We're previewing the Rochester Fringe Festival and putting a spotlight right up front on Invisible No More — a free, multidisciplinary rededication ceremony at Mount Hope Cemetery on Saturday, September 19 at 2:00. I chatted with Ryan Thibodeau (psychology faculty) and Ann Harris Wilcox (dance professor) about how this piece honors roughly 300 people who were reinterred from an unmarked Highland Park burial after 1980s excavations and have largely been forgotten by history. The event blends dance, a community movement choir (yep — you can send in a 15‑second gesture), live music from local players and Eastman brass students, and a closing ritual of biodegradable flowers to make visible those who “invisibly lived and invisibly died.” They wanted to include names, but the New York State Office of Mental Health limits use of those old patient records, so the focus is on remembrance, reflection, and nudging our community to do better for people living with serious mental illness today. It’s free and mostly drop‑in, but do swing by rochesterfringe.com for details and to check out the rest of the festival — bring a friend, bring flowers, and bring your curiosity.

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Well, that music means it's time for another episode of Just Can't Not.

Go to rochesterfringe.com to get your tickets for the festival happening from the FIF to the 26th.

It's a beautiful time to be out in Rochester.

Get your tickets today.

And you definitely want to get your tickets for cool shows like what we're talking about today.

But this one is free.

So, guests, why don't you introduce yourself.

My name is Ryan Thibodeau and I'm on the psychology faculty at St. John Fisher.

Hi, I'm Ann Harris Wilcox and I'm a professor in the program of dance and movement at the University of Rochester River Campus.

Yeah.

And the event that these two are holding is called Invisible no More.

This is being held at the at Mount Hope Cemetery on Saturday, September 19th at 2:00'.

Clock.

It is a free event, but obviously you want people to register ahead of time if they can.

Is there, is that a thing or is it just show up and hang out?

It's pretty much show up and hang out.

Okay, I love that.

So I guess let's get a little bit of a preview for what is the show, if you want to describe it for me?

Sure.

So it's a multidisciplinary rededication ceremony to a particular spot that Ryan will give you some beautiful history of that's in the Mount Hope Cemetery.

But the spot is on Grove Ave. And it's an area that is reserved for some people that had been buried there.

But there are no markings, so you actually wouldn't know, except there is a small and lovely rock with a plaque on it that does designate what the space is.

But to your average person walking by, you would never know that people are buried there.

And we are using the fringe as a lovely way to gather people to honor these lost individuals.

Yeah.

So if I could maybe give you a couple of minutes of history of this site and please, what it's all about.

So in 19th century Rochester, there were between south on South Avenue, between Highland and Elmwood, there were three sort of social welfare institutions.

And this was an institution that tried to serve the needs of a wide variety of people who were so certainly for people experiencing poverty for sure, but a wide variety of other needs as well.

So widows and orphans and just older folks with medical issues and people with what we would now call mental illness.

Or what we would now call developmental disability could wind up in the poor house.

And it was kind of our first attempt to sort of provide services to people who are struggling.

There was also an insane asylum.

And I'm using the air quotes because, of course, we don't refer to those places like that anymore.

And that would be actually where the AL Siegel center is now.

Yeah, it occupies.

It occupied the site of where the AL Siegel center is now.

There was also a penitentiary at the corner of Highland and.

And South.

And so when a person died in one of these institutions, they were sometimes claimed by family or friends who then arranged for a private burial in a proper cemetery.

But oftentimes that did not happen.

And when it didn't happen, they were essentially buried in a cemetery that was in the backyard of the penitentiary in what is now Highland Park.

So to give folks kind of a contemporary lay of the land, that would basically be where the stage is set up for the Lilac Festival, if you know where that is.

And so at that point, the cemetery becomes more or less forgotten, basically.

And so at that point, the Rochester Museum and Science center staff from the RMSE were brought in to do some archaeological investigation.

They were able to determine that upwards of a thousand people were buried in that Highland park cemetery.

They made the decision to take around 300 or so folks who were in the immediate excavation zone to remove them from that site and then to reinter them in a plot at Mount Hope Cemetery.

And those are the folks in the plot in Mount Hope who are really the focus of this focus of this project.

Was it known.

Was it documented much that, like, these people were interred there?

Was that.

Was that a known thing, or was it just, oh, we're just digging and we didn't check?

And it was kind of a.

Kind of a thing.

It was sort of known.

There were some sort of whispers over the years, and there were some.

There were bones that would come to the surface every now and then in the.

As they do.

In that.

In that area.

And they happened upon some, you know, human remains.

So.

So it was known.

But the problem is that it was just all too easily forgotten.

You know, after they made the discovery, it was all too easily forgotten.

We forget it about it again for another couple of generations.

To a point where almost nobody knows that there are even people buried there at all.

Well, and I think that's.

I mean, you know, let's.

Let's touch on, you know, kind of the, you know, the part that you did mention, which is these are, you know, a lot of the people who are interred there, you know, buried there, are forgotten people in many ways as well, which is so often the case in these kind of situations where, you know, people are either forced into situations with your residential schools and, you know, asylums and other things like that, you know, the bodies are treated as, hey, you just got to get rid of them.

Let's just.

Let's just do this.

Let's bury him in a giant area or whatever else.

And it's something that has been, I guess, reckoned with is the right word over the last, you know, maybe even decade or 20 years of more visibility on these kind of things.

And I think what I'll say is, you know, not that it's perfect, but listening to some of the documentaries in Canada about residential schools and those things were so.

So potently impactful to hear some of those stories about relatives and uncles and grandmothers and all those things.

And some of these people may not have had families or had any relations whatsoever beyond, you know, they were just separated.

Why the.

Why now and why the rededication?

So I'll speak to that.

And it's just very close to my heart.

And even I did not notice these areas.

And one day I was taking another walk, and it must have been recently after the DePaul mental health.

And one of the other.

There were two benches that were created there and a beautiful plaque that came up.

And on it the writing said, invisibly they lived, Invisibly they died.

And it rocked me to my core.

I also have family members who have had a history of mental illness and have been institutionalized the majority of their life.

And I stopped and thought, this is a beautiful tribute right here to have these benches to think.

And you mentioned this earlier, Chris, we need to practice remembering because it's so easy to forget.

And so I thought, let's do it.

And I think there's nothing more beautiful than to have artists come and help celebrate and honor space that is hallowed and, you know, really can pay some respect to our humanity and to celebrate these lost souls, but also help us reflect on who currently may be in this jeopardy that could possibly become a lost soul and how easily that can happen.

So to think about our own mental health situation and what are we doing about it.

And so that was the inspiration for let's Do Something.

So what is that?

And that's what Invisible no More came to be.

Well, and I also love that idea.

I mean, one those, you know, that's six words, right?

Is there's.

There's something very special about when a complete thought has the fewest amount of words, has the fewest amount of time.

Like six words that tell an entire story right in, you know, that nothing.

Right.

It's six words, but something that can rock you in that moment.

And I love that.

That's what grabbed you.

Right.

Is that simple thing.

What I'm kind of intrigued at, before we dive into more of the performance things, is how did the process go with the organization?

Because the cemetery is still a.

It's an organization.

Right.

Obviously, it's a public thing in many ways as well.

But how did it go with, like, hey, we're working with this, too.

We want to make this a more visible thing.

Well, I realized that in doing this, I had a good bit of research to do.

And so some of the research was just finding out who knows about this.

And so I originally contacted the board or friends of Mount Hope, and I spoke to a very knowledgeable gentleman named Dennis Carr, and he's been my liaison, but Dennis was one.

And then also another gentleman named Robert Riley, who.

Who has been a part of documenting the history of mental health care in Rochester along with Ryan.

And I was given their names through Dennis.

And I thought, oh, I'm going to see if they would be interested in this and could they tell me more.

And they were just so generous and enthusiastic.

So that was step one.

Yeah.

And I'll say that.

So the area that Ann referenced a moment ago, that with the plaques and the benches, and we have the interpretive signage, the historical signage.

So that was a project that I spearheaded, actually, with Mr. Riley and with Dr. Larry Guttmacher, who's sort of a giant in mental health care in Rochester and has been For.

For several decades.

And we had to work closely with the cemetery, of course, to make this happen, because we installed it, you know, in the cemetery, which is a.

Of course, still as a city institution.

And I found cemetery staff, cemetery leadership, city leadership, to be really, really receptive.

I was actually kind of blown away just how receptive they were to this.

And I was really pleased about that.

And we were.

In the end, we were just really pleased that we could make this happen, not only for the community so they can enjoy this space, but also for the folks who are buried there and who really have never received a proper tribute.

Yeah.

So I want to.

I want to sit with that for a second, too, because this is, you know, that whole process of visibility and this, you know, somewhat of an unfair question.

Through the whole process of, you know, research and everything else.

Were there any identifications of, you know, specific people that are not highlighted is the wrong word.

But were there, you know, identifications done with historical records and things to know some of those.

Some of the people who happen to be in these areas.

So, interestingly, Mount Hope's burial records, their burial ledgers are, number one, extraordinarily detailed.

And number two, they're accessible to anybody with an Internet connection.

So there's a database that's accessible online.

And so anybody could go and find out who's buried in various parts of the cemetery.

And that includes the public section of the cemetery or the quote, unquote, pauper section of the cemetery.

That's definitely possible.

And in the course of planning our little memorial in the cemetery, we gave a great deal of consideration to including names.

In fact, we wanted to include names because, I mean, the best way to sort of, like, I don't know, restore a person's humanity, I think, is to actually, you know, use their name, really.

And that was very important to us.

We felt strongly about that.

De.

Anonymized, really.

Exactly right.

So the hurdle that we ran into is that folks from the New York State Office of Mental Health.

So it's a little bit of a complicated, circuitous story that I'm not sure if you want the whole thing, but basically, the county asylum morphed into the Rochester State Hospital, which became a state psychiatric facility, which then morphed into the Rochester Psychiatric center, which, of course, still continues to serve folks to this day.

So because the county asylum turned into a state facility, the state felt strongly that they had ownership of the records and indeed, you might even say ownership of the names, ownership of the identities of the folks who were inmates in the Old county asylum.

And so they felt strongly, and they told us in no uncertain terms that we should not.

We were not allowed to use any names, at least for the folks who were patients or inmates of the insane asylum.

And so we were kind of disappointed by that, but we weren't surprised by that because we knew for many, many years we had known that OMH has a very, I guess you'd say, a very stringent view, actually, of patient privacy.

And actually, I'm involved in an effort, I think.

What I think is a really important effort as we speak, actually, to legislate, to change the law, to make.

To increase accessibility to very old records of formerly institutionalized people so that we can identify them, so that we can talk about them, so that we can treat them once more as human beings and so on.

And so that's kind of a parallel effort that I feel very strongly about.

Yeah, and I'd love to have you over to talk about that more another time, because this.

I'd say that transparency is the other thing too.

Right.

It's.

It's not running away from the darkness of the past.

You know, being aware of how people were treated.

And then, as you mentioned earlier, you know, and like, you know, thinking about, how do you.

How can you be present for those in your circle?

How can you be present for the things that you can change in, you know, in society, in our life?

Right.

We only have so much reach, but it's our joy and responsibility to be there for our.

For our circle and maybe the circle around that, and maybe we can make a difference in our city.

So when I was.

When I was reading about this, the first thing that popped into my head was, this has to be such a fascinating challenge to decide how to.

How to portray this complex series of emotions.

And, you know, the.

You know, because there's darkness and there's celebration and there's, you know, you know, unveiling.

Unveiling all these different aspects of this.

How is that process coming up with, you know, this creative expression?

So I think that's why I was drawn to making it interdisciplinary, because it has so many layers to it and the way people honor and grieve, and we have just so many beautiful artists in this town.

So I thought it would be a great way to combine a celebration with a multidisciplinary approach.

So I am a choreographer, so I have one piece in the Ceremony that goes by that title.

Invisibly they lived and invisibly they died.

I borrowed that because I thought it was so central to the to the purpose here.

And then there's one other dance by a beautiful choreographer dancer in Rochester, Nanako Hirokawa Mendino.

And so hers is called the Flower of Remembering.

So there are two dance pieces, but it's also bookended by the only other.

The other movement in this is a movement choir.

So a movement choir is a way of creating a movement piece that is shared by other people, so they contribute to it as well.

So I put out an open call for 15 second gestures or movement from anyone in the community.

In fact, people can still go to the Fringe website with getting that QR code and learning more that they could for the next couple of days they could still send me a snippet of movement that is about this topic of remembering and mental health and well being.

And so with those snippets, I'll generate just a very short movement choir that we can all learn.

And I'll post that before the show as well.

And we will start the ceremony with that so that we can, as a community come together in presence.

And it's easy enough that people can just follow along as well.

And then that will kind of kick off the ceremony, so to speak.

And then we will close with that as well, kind of framing it.

But I have, through a grant through the University of Rochester's Humanities Center, I got a grant to help support several events this year that deal with mental health.

But this would be the first one.

So this is the inaugural event.

And so we will have a large supply of flowers, but people can bring flowers of their own as well.

But we will have a large supply of flowers because one of the rituals right in going to the cemetery is often to bring flowers to honor.

So they're biodegradable, so they're sustainable.

And we are going to disseminate so people can help us disseminate these beautiful flowers.

But in between that, we're also having Ryan speak and Robert Riley and Dennis is going to say, and Dennis Carr is also going to join us.

And then I have some beautiful musicians in.

Sean Mulligan, who's leading, and Greg Woodsby and also Eastman Brass Quintet students are doing a piece.

And then lastly, my husband Adam Wilcox, who is a writer, is sharing a poem that is titled Invisible no More.

Wow.

I mean, this is a packed density of creative expression.

What I'm kind of wondering is people have different ways of thinking about all of these different art forms from dance, music, poetry, history, you know, you know, choirs, you know, reflection together for you specifically when you're, you know, working on Choreographing a dance, you know, a dance piece for a complex topic.

Right.

And something that has hit you emotionally, can you talk about.

Because people think about.

People think things about dance, but I don't think they really densely think about it that much.

When you're working through, you know, expressing these complex emotions, how.

How do you go through that process of coming up with what's going to be the final product Struggle?

Yeah, at first.

Well, I have some beautiful dancers that are working with me, so that helps.

But for me, it's trying to capture their humanity and their loss, loss in direction or loss of control of their lives that they were kind of put away, sequestered.

So it's a very quiet piece that, for instance, one of the things people might not notice, but whenever anyone enters, they never are forward facing.

They're only facing profile in from the back.

And to me, that was a slight metaphor for their namelessness.

And I tried to keep that through most of the dance.

So it's little things like that.

And I have very kind of limited phrase work and movement vocabulary.

So it also speaks to the lack of variety in these lives.

Yeah.

Well, I also love that, like, you know, there's.

There's this anchor, Right.

And I love that as that's the building block.

Right.

So you have that anchor of, oh, we're starting to face away.

And then you build on that and you can build on that as well.

And I. I always love the idea of anchoring, right.

You're anchoring a story, you're anchoring an emotion into.

Into one thing, and then you can develop it from there.

Because it's.

It is about obviously honoring the people, but, you know, it should feel.

Should be obviously of the people that are there as well.

Because it's about, you know, somewhat how do we feel about this and forcing us to reckon with it a bit as well.

Yeah.

I have to say that I'm not an artist.

And so I have to say that I'm as excited, perhaps more excited than anybody to see how all this unfolds on the.

On the 19th.

But, you know, the last point that you made though, I think is so important.

I think that would be wonderful.

We're doing so much better in so many ways.

But at the same time, though, it's also true that lots and lots of people living with especially serious mental illness continue to live on the margins of society in every bit the same way that they did even decades ago.

So although we've come a long way, I think it would be wonderful if we could use this to prompt some reflection about ways that we could do even better.

And what do we need to do to move the needle in a much more positive direction for these folks?

Yeah, And I think that's also.

That's the honesty about.

It's the honesty about where we are now.

Right.

And like, the way my brain goes is I'm a pessimist, but I'm a realist and I'm, you know, I'm content knowing that I think we're failing every day.

I think we're failing less.

But are we taking a step back from even where we were a few years ago?

Those are the things that, those are things that keep me, that keep me up, that were, you know, we're not believing the experts in these fields and obviously even, you know, all the experts are learning things all the time because these are complex things that cross diagnosis and cross so many things.

But I think it's the honesty of, hey, we don't understand all of this completely, even now, and that we all need to do better and also be good to ourselves and be good to everybody around us.

So, yeah, as they say, history is not just history.

Yeah.

You know, past is prologue.

And so we need to use the lessons of the past to really inform right here, right now.

Yeah.

So, man, just got.

Got me thinking for a second there.

So I think what I, what I kind of want to end off with is, you know, if somebody's coming out on Saturday, September 19, at 2 o' clock for the free event Invisible no More at the Mount Hope Cemetery.

What's the.

For you, what's the, what's the historical thing that you want them to take away?

This, I guess the simp.

The.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is that I want people to know that there are folks buried in that part of the cemetery.

I think that it's really easy.

So it's really interesting where that, that plot is situated in the cemetery.

It's directly across from the fireman's memorial, which if you know, if you know where that is it really.

There's this gigantic, really grand and kind of grandiose obelisk that's there, and there's all kinds of interesting statuary and things like that.

And of course, the firemen who are deceased and who are buried there, they deserve every bit of that.

I'm not saying they don't, but if you go across the street to where our folks.

I'll say our folks are buried, It's a much, much different place.

It's much more.

To say that it's much more modest would be a little bit of an understatement, really.

It's modest to the point that you don't even know that anybody's buried there.

It looks like a vast open field.

So, I mean, I suppose for me, the big thing would be to alert the community to the fact that there are people buried there in the first place.

And if that's all we achieve.

And I think that's really.

That's something that's.

I think it's simple, but it's important.

Yeah.

And I mean, I wasn't gonna ask this, but, like, the term came up during this was you just use the phrase our people.

That kind of hit me too, like that.

I don't know.

How does.

How does that grab you?

Well, you know, how we treat the least or the weakest among us reflects on who we are.

Right.

And so I think, who do we want to be?

And I'm hoping that this will inspire.

It inspires me to do more.

I hope it will inspire others to think about people who are out there in great need and need our focus, need our attention.

Yeah.

Well, let's close out for today.

So if you want to put any plugs out for anything else, anywhere else, you want people to follow your work or other things like that, let's do that, and then we'll close out.

So for anybody who's interested in the history of social welfare, history of mental illness, ways of treating mental illness, history of institutions that cared for people who have what we now call mental illness, history of poor houses, almshouses, things like that.

I have an Instagram where I post photographs and a great deal of content from my travels, going to poor house cemeteries, state hospital cemeteries, asylum cemeteries and so on.

And it's called Asylum Adventures, all one word.

And so I have a very modest following, but I have a great deal of fun cultivating that page.

Yeah.

I'm just going to say that I hope that everyone goes out to Rochester Fringe and has the inspiration of all these amazing artists for the 12 days that we.

We have that going in Rochester.

And yeah, there's there's just no end to things that will pique your mind, move your heart, you know, just.

Just really fill you up.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Get out and see some people bringing their creativity and expressions to Everybody.

Go to rochesterfringe.com, grab some tickets, go out and really embrace what Rochester and this whole experience has to offer.

And we'll be back next time with more on the Lunchadore Podcast Network.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchadore Podcast Network.