What we wrote at the time: We think Ueinzz might always be in open rehearsal – complicating, diverging from and multiplying the ways in which their plays are meant to be felt, rather than understood. We have asked them to share this process with us in Glasgow as a way of publicly inhabiting their very slow rhythm – to share in the anthropological-jet-lag-schizo delay of visiting the UK. In this open rehearsal they will start from the same jumping off points as in the play No Ready Made Men (to be performed on Sunday), but inhabit them with different energies (more relaxed and open in a rehearsal, heightened in a performance).

Only once the link between “art” and “audience” is short-circuited, once the glamour or entertainment or culture or work or object which could be expected from that “presentation” of images are undone, and the central protagonist who leaves the stage is “de-individualised”: only in this way can something else occur… Perhaps this is where we can find a performative exhaustion of the project or of the work, so that inaudible voices and improbable events can emerge in that rare conjunction between art and madness, schizoid flow and the suspension of the world. – Peter Pál Pelbart

Overflowing the walls of the psychiatric institution where they were founded (in São Paulo, in 1996) the Ueinzz Theatre Company meet on a weekly basis, in what you could call a schizoscenic project – an ongoing theatrical rehearsal as a way of caring. We think of it as a kind of sociality: not a fixed place or a community, but a set of ever-changing relationships between users of mental health services, therapists, actors, so-called psychotic patients, carers, philosophers, and people whose life hangs by a thread. Informed by radical ideas of care they practice this sociality, trying it out, reinventing it – the flows and worldviews produced in supposed ‘illnesses’ amplified into a theatre capable of reversing power over life into the potential of life. They reveal the disturbing ‘normality’ that surrounds us every day.

… what is on stage is the way to perceive, to feel, to dress, to move, to speak, to think, but also a way of acting without acting, of dissociating associating, of living and dying, of simultaneously being on the stage and feeling at home, in this precarious presence, moving at a heavy and intangible tempo, that takes everything extremely serious and at the same time “isn’t even there”, as the composer Livio Tragtemberg described his musical participation in one of the performances… – Peter Pál Pelbart

Members of Ueinzz joining us in Glasgow this April are: Arthur Amador, Alexandre Bernardes, Carla Bottiglieri, Leonardo Lui Cavalcanti, Onés Cervelin, Luis Guilherme Cunha, Petronio Fantasea, Adelia Faustino, Pedro França, Paula Francisquetti, Ana Goldenstein, Eduardo Lettiere, Valéria Manzalli, Laiza Menegassi, Jayme Menezes, Simone Mina, Amélia Monteiro and Peter Pál Pelbart. Also joining the company for their time in Glasgow will be Cristina Ribas.

The Ueinzz Theatre Group were interviewed in The List in advance of the Episode by Gareth K Vile.