 2004, the largest private mental health asylum in Latin America at the time, Dr. Eiras in Rio de Janeiro, went under federal intervention after 120 people died over four months. In an effort to prepare the institution for closure and trasition patients to humane and caring homes, Cassia Charrison, a contemporary dancer who had been studying therapy through movement, was invited to work with the patients. The idea was to give voice to their bodies so they could communicate more clearly, return to walking, eating and talking again, faculties that most of them had lost during their period of incarceration and abuse.
Cassia’s practice blends the methods of Counciousnes thorugh Movement, pioneered by angel Vianna in Brazil, with the tradition of Healing through Affection and Art pioneered in Brazil by psichiatrist Nise da Silveira. When I saw Cassia interacting with the group for the first time.
Short video pieces have been screened along Cássia’s talks at Angel Vianna Dance College Colloquium (2013), at Angel Ocupa NISE (2018), and at SVA’s Flatiron Gallery as part of the show Concerning Human Understanding (2015). A full feature documentary is expected to be released in 2022, along a book containing the full interviews made throughout the project.