BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Operatic mezzo soprano Yasmin Arkinstall is a mental health advocate and artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder — and she is about to star in an autobiographical opera about “one woman’s struggle to do life, art and mental health”. The Australian work called OCDiva was produced by an all-female creative team including Yasmin as its starring performer; she will sing music composed by Dr Eve Klein.
Every performance will be on Yasmin’s terms: she will only perform the songs she wants to sing, when she wants to sing them. This unique structure means each performance of OCDiva will be different to the next, and the concert experience becomes framed around the artist’s own needs — something that sounds revolutionary in an industry that often casts artists’ needs aside.
The new opera tracks Yasmin’s journey with sensorimotor and harm OCD, including the challenges of diagnosis and treatment, and is designed to raise awareness and destigmatise the disorder while encouraging audiences to become aware of their own resilience. Yasmin tells CutCommon how the opera came to be, and what it’s like to star in her own show about the most deeply personal themes.
Yasmin, it’s so great to chat with you about your work. It can be challenging enough to discuss mental health in the public sphere, yet you’ve chosen to get up on stage — alone — and sing about your personal journey. Where did you find this courage to be vulnerable in this way?
Thanks so much, Steph! I definitely couldn’t have done this a few years ago in my recovery journey – I’ve done a lot of exposure therapy with the help of my therapist, gradually facing my fears bit by bit with an ‘exposure stepladder’ of tasks that I’ve ranked from 1-10 on the anxiety scale.
I’d also like to acknowledge that I’m highly anxious with each performance of OCDiva that I do, so each time I’m doing it scared. In the empowering words of Franklin D. Roosevelt: ‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.’
I’m also really passionate about mental health disorders being portrayed in a true and sensitive way as I’ve seen a lot of misrepresentation from the media over the years. This unfortunately sets back people with OCD and many, such as myself, don’t receive a diagnosis for over a decade or more. That has been a big driving factor in my motivation to do this show!
The opera tells a story of your life including your diagnosis and treatment of sensorimotor OCD. Why did you feel opera would be a suitable medium to share this story?
Living with OCD in a sense is like being in an opera, featuring at times heightened emotions of despair but also lighter moments where I’m able to use humour as a therapy tool. OCDiva is an emotional rollercoaster and shows both ends of the spectrum. It was really important to us that we show how debilitating and mentally torturous OCD can be, but we didn’t want to hammer our audiences with darkness for the whole hour as this can be quite triggering and draining for them. One of my favourite therapy techniques is using humour and meme culture to take the power away from my distressing intrusive thoughts, much like dealing with a bully.
I was also finding myself interested in how we can portray mental illness through opera in the 21st Century. Opera through the 19th and 20th centuries often featured ‘mad scenes’ with lots of florid singing, dazzling cadenzas, and caricatures of people with mental illness that modern audiences might find stigmatising. Mental health awareness has come a long way over the last few years alone, so the idea of a contemporary operatic work following that trajectory was exciting!
So what are some of the experiences that have formed the basis of your songs and the stories you felt were important to share?
The songs and arias cover some of the OCD themes I’ve gone through, different kinds of experiences I’ve had with therapists throughout my life, and therapy tools that have been helpful along the way.
At the beginning of the show, I look back at my childhood and reflect on how the OCD began. It didn’t hit me until a while after I was initially diagnosed, but my OCD first manifested itself when I was 4 years old through harm OCD — repetitive intrusive thoughts about my parents dying in a car crash. With music by Eve Klein and libretto by Sarah Penicka-Smith, this memory turned into Childhood 1: In the Sand World, which depicts a toddler crying in the sandpit at preschool because of these harm OCD thoughts.
Jumping to my early adulthood, we also created an aria called Viv about my experiences with medical gaslighting, a relatively common occurrence where therapists and healthcare workers — even if they may have good intentions — tell people with OCD that there is nothing wrong with them. It can make patients feel invalidated, consumed with self-doubt, and even crazy as they question their lived experience of symptoms, which I’ve experienced multiple times prior to my eventual OCD diagnosis at 21 years of age.
We also wanted to cover some helpful therapy techniques like exposure therapy, acceptance commitment therapy, mindfulness, and behavioural activation. As one example, we have a mid-show meditation sequence called Yoga with libretto by Sharna Galvin. Yoga allows the audience to mindfully tap into their breath awareness with me after going through all of the intense stuff together!
It was really important to us that audiences could see what it’s like to be in the brain of a person with OCD, learn about how people with OCD are treated at times, and take away some helpful tools we practise in therapy.
When listening to a sneak preview recording of your opera, I heard one song that really stood out in a different style — Swallowing, which contained a loop machine and an echo of critical voices all talking about the act of swallowing. How does this structure and the repetition of these voices reflect the way you experience sensorimotor OCD?
I really have to give massive kudos to Eve for this one – it really depicts my sensorimotor OCD experience better than I could have imagined.
My most troubling OCD theme has involved an intrusive hyperawareness of my bodily functions such as swallowing, breathing, and blinking. On bad days, I’m hyperaware of every single swallow that I am doing, swallowing compulsively to ‘avoid my throat closing up in front of people and embarrassing myself’ and trying to ‘problem-solve whether I am swallowing in the right way and timing’. To people without OCD, this would sound absurd, but to a person with OCD it feels overwhelmingly real — this is the nature of the mental illness. The urges to engage in mental or physical rituals tend to be intensely visceral in our minds and bodies as if our brains are screaming at us, ‘Do them! It’ll make it all go away!’.
In the Swallowing soundscape, my therapist is reading out intrusive thoughts that I experience on a daily basis. The intrusive thoughts loop repeatedly with jarring sound effects and operatic phrases until it is a total cacophony of sound by the end. The aim of this was to show the OCD experience, no matter the subject matter, as a repetitive looping of distressing thoughts that build and build. The deeper into the cycle we go, the more out of control we feel, and the internal noise becomes unbearable – the OCD takes charge and we feel helpless to its demands.
We also wanted to show how mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting it is to go through an OCD cycle so that audience members can see the true reality of the disorder; it is not a quirky, funny condition to mock. This, paired with Jana Castillo’s brilliant choreography and Olivia Watkins’ evocative black and white design, makes for a sequence that audiences might find hard-hitting.
What’s it been like to work with Eve — was it a collaborative process for you?
Eve is incredible! I absolutely adore that mega-talented, kind, compassionate genius of a woman. Eve always checked in with me about how the vocal line was sitting in an aria, if I was feeling comfortable tessitura-wise, if I’d like to change anything, etc. She has been so caring and encouraging of me to be flexible with her vocal lines depending on how my OCD is on a given day.
She and the really amazing Sarah Penicka-Smith have been very open to my suggestions about text-setting in the music and song ideas in general. When we went to Brisbane, I showed them a rap I wrote about TikTok dancing [laughs] and Eve suggested that we turn it into a pop song. We created and recorded that song on the day, and it was so fun! She also gave me a rap workshop driven by feeling the flow of it in my body, which was a really cool process.
Your event listing describes the show as using a ‘groundbreaking format’ that allows you control of each performance — and each performance will be different from the next. Tell us a bit about how this works, and the decision-making behind that format of your opera.
Sarah suggested very early on in the project development that OCDiva didn’t have to follow a set structure. This was mainly to accommodate for whether I’m having a bad day OCD-wise. If I’m feeling too debilitated to perform a certain number, or if I feel that it would be too triggering to perform that part of my story, I can discuss that with the team before the show and we can skip ahead to the next number that would flow chronologically.
I’m very thankful to Sarah for this idea and allowing me such flexibility – it’s so comforting!
As you’re sharing the diagnostic and therapy experiences of OCD, I wondered what message you’d like audiences to take away?
The main messages we’d like to share are:
1. Just how debilitating, misrepresented and stigmatised OCD is, and how the recovery journey can be very up and down. Raising true awareness of this frequently misunderstood anxiety disorder helps other people with OCD learn more, reach out for help, receive a diagnosis, and find effective treatment sooner rather than later from a compassionate professional. The [years-long] average for an OCD diagnosis really needs to change, and the therapy process itself isn’t linear.
2. You can do things scared – you don’t have to have impeccable mental health to put yourself out there.
3. There’s so much that you’re capable of even with mental or physical barriers in your way – you’re much more resilient than you think, and pursuing your values in spite of barriers is absolutely possible!
OCDiva will be performed in a number of events from August to November. Find more details online. Follow OCDiva in Instagram @ocdiva__ and support via the Australian Cultural Fund.
For mental health support:
- Lifeline 13 11 14
- Support Act Wellbeing Helpline 1800 959 500
- Headspace
- Contact your GP
OCDiva is produced by Melanie and Sarah Penicka-Smith, composed by Dr Eve Klein, libretto by Sarah and Sharna Galvin, movement direction by Jane Castillo, and design by Olivia Watkins, with support from Australia Council for the Arts, Blacktown Arts, ABC Radio National, Grant Leslie Photography, and donors.
Images supplied. Headshots by Grant Leslie Photography.
