In 1966 Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane gave filmmaker Frederick Wiseman unprecedented access. Wiseman documented staff at the Massachusetts hospital herding patients, often heavily drugged and naked, through bare rooms and corridors.
The resulting documentary, Titicut Follies, shook up the medium and launched Wiseman's innovative, Oscar-winning career. A ballet adaptation of the film premieres in New York Friday night.
The ballet and the film it's based on are both deeply unsettling. "The inmates at Bridgewater were treated very badly, by and large," Wiseman says. "But many of them had committed the most outrageous crimes imaginable."
[For more of this story, written by Euan Kerr, go to http://www.npr.org/2017/04/28/...ion-becomes-a-ballet]
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