Where to now?
I’m really not sure. I am working on my own visual art praxis at the moment and on a dance theatre piece and trying to pull the various strands of my life together.
I’ve had three interwoven careers and as I look back I see that I’ve moved from one to the other and they often overlap and feed into each other. Creative Work, Education and Alternative Therapies
After my accident, which I talked about earlier, I thought a lot about my life and where I wanted to be in the future and I made some serious changes. It couldn’t be just about being a big important designer anymore. At the time of the accident I was also a part time teacher of art at a Girls Secondary School in Whitechapel and I have held lecturing posts up to postgraduate level, ever since. That is what took me to Australia – Nico Georgiadis and Peter Snow were both busy with projects, so I was back at the Slade caretaking the Design Course when I was asked to go to Adelaide to help start the Centre for the Performing Arts (CPA).
Just before I was approached to join the staff at the CPA I had been working on a production of ‘Cinderella’ for Tokyo. I was living in a basement flat in London, I was very unwell and my own doctor had retired. A friend suggested I contact a homeopath named Misha Norland. I didn’t know what a homeopath was but I went to see him and after a consultation that lasted perhaps an hour and half I was given a little packet of white pills and advised to call him in three days. In fact the first remedy had no effect so I went to see him again and, after three more days, I felt a lot better. After that Misha became a very close friend and another mentor. I initially learned from him in Devon at what later became the ‘School of Homeopathy’ and I have continued to study and practise homeopathy ever since.
I also trained as a Yoga Therapist with the Yoga Biomedical Trust in London and have practised yoga for many years. I once held an Associate Lectureship in Yoga for what was then the East Down Institute – now Southern Regional College (SRC) – where I created a Yoga Foundation course with a City and Guilds Award – the only one in the UK. When I left SRC, I opened the first yoga studio in Newry and trained yoga practitioners who went on to set up their own classes. I was immensely proud of them. I still take a few very small online classes and see people privately.
Yoga Biomedical Trust
You now want to bring all those elements together?
I’ve always been interested in the question of mental health and at one time I facilitated yoga classes for patients with mental health problems at St. Luke’s Hospital in Armagh. Now, I am especially interested in the mental health of arts practitioners, specifically the mental health of dancers and performers.
Have you found a way to do that?
I think so. For the past six years I have produced and directed James Joyce based projects in Rostrevor for Light Theatre Company (LTC). Rostrevor is the only place in the North of Ireland mentioned in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ to which a named character comes. In the novel Miss Douce, a barmaid at the Ormond Hotel, came to Co. Down for her summer holiday. This has given LTC a rationale for a Bloomsday Festival and other events.
Through working on these projects I have become increasingly interested in James Joyce’s life, particularly in that of his daughter, Lucia.
The family was impoverished, moved frequently, and her father, who clearly loved her, often came home late at night, drunk. Despite an extremely difficult and troubled family life, Lucia became celebrated in 1920’s Paris as a gifted dancer in the manner of Isadora Duncan. There is not much written about Lucia the dancer, who once declared in exasperation “c’est moi qui est l’artiste”; more that she was simply labelled ’mad’.
She had trained as a dancer with Isadora’s brother Raymond Duncan at his Akademia, which offered free courses in dance, arts, and crafts. She had been the runner-up at Paris’s first international festival of dance and had toured with a small group of dynamic and idealistic young artists ‘Les Six de Rythme et Couleur’. In 1928, a French journalist writing for the Paris Times said, “When she reaches her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father.” Her talents were reported to W. B. Yeats, who at the time had just founded the short-lived Abbey Theatre Ballet with Ninette de Valois, (later to become the founding director of the British Royal Ballet) and who at the time was on the lookout for outstanding dancers.
During this period, Lucia fell in love with, Samuel Beckett, believing that he was going to marry her, but sadly he was only interested in working for her father, for whom he was transcribing the text of ‘Ulysses’. The break-up of this relationship had a tremendous impact on her and she embarked on a series of affairs, including with her drawing teacher, artist and sculptor, Alexander Calder.
Perhaps it is not surprising then, given her upbringing, not encouraged by her family to pursue her career as a dancer and the breakdown of her relationships, that at around this time it is likely that she had a mental breakdown.
What we do know is that Lucia spent much of her adult life in therapy and institutions. There were various unclear diagnoses, but it is known that at one time she was straight-jacketed and subjected to Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and injected with bovine serum. Later, she was diagnosed by Carl Jung as a ‘schizophrenic’ at his clinic in Zurich.
Sadly, due to her mental health difficulties, she never realised her obvious potential as a dancer.
But was Lucia really that ‘mad woman’, as many people seemed to believe?
Apparently her brother Georgio thought so when he committed her to a Maison de Sainté on the day of her father’s 50th birthday!
Or perhaps there are other explanations?
Was Georgio threatened by the growing acknowledgement of her abilities as a dancer?
Did her parents disapprove of her free form of dancing and just wanted her to ‘settle down’?
Was Lucia’s rebellious behaviour simply the act of a talented artist whose potential was being curtailed by her family?
We will never completely understand what caused the breakdown, particularly as most of the relevant correspondence has been destroyed.

So; as I pull the seemingly disconnected threads of my life together, I increasingly see that there is a fine line between huge talent, even ‘genius’ and mental health. There is also an interface between healing and the theatre. I am not talking about theatre as therapy per se, nor of art as therapy – useful as these modalities might be. What I’m considering here is what could be termed ‘true healing’. I believe that for this to take place, it is necessary to create a sacred space. I learned that in a homeopath’s plant-filled consulting room in North London, many years ago. A space in which it was safe for me to talk and to be truly listened to. It seems to me that the theatre, particularly ‘ theatre in the round’ can also be a sacred space, within which it is safe to speak and be listened to – or to dance?
And where, maybe – just maybe, in this space – some form of healing can occur ………..??
If you want to see more of Alistair Livingstone’s work go to the following links: