In creating Szepty/Whispers, Veronique West was trying to explore fragmentation. The artist explains:

Madness tends to be associated with fragmentation. The word “crazy” originally meant: full of cracks. According to scholar Nasrullah Mambrol, an early definition of trauma was: “an extreme experience, which challenges the limits of language and even ruptures meaning altogether.”

Throughout the development of Szepty/Whispers, the creative team used fragmentation as a guiding aesthetic principle. Rather than understanding gaps as deficits, we asked: how can they offer unique opportunities?

Fragmentation allowed us to explore both creative experimentation and trauma-informed access. We chose to work with disjointed traces of my family history, rather than a complete or linear sequence of events. This decision is artistic, since it seeks to more truthfully reflect experiences that “challenge the limits of language” and reconfigure our relationships to time.

This decision also foregrounds care, by omitting direct representations of harm or violence. Through a fractured form, we centred our creative goals while centring the needs of trauma-impacted body-minds.

Immerse yourself in the methodology behind the creation by watching these excerpts of Veronique’s preparatory explorations for the theatrical presentation of the play.