What we wrote at the time: Each Ueinzz performance is a process of reinvention, between exhaustion and a fleeting vision: singular, collective, anonymous, plural, suspensive, intensive, unworking life.

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.

We were in front of the Legislative Assembly in São Paulo and talking with a peanut seller. One of our actors asks him what the magic of that place is. The street vendor does not understand, and asks if the interviewer wants to know how much he earns. “No, I wanted to know what is your happiness here?” “I don’t understand”, says the peanut seller. The actor, a little agitated by his interlocutor’s deafness, asks him point blank: “No, I want to know what is your desire, what is the meaning of your life”. Then everything stops, there is a suspension in the dialogue, a silence, and we see the man sinking into a dimension that was totally other, far from any journalistic context. And he replied, quietly, with a certain difficulty: “suffering”… This is the basis without a basis of the entire conversation, the disaster which already occurred, the exhaustion which cannot be spoken of; it is the bitter isolation of a man cornered in front of a monumental building which represents an unshakeable, but nonetheless empty power; it is all that which only appears by means of a sudden interruption, triggered by a sort of vital irritation…. In making the situation schizophrenic, for a time there is the impression that everything may become derailed: functions, places, obeisance, discourses, representations. Everything may fall, including the device itself. Even if we meet what was there from the start — suffering, resignation, impotence – we witness disconnections that make a so-called normality flee, along with its linked automatic reactions; and also the evocation of other possible bonds with the world – Ueinzz Theatre Company

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.