Augustine

October 29, 2024.
Starring Maclaine Lowery.

“Augustine” is a dance piece that journeys through the eight stages of possession, evoking the 1870s photographs taken by Jean-Martin Charcot of his infamous sixteen year-old hysteria patient, Louise “Augustine” Gleizes, at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

Augustine’s erratic behavior in-front of the camera was most-likely pure performance, the ethics of which become questionable, but comes at a pivotal time in history when the West was rebuilding their ideas of the metaphysical world. If Augustine was a performer, she was an opportunist, too, seizing on one of the first times in modern Western history that she could captivate an audience with unpredictability and have it taken seriously, read esoterically, and documented with curiosity by educated, influential people.