Prison Theatre and an Embodied Aesthetics of Liberation: Exploring the Potentials and Limits (original) (raw)
Related papers
Performing new lives: prison theatre
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2012
Performing New Lives is an engaging and accessible collection of 15 essays penned by some of the most experienced and respected
Theatre, incarceration and citizenship
Tūtira Mai: Making Change in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2021
In this chapter, I provide an overview of the Forum Theatre plays that were developed by the incarcerated community at Auckland Prison, Paremoremo in 2017. I begin by providing a context for understanding theatre in prison, before providing a brief outline of the Forum Theatre approach. The chapter will then describe the three short plays that were performed, and explain the significance and the implications of the issues presented. This chapter explores how the Forum Theatre project worked to empower the community to take action and be involved in deliberating the issues of dysfunction presented in performance, in an effort to enhance the health and wellbeing of prisoners. I will then conclude by arguing that theatre in prison offers wider society a useful and pragmatic means to redefine what citizenship can mean by highlighting the importance of cultural rights.
Across the fields of applied theatre and prison theatre, there appears to be little analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic engagement for participants in prison-based partici-patory practices. This article presents a pragmatist aesthetic frame that I developed to analyse the experience of a drama programme I ran in a women's prison. This frame evolved alongside the practice, drawing largely from John Dewey's (1934) Art as Experience and a selection of contemporary scholars who, influenced by Dewey, work in the areas of aesthetics, ethics and education – most notably Richard Shusterman (2000, 2008) and David Granger (2006). I also incorporated narrative within this frame as an interpretive and expressive structure for experience, and a key element within my applied theatre practice. I began to conceive aesthetics in terms of an 'art of living', identifying a 'poetics of renewal' that informed the self-and world-creation of participants in the drama. I share this theoretical framework as a possible way to integrate the instrumental and the aesthetic in applied theatre theory and practice, specifically in a prison context.
Drama Therapy Review
This article is an updated assessment of ‘The Shakespeare Prison Project’ (SPP, Wisconsin), informed in part by post-COVID-19 reflections. Founder and artistic director Jonathan Shailor provides an exploration of the theory and practice that informs his work, which he calls the Theatre of Empowerment: storytelling, dialogue and performance, in the service of personal and social evolution. The key to understanding this work is seeing the prison theatre ensemble as a ‘community of practice’ that cultivates the virtues of individual empowerment, relational responsibility and moral imagination. The author tests these claims with a preliminary analysis of participants’ stories and draws conclusions from this analysis that will inform the next chapter of ‘The Shakespeare Prison Project’: Shakespeare’s Mirror, an approach that connects themes from Shakespeare’s plays with the personal narratives of incarcerated actors.
Tracing the Journey to Here: Reflections on a Prison Theatre Devised Project
Theatre Topics, 2016
Here: A Captive Odyssey was a devised theatre piece co-produced by William Head on Stage Prison Theatre Company and the Prison Arts Collective. The play traced the history of William Head Peninsula, which is thirty kilometers outside of Victoria, British Columbia. The devised ensemble play was performed to public audiences that were allowed into the prison after passing through security screening. The show ran from 8 October to 7 November 2015 and played to over 1,700 people, about half of whom had never before attended a William Head on Stage production. Due to my insider perspectives in this project-working as co-creator and co-performer while also taking on roles as co-facilitator, acting mentor, and vocal coach-I will take on a reflective practitioner voice to consider my experiences of the project. 1 William Head on Stage and the Prison Arts Collective Partnership William Head on Stage (WHoS) is the longest-running prison theatre company in Canada, now in its thirty-fourth year. The company emerged out of a course offered by the University of Victoria's Department of Theatre, and for many years the department's students and instructors were involved. However, over the past twenty years or so community theatre artists from Victoria have been the outside collaborators. The inmate-run company chooses who directs its annual fall productions and negotiates what it wishes to work on each year.
The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 2011
relating to the work of Loïc Wacquant, whose books Punishing the Poor and Prisons of Poverty have generated both excitement and controversy. Criminology has undoubtedly benefitted from Loïc Wacquant's inputs-as he traverses the boundaries between searching theoretical analysis and wide-ranging empirical findings, and between politics, policy and practice and discursive disciplinary fields. In a context of UK-based riots and looting and populist and punitive stances in relation to the sentencing of rioters and protestors (August 2011) we might expect interest in the work of Wacquant to intensify-as he charts an inextricable link between the ascendency of neoliberalism and the rise of the penal state. The works of this sociologist, Wacquant, are hugely important. The two reviews that follow offer some useful insights into the intellectual resources proferred within. We are most grateful to Vanessa Barker whose review is based on an 'author meets critic' session at the American Society of Criminology conference in November 2010. In the spirit of 'author meets critic' we will be inviting Loïc Wacquant to respond to these reviews in a future issue of the journal.
Performing Te Whare Tapa Whā: Building on Cultural Rights to Decolonise Prison Theatre Practice
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2021
This article explores Ngā Pātū Kōrero: Walls That Talk (2019), a documentary theatre production staged by incarcerated men at Unit 8 Te Piriti, a specialist therapy unit for those convicted of sex offences located at Auckland Prison, Aotearoa New Zealand. The performance was built around Te Whare Tapa Whā (The House of Four Sides)-a widely used model of Māori health. In this article we discuss the use of masks in performance and the significance of Te Whare Tapa Whā as a dramaturgical device, which builds on the foundations of cultural rights in order to advance a decolonising approach to prison theatre practice.