si je suis malade, impudente!
A Conversion Workshop
by Rouzbeh Shadpey
2 May, 2026
from 10 - 17h
from 10 - 17h
Fee: This workshop is PWYC, with a suggested donation of 25-50 euro. All donations will go to the Iranian Red Crescent.
Group: This workshop will be in English and is open to everyone. No prerequisite knowledge or training is required, but interest in theory, performance, and/or the clinic is encouraged. Sick, disabled, and crip people will be given priority. The group will be capped at 15 participants.
Access: The venue is on the ground floor with a bathroom accessible via stairs, participants are encouraged to mask. Tired participants can lie down and simply listen at any time during the workshop. Please inform us about your access needs.
RSVP here
Workshop overview
This one-day workshop by Rouzbeh Shadpey explores the intertwined theatrical and clinical legacies of conversion in the figure of the standardized simulated patient. To this end, three scripts will be brought into dialogue: Jean Rotrou's Le Véritable Saint Genest, Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, and a standardized patient script on conversion/somatization.
The day’s proceedings will be split into halves. In the morning, participants will hold discussions and engage with theatrical and theoretical texts on comic mimesis, clinical simulation, and psychosomatic conversion. In addition to the aforementioned scripts, these include essays by Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, Alain Badiou, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jamieson Webster, and Frantz Fanon. All readings will be assigned in advance and compiled as a syllabus. In the afternoon, participants will play at performing standardized patients and medical students. All participants will be asked to sign a non-liability contract in case of conversion or death.
Detailed explanation
The concept of conversion—originating as a shift of faith—was adopted in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric clinic to describe the substitution of physical symptoms for psychic distress. It is the central mechanism Freud identified in hysteria, and thus foundational to his theorization of the unconscious.
In the history of theatre, both conversions—religious and physical—have repeatedly captivated the staged imaginary. Time and again, the actor becomes what they enact. Simulation stimulates reality.
The selected scripts delineate key moments in the history of theatrical conversion and juxtapose them with the contemporary clinic's own simulations. Rotrou's Saint Genest stages the story of the patron saint of actors who converted to Christianity—and was martyred—after portraying a man who converts to Christianity and is martyred. Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, meanwhile, famously culminated in the death of Molière himself on stage while performing the role of a hypochondriac. The irony is delicious and dialectical: playing a "fake patient" results in real death. The mimesis of illness mimesis engenders real illness. In the words of Mladen Dolar: "Any actor can become sick by acting disease, but it takes a real genius to act a hypochondriac and die of it."
What, then, might occur if we act as standardized patients—those healthy actors employed in medical education to simulate illness? What fate awaits us when we act as people who act sick, not as a psychic device but for menial wages? Could the same conversion inherent to the mimesis of mimesis emerge here? Might illness be ushered into the real—and if so, is this necessarily undesirable for those who already suffer, but without the dignity of recognition?