Award Winning Show NEUROCHATTER Comes To Manchester & Edinburgh Fringe 2024
The play is the winner of Brighton Fringe’s Outstanding Neurodiverse Performance award.
Neurochatter has been announced as part of Manchester Fringe (Ed Fringe Previews) playing at The Fitzgerald, 11 Stevenson Sq, NQ, Manchester, M1 1DB on 23, 24, 25 July 2024 and at Edinburgh Fringe at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall (Theatre 3), Edinburgh, running 19 - 23 August 2024.
Mike, Elliott and Host happen to be the same person; they just don't know it yet. Can they break through to reality or will they remain in fragmented fantasy together?
Recipient of this year's 'Keep it Fringe' Fund & Winner of Brighton Fringe's Outstanding Neurodiverse Performance award, one actor (S.J Harvey) embodies her three alter egos in this tragicomedy Psycho-Drama; recounting the fragmentation of her mind and what it took to confront her rupture in psyche.
During her time in therapy, S.J Harvey experienced heightened altered states of consciousness all with their own names, gender, wishes and wants. Her play NeuroChatter focuses on three of those alterations in her identity:
'Mike' - an eccentric, scatterbrained academic,
'Elliott' - a defensive aspiring artist and
'Host' - the reluctant, True-Self hiding behind her two identities.
Together, they battle out their shared existence, venturing deeper to confront their 'Shadow-Self' and unwittingly begin an unravelling of the mind within the realms of dissociation. From rupture they stumble upon painful realisations, hurtling them towards the ultimate hope of repair. Can "Host" remember her name, or will she continue to hide behind her alter-egos? Can they collectively find a way towards integration or will they remain in active-imagination, forever?
NeuroChatter is an autobiographical portrayal of the artist's lived experiences of being treated for a dissociative condition and post traumatic stress; "During therapy, I felt myself being re-shaped, re-formed and urged into a medical model that I had logically resisted for the first year of treatment. However, within the year, I began to believe my thoughts and emotions didn't belong to me, but to the alter-egos. I changed as a result and I quite literally became multiple people and various versions of myself; I talked to other versions of myself as if they were real friends and became lost in fantasy leading to life-threatening consequences, all whilst under Clinical specialist PsychoTherapy. It's an experience I'm still trying to make sense of today".
She uses the methodology of comedic PsychoDrama to showcase trauma's impact upon identity and the inner workings of the mind. With many misrepresentations of mental health, Sara hopes to challenge that narrative with a more humanising approach.
Sara J Harvey is a writer & actor from Chester; is trained in Somatic Psychology, Applied Neuroscience & is a keen educator & researcher of Trauma Therapy, Autism & Dissociative Conditions.
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