UNM Connect; Interview with Eva Encinas-Sandoval and Shock Treatment in Mental Institutions

With us today is Eva Insinia Sandoval, Director of UNM's Accredited Flamenco Dance Program, and Flamenco Student Bridget Luhan. Welcome to the show. Eva, let's start by talking about the Flamenco Program. This, I understand, is one of the only accredited Flamenco programs in the world. That's true. We're fortunate at the University of New Mexico to have an undergraduate and graduate degree focus in Flamenco. Of course, what the students do is they get a degree in dance, but their concentration of study is in Flamenco. So, yes, it is the only one in the country, and indeed the world. Of course, in Spain, there is a great deal of Flamenco, but being

an art form that is part of the culture, they don't feel the need for having the extensive sort of curriculum and developed educational opportunities for students in Spain, whereas here in the United States and any other country outside of Spain, it really is very beneficial to have that extensive educational focus for people that are interested in Flamenco. Why? Why is it important? Well, one of the great reasons that I feel that a university is a wonderful place for a program such as this Flamenco undergraduate and graduate emphasis is that Flamenco so much more than just a dance form or a guitar form or a singing form is really as much about art. It's about social and cultural issues of the people that developed it and the part of Spain where it's being nurtured. And because of our ties here in New Mexico

to Spain, I feel that we have a direct link to what that is about and have a true what I an aficion or a real love and appreciation for the art form. So for that reason, I think New Mexico is a very logical place to have something like this and part of the reason why it's done so well, that there are a lot of people here who have an innate understanding and appreciation of the art form and because of that, have supported it to a great degree. Richard, I understand that you have studied many dance forms during your time at UNM. What is it about Flamenco that you find so attractive? Flamenco embodies your soul, your mind and it's more than just a physical dance form. If you bring culture, you bring your experiences, you bring your mood, you bring everything to Flamenco and then you take that and you express it to whoever's watching and every

class is like that. It's not just something reserved for the show. Every single class is an emotional and spiritual experience. Now is it as a discipline, is it as discipline to form as say, ballet or is there room for creativity in there? It's highly encourages artisticness and creativity but I think people tend to think that it's not discipline like ballet and I think it demands of you more discipline than ballet, more physical strength, more aerobic strength than ballet ever did. Tell us about the conservatory. Well and just this year actually in March of 1999, we opened the Conservatory of Flamenco Arts which I direct but it is a co-working of my daughter, Marisol and Signees, my son, Joaquin and Signees and a wonderful artist that, Omaida Amaya, who is originally from Spain

and is here from Boston, moved here to Albuquerque because she believed very much in the efforts that were being done through the university program in really focusing in an in-depth curriculum for Flamenco. So when the four of us got together, we realized that there were many specializations that a Flamenco dance student for instance needed to know about music, about structure, about the cante, the singing, about rhythm relative to the Palmas or a cajon which is a percussion box that is used in Flamenco. Issues about the people, the language that in a dance program can't necessarily be addressed because it's a dance program and you can't really offer music classes in a dance program. So we felt that in order to really be able to create the absolute Flamenco program, which is what we've been trying to do, we really needed a school

that would allow for the kind of specialization for the students at the university to be able to augment their Flamenco experience, but also to be able to offer classes for children and for people that for whatever reason could not or chose not to study at the university because either they have full-time jobs or they're not of age or they're not degree seeking. So we felt that we really needed to open up a school in the community that would be for the community that would serve a purpose along with the same sort of mission that the university has, but a little more accessible to the community but would work in tandem with the university program. And so now in March of 99, we opened that school. It's on Gold Street between 2nd and 3rd to 14 gold and we're preparing our first recital of our students. We're very excited about the progress that we've made. We're working

on developing a very specific curriculum of music and dance, which hasn't been done anywhere. And we have a wonderful faculty of musicians and dancers that are working together to, again, who have a great desire and heartfelt interest in being able to share this art form with other people because they've realized how Flamenco has enhanced their lives and consequently want to be able to share it with other people. Now you recently staged a performance. Tell us about that. Well, we, two performances that have happened recently. One is at the Wool Warehouse where we, as I mentioned, we highlighted the talents of our wonderful students at the conservatory. All of the classes performing the work that has been studied in the classes, both dancers, guitarist, singers, people studying Palmas. And then the second half of the show featured myself, my son Joaquin, my daughter, my daughter, my daughter, the faculty of the conservatory,

presenting the second half doing a series of solos and wanting to give back to our students for the hard work that they've been doing for us. And we also very recently presented our end of the semester presentation for the university where all the UNM classes get together from the very beginning sections, the 169 Flamenco classes, of which I think we have five sections and then our 269, our intermediate levels, and our 369, which are the advanced level classes. And they invite all of their families and friends, and we join together in the South Arena, which is a huge studio. And every, all the classes show the material that they've worked on throughout the semester. And just it's a sharing session between all the people who are starting to get what I call, refer to as the Flamenco bug, once they've been initiated into a Flamenco class, it usually has a great impact on them. It really influences them for the rest of their lives.

Physically, emotionally. Well, I think physically, I think it certainly draws something out of you physically, but I think it's much more on a deeper level and an emotional psychological and as Bridget mentioned, a spiritual level of learning how to share what we have inside and finding a way through a very expressive art form, to be able to bring that out in a very careful, yet profound way and share it with people that will have great appreciation for it. What do you think the future holds for the Flamenco program at UNM and for the Conservatory? Well, I am working along with Pedro Quadra, who's an incredible guitarist that is here from Spain. He had a very impressive performance career in Spain working for some of the finest companies. He married a woman from Albuquerque and is now living here, who also actually

worked as a professional dancer in Spain for many years, both of them very talented. I'm working with him. He teaches Flamenco guitar at the university and we're hoping to get a Flamenco guitar focus happening at the University of New Mexico as well. So we're trying to infiltrate the music department basically. At the same time, we're trying to entice more Flamenco artists of experience to come and work with us both at the University and at the Conservatory because I really feel Flamenco is such an individual art form that the more input that you can have from different artists, the more rich the experience can become. There's no one way of doing this art form. It's a very individualized experience where you learn certain techniques and methods, but with those techniques and methods you learn to speak your own language. And I really feel that

it's very important for our students to be able to be exposed to the finest that there are in the world. And we do one of the opportunities that they have for that is I direct a Flamenco festival in an international Flamenco festival every summer that is housed at the University of New Mexico. It is the largest Flamenco festival in the United States and we bring in world-class artists for two weeks to come and teach and perform and lecture and just live in New Mexico for two weeks. They love it as much as we do. When they come, they're asking, as we take them to the airport, when are we coming back? Because they love New Mexico. They feel the connection to Spain here. They understand and appreciate the great aficion for the art form that is here. What do you think your students take away from the Flamenco experience?

What they take with them? I think that they have a deeper understanding of the role of art in one's life. The country that Flamenco comes from, well, all throughout Europe, I would say, and many other cultures as well. Art is much more integrated into the culture than it is in this country. For some reason, and I can't exactly know why, art is something that you go to a museum to see or you go to the theater to see, but you don't experience it as part of your everyday experience. Flamenco is part of a lifestyle in Spain. I feel that one of the most important things that I can teach my students is that they can integrate this into their day-to-day life. They can wake up in the morning and sing some songs. Whenever they feel like it, they can break

into some palmas and share with their friends, you know, work on some of the information from class and teach their children and teach their boyfriend how to dance a couple of Siviana or whatever. Is that what you've done, Bridget? Do you teach your boyfriend the... Yes, you dance a Siviana actually. That's wonderful. Do you feel that has this become part of your life? Do you think this is something that you'll do for the rest of your life? Yes, I think I would be involved with Flamenco at a certain level for the rest of my life, and that is because Flamenco allows that. It's not like ballet that you get to be in your upper 20s and your husband. Flamenco is about the family, the community, about both about men, women, all ages. There's a place for everybody always in Flamenco. That's great. That's very true. I mean, in my family, I'm one of the few Americans that has been

raised in a Flamenco family, and we as children danced with my mother and my grandmother, and my grandmother danced with my children, and it's been... I envision that 20 years down the road, we're going to see a lot of that. We're going to see people who are families, all of the generations knowing something about Flamenco, and after dinner, they don't sit around the TV and spend the evening watching TV or reading the newspaper, they sit around and do Palmas and sing, and people get up and dance, and even as Bridget says, in Spain all the time, you see women and men who are 70 years old still out dancing and having a great time. That's one of my goals is to reconnect New Mexico with that part of its heritage. That sounds like a fantastic goal. Thank you both for joining us today, and best of luck with the conservatory. Thank you very much.

Once, he didn't like my ending, which I'm glad I didn't either. So, I'm going to let me see. Oh, yeah. I'm starting to see, not to say that there aren't people right here in Albuquerque in our own

area, but Albuquerque is much more homogenized in its cultural and social awareness. Then, if you go to Northern New Mexico, first of all, you hear them speaking a lot of the actual language of Old Spain, not you're right, and the people just have not, that route has been more carefully preserved, and I've seen enough people from Northern New Mexico who, for some reason, they start studying flamenco and understand certain things about it that usually take people years to learn. They have a natural affinity for the compass, which is the rhythmic structure of flamenco, which is very complicated. They feel very comfortable in the tonality. Flamenco is all developed on the frigian mode, which is a very specific tonal progression, not Western at all.

But they can hear those tones very naturally, and I know it's a long shot, but I've seen enough of it that I truly believe that there is that connection here. There are a lot of people in Northern New Mexico who have direct ties to Spain, and I think that because of this, yes, flamenco is a gypsy art form, but it existed in Spain before the gypsies were there. It is truly a Spanish art form as well. So I really believe that because of that, whether it be through some of the old folk songs that came with the people that ended up here in New Mexico, that followed some of those rhythmic patterns and tonal progressions, something about it introduced these ideas to these people before I got them into a class. You know what I mean? And so it's a little bit of a long shot, but I'm convinced. Well, I don't doubt it. We're going to do that ending again. Okay.

Ready. Okay. I think it's marvelous that the University of New Mexico is not only helping to keep our traditions alive, but perhaps reinstalling the love of flamenco dance in generations to come. Thank you both very much for being here today. You're very welcome. You. Okay. We're doing the easy part. We're just responding.

Well, I think this sounds like a great program, and it's certainly wonderful that UNM is helping the, yeah. I know how this gets. Okay. Well, I think it's wonderful that at the University of New Mexico, we're keeping those Spanish traditions alive. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you both for being here today, thank you both for being here today, thank you both for being here today,

it gave voice, it gave life to a basic distrust of the way in which psychiatry was being used for society's purposes rather than for the purposes of the people who had mental illness. Yeah, we gave shock treatment, not much. I gave it a few times. It was used primarily at that time

as a treatment for agitated depression. It worked more quickly than the drugs we had. It worked more quickly than the drugs we have now. It left me squeakish. The brain is much too delicate and much too mysterious, first miss me. One flew over the Cuckoo's nest, contributed to a national backlash in the 1960s against the system of large state-run hospitals. Suddenly, mental patients had more rights. Hospital populations began to drop sharply. Cuckoo's nest came out in 62. By 64, I was in Denver, snatching people off the elevator to keep them out of mental hospitals, firmly convinced with Keezy that if we could just close down the hospitals, if we could just keep

people out, we would produce this great sanity. A lot of us believed that. Books like Cuckoo's nest and the public's cure they created played a role in depopulating state hospitals. Of more direct importance, there had been a fundamental development that impacted treatment of the mentally ill. The drugs like Thorazine and Malaril, Stelazine and Haldo. Do have their side effects, but they worked well enough so that people could be treated outside the hospital so that hospitalization was no longer a lifetime thing. They could go home. By 1960, new drugs were calming the mentally ill. At the same time, other drugs were on the verge of making a major impact on our society. Secret drugs. From a government program to develop new weapons. Strange substances were being tested at the same better hospital where Canada

had been working while writing Cuckoo's nest. Government doctors offered to pay a $75 per se session to swallow a pill to see what happened. Every Tuesday, I joined there about $8,000 to $13,000, and these doctors would give me some stuff. And they wouldn't tell you why. I had never drunk beer before. Completely all the Americans. They put me in this room and locked the door, presumably to keep nuts from coming in, or me to get out, I wasn't sure why. One little window up there, the door of chicken wire processing. And I'm really ripped, I think, on a cello side. One of those J.B. 380s, all these things are just numbers. L.S.D. 25. The researchers were cataloging the effects of new mind-altering chemicals. Their goal was to create a drug that could be used as a fearsome way to be dropped into water and food. It was intended to incapacitate the enemy. This program had been initiated and was being run by

the CIA. And this is the great irony of the 60s that the psychedelic drugs which created the kinds of changes and consciousness and perceptions of the world that drove the 60s was distributed by the CIA. So pretty soon one way or another, these drugs found their way out of the hospital and into the counterculture. It blew our minds. It took us into a world which was unlike any world that we had ever been in. As interest spread, clandestine labs began to import or manufacture psychedelic drugs. Media images beamed from San Francisco depicted beads, long hair, vacatized, and a free love. A thing that people overlook about us is we're all college graduates. We're a Stanford graduate

program. Babs are captured in the Marines. We had a life and families. We had some idea what existentialism was about and the dead-end bleak chasm you're standing there looking into of existentialism. We're a Stanford graduate program. We're a Stanford graduate program. We're a Stanford graduate program.

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It was a defeat for Keesey and others who had made claims about the drug's potential. And for many, it had provided spiritual enlightenment. What's happened is both schizophrenia and LSD and other hallucinations, poison the brain's ability to tell whether impulses are coming from outside out there in reality or are coming from inside from the workings of your own mind. Keesey had relished his role as a lightning rod, attracting attention for the psychedelic 1960s generation. It also began attracting the attention of the law. In 1965, Keesey was arrested for possession of marijuana, not LSD, and eventually spent five months in jail. When he was let out, he packed up his family and left California, back to a farm in Oregon, where he has lived ever since.

Three decades later, when he looks at his jailed lines, it all comes back again. It's like selling clamshell, the doors are there again, you're back in jail. And the thing that jail teaches you is you want to get out. Boy, I want it out so much. Not just to see my family, I would just want it out amongst the flowers and the birds and the sun. He says the time in county jail taught him a few things about human nature, but his basic beliefs did not change. He continues to argue that the psychedelic experience, whatever its source, is good for the soul. His challenge to society, question reality. And the American dream is psychedelic. The cookusness charm, I think, goes to this thing of tearing away the fabric of what we've been told as reality. And seeing that through that fabric is something far more real. It's raw and it's harsh on you. It gives you anguish to see it.

But when you do, then somehow you are moving a little farther up this ladder into the smoke. One flew over the cookusness, sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Surprisingly, Hollywood seemed very reluctant to proceed with making a movie of the book. It was 1975, 13 years later, when cameras finally rolled on the project. Do you want me to explain? I can't explain Hollywood's, you know, reluctance to do many good things. I mean, don't put that on me. But in any case, clearly, we're not ready to finance a book about a half-breed and an insane asylum. You know, that just didn't make sense. And as usual, it took some people with real passion and belief and some mavericks to get it going. One of the mavericks was the independent producer, Saul Zance.

As someone at a studio once told me, pictures and mental institutions don't make money, you know. They have all those great one-liners that end all conversations. Zance put up most of the money to make the film, Miloge Foreman Directed. He gained a reputation in his native Czechoslovakia for gritty, realistic movies that makes tragedy with humor. Everyone in favor of changing the schedule, please raise your hand. Okay, I want to see the hands. Come on. It's one of you nuts has got any guts. Miloge made an inspired choice when he cast the film, Louise Flutcher, to play Nurse Ratchet. Miloge was constantly saying, is it natural? Is it natural? And he wanted more than anything for it to be as natural as real life. Newsreel, if you will. You know, newsreel, real. I only count nine votes, Mr. McMurphy. Only nine is a landslide.

There are 18 patients on this ward, Mr. McMurphy, and you have to have a majority to change ward policy. So you gentlemen can put your hands down now. In the book, there are moments of stark realism. More often, the reader gets a surreal mental picture of the ward, as Ken Keezy visualized it, dramatically different from Foreman's film. The light from the nurse's station throws a shadow on the dorm wall big as an elephant. He gets smaller as he walks to the dorm bar, and looks in as ride babies sleep tight. Twists are not in the foe floor, goes to slipping down away from him, standing in the door, lowering him in the building up, a platform in the brain of him.

The only sound I hear is the guy's breathing, and that trumpet, under his skin, will allow him to further down the room. I know already about that. Somebody will thank me on their phone, and will you back on the ward, and there won't be a sign of what went on tonight, and if I was full enough to try to tell somebody about it, I could say, idiot, you just had a nightmare. Things as crazy as a big machine room, down in the bowels of the dam, where people get caught up by robot workers going incest. But if they don't exist, how can they unseize them? It worked in the book. Sure it worked in the book, but what works in a book doesn't always work in the movie. They're very different mediums. I was impressed with how faithful they were to the book, despite the change in point of view, despite the fact that the two symbolic figures became real people in the movie.

After the book came out, some psychiatric practices, such as electric shock, were changed or halted entirely. But by the mid-70s, when the movie was released, the 60s generation had changed. Grown older, more conservative. At 27, I loved McMurphy. Hated Nurse Ratchet, bought completely into Kees' vision. Ten or 12 years later, when I read the book again, after I'd seen the movie, I couldn't understand. I hated McMurphy, and I felt great sympathy for Nurse Ratchet. This was after 12 years of working with psychopaths. I knew just what Nurse Ratchet was going through. The initial backlash against institutional psychiatric methods peaked.

The pendulum has started to swing back. Electric shock therapy has seen a small revival. It is not widely used, but more psychiatrists have come to regard the procedure as having some merit. Shock treatment is still the quickest way of getting people out of an agitated depression. It is still used, not much, but it's used now more than it was ten years ago. Ken Keezy described one other treat. After McMurphy attacks and tries to kill Nurse Ratchet, she orders him to a brain surgeon for a lobotomy as a final punishment. Lobotomy, the ultimate horror in psychiatry. During a procedure called an occipital lobotomy, a long tool, very much like an eye spec, is driven up through the top of the eye socket into the brain,

into the frontal lobes, and then wiggled about to disconnect the cellular wiring. It worked occasionally. Lobotomies tended to quiet the worst cases in the back wards of the silos. There were more than 5,000 such operations in 1949, the peak year for the ice pick of the drill. Now, there is talk of bringing back lobotomies. Doctors at Harvard have suggested more research in the methods of surgically changing minds, now that the doctor's skills and technology are so much more advanced. It will be a tough sell to most in the medical community. I wouldn't volunteer for it and I wouldn't recommend you do so. It is a horrifying sight to see people whose whole personality, whose whole will, whose whole sense of social appropriateness, has been taken away from them.

At the end of Cuckoo's nest, the chief realizes that he must do something for his friend McMurphy. I wouldn't need you this way. McMurphy had pushed the chief back towards sanity. He had saved his life. Now as the chief regarded what the hospital had done to McMurphy, his mind shredded by an ice pick wielding brain surgeon, the chief could save him only by destroying him. One flew over the Cuckoo's nest and other books helped fuel the move to empty state mental hospitals across the country. Since 1960, the patient's census has dropped by 80%. Many of the ex-residents ended up homeless, wandering the streets or in prison.

The Los Angeles County Jail now has the largest population of severely ill mental patients in the country. Somehow it got interpreted in the 70s and 80s that it was better for people to be out of hospitals. We didn't need to treat them at all. Just turned them loose on the streets. That didn't work. That was unsightly led to a lot of tragedies. It led to really the bizarre experience of having the streets full of psychotic untreated people. Most of the old hospitals never closed. In fact, their staffs have grown. They now outnumber the patients. New regulations require intensive care for the most severe cases. The old brick hospitals won't be demolished anytime soon. Fans in the middle age have overtaken the Mary Prankster. They have grown children, some joined them for the 500 mile practice down to the concert in San Francisco. The first time we've done this putting the FM signal out from bus

And we were able to communicate with cars about a mile ahead of us and a mile behind us. It's suddenly everybody is like this puddle of communication moving down the freeway. The bus rolled over familiar roads and old memories to a reserved spot in front of the auditorium. The concert was scheduled coincidentally on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. He's the adreamed up the stage show which flashed back to that event. It was a problem. Most of the crowd hadn't been born when JFK was shot and there was confusion over just what message the pranksters had in mind.

It's wonderful to have your audience surprised and delighted. What's happening is there's a battle going on for attention. I've always maintained an audience's currency. You give me enough audience I'll make a living. Gee, this is a guy who can get away with being himself with anybody anywhere no matter what. And maybe we can all do that. I think him probably found other things more exciting than writing. When you get pretty far out there on drugs and rock and roll which is a very hedonistic experience, very hedonistic combination.

You know, it's hard to kind of say, oh my god, I have to go sit at the typewriter again. Maybe there are those of us who just have one good book in us and I'm awfully glad that Kisee had cookies nest in him. My dad taught me a really important thing. Good writing ain't necessarily good reading that to appeal to somebody from a writer's standpoint somehow separates you from them. And what you do not exist, it all happened before and you're trying to get into this clock gap. And the only way. Lately, he has been fascinated by a computer-based film editing machine he bought for the farm. Check this over here. This is Toto Stack. It's Little Toto! It puts the capabilities that used to only belong to New York and Hollywood. People are able to do stuff. They would only have been able to dream about before the really good stuff happens. Ken Kisee would like nothing better than to bypass Hollywood.

He's still resentful about being fired as the screenwriter by the producers of Cuckoo's Nest. An estimated 100 million people have seen the popular film. Kisee has stayed away. During the depositions, these two LA lawyers were sitting there. One of Puffy and Sullen and the other one, Skinny and Fierce. They said, I bet you'll be the first in line to see that movie. I said, I swear to God, I'll never see that movie. And when you swear to God in front of a lawyer, you better damn well. Keep your word or you're going to run into hell. You know lately, it do occur to me. What a glorious trip it's now to be, to be, to be, to be. Sometimes a light's all shining on me.

Other times I can never see. Lately, it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's near. You You