Patience and Resilience, a post by Dana El-Khatib

Dana hugging a child at a workshop for Teatro em Comunidades. Eddie Williams appears on the left.

My name is Dana El-khatib. I’m currently a rising junior at the university of Michigan, studying Economics. Though born in Ann Arbor to a Palestinian family, I lived most of my life in Jordan. For that reason, I constantly find myself comparing how different cultures approach different practices.

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) at the University of Michigan aims to provide arts programming among other things to incarcerated individuals in Michigan prisons, and returning citizens. This is done through drama workshops, a literary art review and an annual art exhibition. This past winter semester, I was one of six alternating facilitators for drama workshops in the Federal Correctional Institute at Milan. When people ask me why I decided to join PCAP, I think of many reasons that I could blab on and on about. I think about how I cannot make a moral judgment about the people inside because I didn’t grow up in the conditions that many of them did. I think about our dysfunctional educational system, I think about systemic racism, etc. However, if I’m being honest, one of the biggest reasons I chose to do PCAP is for my own selfish desire to grow as a person. There is a word in Arabic that has a special value in Islam;الصبر; pronounced as“alsabir.” Though I do not believe there is a direct translation in English that could embody all of its meaning, if I had to explain it, I would say it’s a combination of resilience and patience. This concept has become more and more important for all Arabs due to the economic and social conditions the region faces. Even more than that, its value has become rooted in Palestinian culture with resistance and struggle. Although everyone faces adversity in their lives in many forms, I, having lived a very fortunate life, knew that I could learn a thing or two about alsabir from the incarcerated, and that’s why I initially joined PCAP. Imagine growing up in horrible economic conditions and then being stripped of your freedom because of the life that society has pushed you towards. Yet, I have never seen more forgiving and positive people than the individuals I have worked with on the inside. When setting guidelines for the workshop in Milan, two of the men immediately said that one guideline should be: peace and love at all times. If I had been in their shoes, I think I would have so much hate and anger in me that I would want to get revenge on this world, but most of the people I have met seemed to have a wonderful soul that just wanted to better their life; that is what I see as the embodiment of الصبر.

In Brazil, I wondered how the different social and cultural scene would affect how people reacted to their living situation. When we visited a facility specifically for mothers who give birth in prison and their children, I was amazed by the strength of the women. In Arab culture, when a woman gives birth, everyone is there to help her. The grandmother or mother-in-law also usually stay with the mother for a couple of months to help manage the burden of a newly born baby. As I watched the mothers in the prison holding their crying babies, I compared the life they live with the life that I had always expected a new mother to be living. There was no outside support or comfort. No one to hold you when you don’t know what to do, no one to take care of your crying baby at night so you could rest. You only had yourself and the other women in the prison. I tried holding as many crying babies as I could so that the women could have the closest possible experience to a normal workshop, but I knew that there is only so much of your reality that you can escape for a few minutes. I saw the women care for each other’s babies; I thought about their solidarity together. This doesn’t even compare to the burden of knowing that in a matter of six months, your baby will be stripped from your hands, and often put into foster care if the mother’s family does not take them in. Yet, I saw the women smile and laugh. One said she named her son Moses after the prophet, because she feels that he is a warrior in this prison; this gave her strength. Again, I thought about how resilient and patient these women were. I admired the amount of صبر they had and only hoped that I could be nearly as strong in my life.

The favelas offered a whole new look into what this strength could mean to a community. We facilitated workshops for adults and children in what is known as a favela. A favela is a unique low income area in Brazil. Looking at the favelas and walking through them, I felt as though I had already been there. They were almost a carbon copy of the older and more established Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. The children had the biggest and brightest smiles. The elderly had the strongest spirits even after living so long in such harsh conditions. On the bus ride back, a friend of mine was very sad. When I talked to him, he said he kept thinking about all the shit these kids have been through in their lives. I simply smiled and said, they have the strength to handle it. I really do believe that the universe does not throw something on you that you cannot handle. These children are raised in circumstances that enable them to develop a level of صبر that we can’t even understand or compare to. They find ways to carry on and strength that radiates through their smiles. I wish no one in the world was put in such conditions, but the truth is many are living these conditions and worse everyday. If we want to wallow in sadness of how depressing that is, we surely all can; but that won’t do anyone any good. I admire their strength and I do not fear that they will not survive because I know they will. I refuse to think of them with pity, but I insist on admiring all those who have lived through much worse than what I have experienced because the truth is, they can teach us a lot.

Accessibility Abroad, a post by Syd Lio Riley

Oi! My name is Lio Riley. I’m a rising sophomore at the University of Michigan studying theatre arts and (potentially) American Culture. Before classes even started Fall semester, I met the lovely Ashley Lucas, who said she took a group of students to Brazil each summer to study theatre and incarceration. I looked her in the eye and said, “I’m going with you.” Almost a year of facilitating workshops in Michigan prisons and communities has passed, and here I am in the Mango Tree Hostel writing about my experiences doing the same in Brazil. With only a week left, it still doesn’t feel real.

In the time between meeting Ashley and traveling to Brazil, I learned a lot about how prisons work. I took her class The Atonement Project in the fall and Theatre and Incarceration in the winter (both of which are co-taught by the lovely Cozine Welch. Hi, Cozine!). In addition to gaining an unexpected interest and passion for carceral studies and activism, I began to study the intersections of transgender identity and disability in the American Culture department (Hi, Prof L!). I’m a transgender student at the university, and I’ve been living with a chronic pain condition in my knees for just over six years. Both of these identities, along with academic study and my newfound passion for prison activism and justice work, have lead me to ask a lot of questions on this trip concerning accessibility and representation, in theatre and theatre work abroad.

An example of tactile paving on a sidewalk

One of the first things I noticed after exiting my plane in São Paulo was the tactile paving found on every walking surface of the airport. Tactile paving is a system of ground tiles with raised bumps and ridges, used to help blind and visually impaired people navigate public spaces. In the US, they’re commonly placed at the ends of sidewalks, but I’d never seen entire networks of them inside buildings. When we left the airport, I found them lining every sidewalk and many hallways inside buildings, too. I thought this was pretty cool — the more I learn about accessibility, the more I recognize it (or the lack of it) in public spaces. It made me wonder why we didn’t use tactile paving this generously in the US. Still, as I began to navigate the landscapes of Florianopolis and Rio, I found the cities to still be largely inaccessible.

 

With pavement more frequently broken than not and a lack of curb cuts (small ramps built into the ends of sidewalks for wheelchair or stroller users) everywhere, the physical accessibility of the cities has been frustrating. For me, a broken escalator or elevator that requires a key to use can be the difference between a fun night out with friends or missing the next day’s activities (I’m writing this from the hostel while my classmates sing and dance at the hospital). This was reflected in the prisons, as well. The conditions of the prisons we’ve seen have been heartbreaking. As a non-incarcerated person navigating the prison, there were often only stairs or incredibly steep ramps. We saw very limited space for the folks incarcerated to get sunlight or fresh air and in one prison, large trash-can sized bins filled with rice left out in the open for bugs to land on and crawl in. It made me wonder what accessibility looked like for the people living inside. With how everything else looked, I wasn’t optimistic.

In addition to just the physical accessibility of space for people with physical disabilities, accessibility also is about accessibility of education and other government-provided services. We learned right away that many of our friends in Brazil take the bus for several hours each day to get to school. Some take multiple busses, and even boats. We also learned when traveling to the favelas that in some places, streets are so narrow that cars can’t fit through. Many are built into hillsides which makes them difficult to navigate, and because there are no street names or house numbers, people living in the favelas can’t receive mail, and also have a hard time finding employment without a permanent address. This perpetuates the cycle of poverty. In prisons, the religion you practice can determine your living situation, making religious freedom complicated. Evangelicals are provided with “nicer” living accommodations and more colorful surroundings due to the prevalence of Evangelicalism in Brazil, while Catholics are more crowded and don’t have access to as many things. For the trans women living in the men’s prison, this can mean choosing between denouncing their identities and losing access to their community in order to claim a religion for access to slightly better conditions, or claiming no religion to maintain the ability to live as women and attend the theatre workshop exclusive to trans women. Most incarcerated people are denied access to any programming at all, as we’ve learned after visiting several facilities here.

Many of these problems are too large for any one of us to solve in the three weeks we spend here, and I’ve been struggling with finding ways I can help improve accessibility while also honoring my own body and accessibility needs. Throughout the trip, the most surprising thing I’ve learned is how central accessibility is to PCAP. By literally bringing theatre into spaces like the prisons, hospitals, and favelas, we are making theatre and the arts accessible. One of the most striking examples of this was in a women’s facility called Unidade Materno Infantil, a facility where incarcerated mothers can keep their newborn children for about six months before either their families care for them or the babies are turned over to the state. The workshop participants included both mothers and their babies, meaning that many women (and some of us!) were occupied feeding, changing, soothing, and holding babies. Because there was such an obvious need for theatre games that accommodated this situation, we played each game sitting down, and adapted the game or our own movements to the needs of ourselves and the group. While the obvious reason for the accommodations was the babies, playing the games sitting down alleviated my pain personally and made it easier for me to facilitate and participate.

Materno Infantil workshop facilitators standing in front of their bus after workshop

The fact that these games were so easy to adapt for mothers and their new children, but we still struggle to adapt theatre for folks with other less-obvious access needs frustrates me at times.  PCAP is built on uncertain schedules and arbitrary rules of the prison, as well as creativity and improvisation, so accessibility is often an easier goal in our small workshops. Not to say that PCAP has mastered accessibility — there is always work to do — but we can use these principles and mindsets when addressing accessibility and disability representation in theatre as a whole. This starts with how we include disabled people in our conversations. Do we use language like “deformed” to describe babies who are born disabled because of the Flint Water Crisis? Do we put an elderly actress in a wheelchair for the entirety of a show, but prompt her to get up and dance when comedic timing calls for it? Do we expect less from the elderly folks in our workshops than we do of the young ones, and express surprise when they actually can act (or twerk!) better than most of us? Changing our own attitudes of what disability looks like, what counts as “comedy,” and what kinds of people are disabled can lead to a larger attitude change that hopefully builds a more accessible world for everyone — whether that means physically, financially, religiously, based on gender or sexuality, or any other reason.

Teatro Renascer participants and facilitators in a tableau from a short scene. They are all posing with different expressions of fear.

Navigating my own access needs abroad has been a challenge, and I’ve learned many of my classmates are struggling similarly. It is incredibly frustrating at times, especially when I have to miss class, workshops, and other fun outings, but it’s made me keenly aware of where accessibility falls short in other areas, both here and in the US. Learning about the work our friends in Brazil are doing with trans women in prison makes me wish PCAP offered resources like that, and has encouraged me to pursue the study and advocacy for transgender people in prisons at home upon our return. Facilitating a theatre workshop with a baby in my arms reminded me that theatre is secondary to access and inclusion. There’s a lot of work to be done in regards to accessibility in and out of prison, as well as in theatre, but addressing the problems that exist and recognizing solutions we have found can help us continue to push for an even more inclusive environment in our workshops and our world.

Experiences of Misogyny and Machismo in Latin America, a post by Lisa Garcia

Olá gente!

My name is Lisa, and last month I graduated with a B.A. in international studies. I came to PCAP after watching Ashley’s performance of her play, Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass. It was such a touching topic and an incredible performance that I decided I needed to meet this woman and be her friend ASAP. I visited her office, she told me all about her work with PCAP, and a few weeks later I was enrolled in her Winter class. I spent second semester co-facilitating a theatre workshop at the federal men’s prison in Milan. Throughout this time I learned a lot about the complexities of prison bureaucracy, disorganization, overcrowding, and understaffing. As a volunteer, I saw that we were the last priority because of these and lots more forces working together. I also experienced firsthand what theatre can do in spaces that don’t allow space for vulnerability and creative expression.

I wanted to come do this work here in Brazil because I genuinely believe in PCAP’s values and mission, and because my heart is in Latin America. I was born in Guatemala, so I’ve had the privilege of traveling in and experiencing several Latin American and Caribbean countries. The University has also allowed me these opportunities through study abroad programs.

In every community I enter I am always very aware of how patriarchy affects women. Coming to Brazil, I felt no different. In my experience of my own, as well as other Latin American cultures, machismo and misogyny are pervasive in social life. Women and LGBTQ folks are, in a lot of similar and different ways to the U.S., treated unjustly and violently. However, I’ve had a few refreshing experiences here in Rio, as well as in Florianópolis, that I wanted to share. I believe other patriarchal societies, not just in Latin America and the Caribbean, can learn from these practices.

 

When we visited the women’s prison in Floripa I learned that, by law, women’s prisons can only have female staff for the safety of the incarcerated women. Men’s facilities don’t have any similar rules, so anyone can work there. Although it would be better if none of the men or women were locked away and forgotten in the first place, I was at least relieved to know that male staff don’t pose a threat to the incarcerated women of Brazil. 

 

In Rio, while riding the metro, I noticed that there’s a pink line behind the yellow safety line on the platform, but only for the length of two metro cars. Upon asking, I learned that there are metro cars reserved exclusively for women during morning and evening rush hours. I thought about how much safer I would feel if I rode a New York subway car with no men on it. I was impressed with how this city is trying to provide protection for women in public spaces. However, this is not the case largely throughout Brazil. The metro only runs through the wealthier parts of Rio, so relatively few people have access to it at all. This is not to invalidate that the system is inspiringly progressive in the first place.

The experience that stayed with me the most, though, was facilitating a theatre workshop on Friday for trans women in a men’s prison. In spite of their identity, these women are still locked up at the men’s facility. Julia, Kym, and I accompanied five UniRio students to their relatively new workshop: it’s only been happening since December 2018 (less than six months). It took a very long time for the staff to let us in because Friday is also the day when families of the incarcerated persons can come drop off food and hygiene supplies for their loved ones. This is not allowed in U.S. prisons, but because food and resources in Brazilian prisons are so poor in quantity and quality, some families must trek long distances to make sure their incarcerated loved one has access to decent necessities. There was a long line of mainly women; some held Bibles, all held giant, heavy bags of supplies. After an hour and a half of waiting outside, we finally made it into our workshop space. As the women slowly arrived, I noticed that we had a trans staff member participating in the workshop, and the rest of the women seemed to have a friendly relationship with her. This would never happen in U.S. prisons, so it was refreshing and also comforting – in a twisted way – knowing that these women had a sort of ally among their jailers.

Once we were all seated in a circle we did introductions and talked about PCAP and how our work connects to the work we are doing in Brazil. The women had a lot of great questions about PCAP, our motives for coming to Brazilian prisons, and about the U.S. prison system. This was humbling and encouraging to me because they didn’t merely accept that these Americans were here to teach them some theatre, but made everyone in the space think critically about each of our positionality and the greater impact our work has on incarcerated people, women, and the LGBTQ community. This start made our workshop feel a lot more vulnerable and safe. Though we only had time to play one game, I was able to teach them a PCAP favorite, “Funky Chicken,” in the Portuguese that I’ve been working on, which was a personally proud moment. We each had a turn at dancing our funky chicken, laughing, and encouraging each other. By the end we were all hot, tired, and sweaty, but also filled with joy. We ended with a circle, holding hands, rotating, singing and dancing a beautiful song about community and solidarity. I continue to be amazed by how the arts can transcend physical walls and iron bars, but also cultural and language barriers. Our hugs and kisses goodbye were so heartfelt and genuine; I’ll never forget them. I was sad that we only had forty minutes with these marvelous women, but so grateful to have had the opportunity to meet them and tell you all about them. Maybe you’ll feel like telling these stories, too, about the beautiful humans we so inhumanely imprison and forget about, and about how it should be different and more compassionate.

With love and hope,

Lisa

Our Work IS Important, a post by Kymberley Leggett

Hi, I’m Kym! I graduated this May with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and double-minored in Music and Community Action & Social Change with a certificate in Poverty Solutions, Action, & Engagement. I have the pleasure of enjoying this experience in Brazil with PCAP for a second year. Coming back to Brazil, I knew some things would be different. The sand on the beaches would be in different places, the friends I made last year may have graduated, and the political context under which we do our work here would have a whole new stride. This would become apparent, first, when we had our arrival orientation. The black students were warned that the state of Santa Catarina may be more challenging for us because of the way things have happened politically. It is things like this that make me realize the importance of all the work we do here in Brazil.

At the University, we were able to attend a class where we shared games with the Brazilians, and they shared some with us. Not only was it fun, but having the game-share allows us to build upon the collection of games we have so we have more fun, meaningful games to play with the communities we go into. Also, building relationships with the students at the University allows us to get a feel for Brazil in a safe, supportive environment. We learn more Portuguese by having people to practice with. Even when we don’t retain the words, we learn ways to get past the language barrier and convey what we are trying to communicate through hand movements or speaking other languages (like Spanish or French)… whatever works! We learn how to navigate areas that are unfamiliar to us and sense the general mood of a room. We also get a feel for how the politics of the country impact our own lives and the lives of those we work with. With some of this knowledge, we headed into two prisons this week.

Finally, we were able to hold our workshop with a group of incarcerated men working in the wood workshop. It was very clear how much the institution had taken over their lives. Even when we began the workshop, the men had their hands behind them, the way they’re expected to walk throughout the corridors of the prison. They were hesitant, at first, to let loose with us. Being surrounded by big men with guns and random people who don’t speak your language isn’t a situation most people would choose to be in. After we played a few games, though, the security left the room, and the tension lessened. We were able to smile a bit bigger and laugh a little harder. Laughing is special! It has no language, so people of all types can bond over it. It makes a positive impact on those who do it. Unfortunately, not all people can do it all the time, though, so it is important to do it while you can.  We didn’t get to spend much time together, but knowing we had the opportunity to bring a workshop to them and to hear them speak without the formality they’re used to brought the day to a nice ending. We’ll continue to do great work on this trip with women, children, and more men and I’m excited to see what comes of it this time around!

Solidarity and Storytelling: The Women of Joinville, a post by Hannah Agnew

My name is Hannah Agnew, and I will soon be starting my senior year at the University of Michigan with a major in Sociology and a minor in Crime and Justice. I have been involved in PCAP since my freshman year of college and it has completely changed my life, to the point that I have decided to enter a career field in which I can work with incarcerated women. For over a year now, I have been facilitating the Sisters Within at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the longest running theatre troupe in a women’s correctional facility in the U.S. As I have been doing the work here in Brazil, I have constantly had the Sisters on my mind and in my heart––I truly wish they could be here with us.  

Throughout my week of facilitating theatre workshops in correctional facilities located in Florianópolis, Brazil, the pain and frustration of seeing what we do to incarcerated folks all over the world has really hit me. A few days ago our group was given a guided tour of a men’s correctional facility which felt like a bad joke–– we walked along the top of the wall that forms the periphery of the grounds hearing the administration relish in how “progressive” they believed their facility to be as we observed fragments of the men’s everyday lives from a literal line between freedom and captivity. While this tour was necessary in helping to establish a relationship with this facility and beginning new theatre workshops there, I felt a wave of frustration wash over me as I realized that this work really never gets any easier. But after thinking about it, I realized that seeing the injustices that happen in prisons shouldn’t ever become easier and that we must always keep fighting for those inside. While this week I have seen humanity at some of its worst in the way we confine and attempt to strip incarcerated folks of their sense of self, I have also seen at every facility I have gone to that despite the restrictive conditions they are kept in, people inside continue to maintain their identities and a sense community in the most creative and inspiring ways. I was particularly struck by the group of women I worked with at a prison in Joinville, a town located three hours outside of Florianópolis.

Due to the fact that the workshop is facilitated in a very small space, only four of us were able to join in––me, Ashley, Vicente (a theatre professor from UDESC), and one of his students. We were accompanied by the two women who regularly facilitate the workshop and a journalist who was able to take pictures of our time together. When we arrived at the facility, I was taken aback by a long line of primarily women waiting outside, all dressed in the same uniform-like outfits consisting of a white t-shirt and grey sweat pants. I soon learned that they were visitors of the women inside, required to dress this way so that guards could distinguish them from the incarcerated women, and I was painfully reminded of the fact that when someone is prison, their loved ones are held captive by the prison as well. Not only did these visitors have to go through the frustrating and often humiliating ritual of being searched by guards in order to simply see their loved ones, but the prison took a sort of ownership over them as part of their individuality was diminished by the outfits (similar to the incarcerated women).

The women’s prison is located right next door to a men’s prison, and in the middle of the two lies the programs building, which is shared by both the men and the women (but never at the same time). We later learned that the room we had our workshop in was also used by the men for literacy classes, but the women did not have access to them and were not able to learn how to read or write. As we made our way to the room we were overtaken by a toxic smell in the air, a mix of paint fumes and other unknown substances, and not long after we all began uncontrollably sneezing, coughing, and trying to exude the foreign stench from our bodies. I wanted to run outside and take in the nearby fresh air, and my heart broke for the women who are constantly surrounded by these conditions, being seemingly poisoned by the cruel and unforgiving institution.

After adjusting to the air, we finally made it to the room where we would facilitate the workshop, and I was completely taken aback. I had never been in a space like this for a workshop. It consisted of two adjoining cage-like rooms separated by large metal bars with gaps in them big enough for us to reach through and touch the women but still effective in segregating and emphasizing the difference in status between the facilitators and the incarcerated women. We were to have two workshops in this room, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and during the entirety of them we would have to adjust all of our games and exercises to working through these bars. I had a feeling similar to the day before at the men’s prison, struck by how the facilities used very physical ways to remind the folks inside where they were. But despite all of this, the women were an absolute joy to work with,and I will never forget how inspired I felt by their creativity and determination to create art with us despite the literal and symbolic barrier that separated us.

In the first workshop we began with an activity in which we got together in pairs and helped each other stretch and gave our partners massages. While I was paired with Vicente, I watched as several women worked with each other through the bars, and at some moments I even forgot that we were separated. For the rest of the workshop we primarily led group games in which all of us held hands and formed a circle that permeated through the bars. The women we worked with did not let the barrier stop them from connecting with us and each other, and the joy I felt in that room was palpable. Despite the prison telling us we were different and separate, we still found a way to create community which I think is a very common theme in all of the PCAP workshops that we do. After the first session, we facilitators left for lunch as we waited to begin the second workshop. It has always been difficult leaving prison and knowing that everybody else has to stay behind, but I particularly felt it in this moment as we all had the privilege of being able to decompress, relax, and take in the fresh air while the beautiful women we had just worked with were forced back into their monotonous and dehumanizing every-day routine at the facility.

During the second workshop, we facilitated mostly all of the same games from the morning and of course these women were just as excited, creative, and joyful as the first group. At the end of our time together, I told them all how touched I was by their ability to be so open in this space and that when I returned home I would carry this experience with me and tell the Sisters all about them. The women then proceeded to ask all about the Sisters and even expressed their wishes to exchange letters with them, despite the fact that have never met and probably never will. It was beautiful to see a sense of solidarity that transcended cultural and geographical barriers between these women and the Sisters.

Soon after, they began a political discussion about their wishes to protest the current President and climate of their country, but someone expressed their frustration in the fact that they could not do anything from behind bars. But Vicente was quick to point out that this was not true. He went on to explain how theatre can be used as a form of protest and that several folks he has worked with have been given permission to perform on the outside and create something that represents what they want others to know about them. The women seemed particularly excited about this, and I felt a new wave of passion and intensity take over the room. On this note we headed out of the prison, and it left me with a lot to think about.

With this experience I have a newfound passion for the work that PCAP does, and I have a deeper understanding of the power of theatre and the creative arts in creating solidarity and enabling folks in total institutions to preserve their humanity. Each workshop was only two hours long, but even in this short amount of time, I felt like I had gotten to know the women on a deep and personal level (despite not speaking the same language). I saw a deep sense of community and solidarity between the women, facilitators and even the Sisters, and I saw everybody in the room use theatre to permeate the wall between us. I often take theatre for granted in my everyday life, but in this context I realized just how powerful it can be in uniting folks and maintaining agency.  I also have immense respect for the women that regularly facilitate the workshop, one of whom drives three hours there and three hours back home every week. I learned so much about movement, language, and vocals from them, and I am excited to shared everything with the Sisters when I get back home. In working with these women I realized how much I still have to learn as a facilitator and how valuable it is to exchange different pedagogies in order to bring new perspectives into our workshops. Throughout the entirety of this trip, I have gained so much insight not just from the participants but from the other facilitators, scholars, and students from UDESC who are conducting work similar to ours. I don’t think it will be possible for me to ever forget this experience, and I hope to keep the women, both participants and facilitators alike, in my mind and heart even when I leave Brazil. I find myself wishing I could tell you all even more about these women and that they could be on the outside to tell you all their stories themselves, but I hope that this post gives you all a sense of the beauty, creativity, and resilience that they all possess.

 

How I Got to a Women’s Prison in Brazil, a post by Christian Ureña

Oi! My name is Christian Ureña. I just completed my junior year at the University of Michigan. I am majoring in Movement Science in the School of Kinesiology.  I was first introduced to PCAP over a year ago when one of my fraternity brothers, Sergio Barrera, was in Ashley Lucas’s Theatre & Incarceration class. He talked so fondly of his experience in PCAP and about the fun he would have with the men in prison when playing theatre games. I wanted to be able to make an impact as well by bringing joy to people who have not experienced positive emotions like that in quite some time. The following semester I enrolled in Ashley’s Atonement Project class. Through this class, I was able to do a workshop. I was a co-facilitator with Sergio and another one of our Fraternity Brothers, Carlos. We facilitated at the only Federal Prison in the State of Michigan in a city called Milan. Throughout the course of the semester I was able to see firsthand the benefits of programming for the men in prison. I enjoyed that experience so much that I felt that I needed to continue doing this work because one semester was not enough. From there, I went on to facilitate the community workshop at Miller Manor that included people from that living community and reentered citizens. Through these workshops, I was able to learn a lot and bring people a lot of joy in several prisons in Michigan. When Ashley told me about the trip to Brazil where I get to do these same theatre games and continue to impact people and bring them joy, I knew this was something I wanted to partake in.

Christian Ureña and his fraternity brother Sergio Barrera on the beach in Florianópolis.

Now that I am in Brazil, I know I made the right decision coming here to continue doing this work. Today, I had the privilege of going into one of the women’s prisons here in the state of Santa Catarina. Going in, I knew it was going to be much smaller than the men’s prison we were able to see earlier this week but besides that I did not know what to expect. First off, I was surprised with the lack of security that there was going into the prison. There was no metal detector or pat down or anything. I do not know if this is because we are “The US citizens,” so they just trust us, or if this is the normal protocol. That surprised me, but besides that, I had a great time.

The women are absolutely hilarious and super nice. Before our workshop started, the ladies prepared a mini performance for us. I honestly did not understand a lot of it. I know something was going on with a hitch hiker of some kind that had a lot of belongings. I also know that they played the pancake game at the end, and it was honestly the best version of the pancake game I have ever seen. I laughed so much. Later, they showed us this amazing game that I got to play in which there is a cat and a mouse. The mouse and the cat are both blindfolded. The objective of the game is for the cat to “catch” the mouse. It is a game that would never be allowed in a US prison [because it involves blindfolds and physical contact] which makes me think back to my friends at Milan because I know they would love to play this game.

Back to the ladies, after the workshop, we were allowed to celebrate with them and eat cake that they made for us. It was the most delicious thing I have had so far while being in Brazil. I am a huge fan of sweets, and it truly hit the spot. However, throughout this celebration, I couldn’t help but notice something. Their bathroom door is bigger than the door frame; therefore, the door does not close. There is also no soap in the bathroom. Also, the toilet is missing its toilet seat. These are things that I feel are basic in the maintenance of the prison that unfortunately these ladies have to live without. The warden of the prison explained to us that there are still a lot of renovations happening so I truly hope adjustments will be made to their restroom. One thing that the warden shared with us that made me happy was that she used to be a prison guard who did not understand the use of programming such as the one we provide. However, once being promoted to warden she was able to see and appreciate first hand the impact programming can have on the women. She spoke very fondly of the impacts of the theatre workshop which is something that gave me a lot of hope for the women in the prison.  

Sharing Our Truths, Love, and Laughter in Brazil, a post by Uche Nna

Hi, my name is Uche Nna, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. I anticipate graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and a minor in Gender and Health in December. I thought about joining PCAP after a few friends gave me brief summaries about the work PCAP is involved in and how it has impacted them. I made my true strides to join PCAP after learning about the study abroad program in Brazil. I feel very fortunate to be writing a blog on the final days of our trip. I hope to share with you the moments that impacted me the most. We started this journey on May 20th in Florianópolis, Brazil, and it will come to an official close on June 11th in Rio de Janeiro. In our time here, we have shared our truths, love and laughter within prisons, communities, classrooms, Brazilian homes, and the each other as classmates.

Our time in Rio has been very interesting. We became as mixed up and thrown off by a gas strike as the locals. As the gas strike continued, we watched businesses become empty, signs about being “closed until further notice” went up, the university was closed as students were unable to ride the buses to get to class. As the gas strike moved into its 7th day the roads were barren, we panicked about being able to get to the airport and flying to Rio. We tried to remain cognizant about what our friends in Brazil struggle with when there is conflict, and protest that addresses government policy.

My favorite day in Rio was one of the most exhausting days I had in a while. This day started with my roommate’s alarm at 5:15 am followed by my alarm at 5:30 am. After making our way out of the hostel towards the university, the sun began to rise. We were on our way to prison to do a workshop. When I arrived outside the prison doors of the men’s facility, we joined an assembly of visitors who were shuffled in 4 at a time. By the time we arrived, they were taking in 16-20. I am unsure how long they have been there that day or how early a visitor would have to show up to get a good number. Over the course of 45 minutes, the guards looked out of the 2.5” x 6” rectangular peephole a few times, took our passports, asked us why we had come today and finally let us inside.

Walking through the hallways of the prison, I was really thrown off by how happy some of the staff were to see us. They seemed elated, almost too elated. I was facilitating with about 9 other students (3 from UniRio and 6 from University of Michigan) as we entered the space of our workshop, we began playing catch with each other. One by one men began to pop through the door and joined in with us. There were about 20 men who were in the circle playing this hacky-sack catch game about 10 minutes after the first one came in. We had a fabulous workshop and played about 7 games. Having the space to be playful with the incarcerated men has been amazing over the past few months with PCAP. It always amazes me how quickly they can let their guards down and be fully engaged, excited, and energized through playing games. Theatre in prison enables incarcerated people the opportunity to feel unapologetic joy. Being overzealous and playful in many prison spaces can be dangerous as this is how many people become targets for manipulation and abuse. Theatre gives incarcerated people a break from this and tells them that it is ok to try something new, laugh at oneself, or tell a silly joke. When we were ending the workshop, the men were very excited to tell their future goals. After this, one of the men, who I perceived as a staff member earlier in the day, presented a pile of artwork to us. This is when I realized that some of the staff members were also incarcerated, and I understood why they were so happy to see us.

Later in the day we attended Professor Marina’s graduate class. In this class her graduate student Julia shared some of the work and research she has been doing in women’s prison. She shared information about the disproportionate number of marginalized women, and she read a very impactful letter by one of the women. In this letter the woman says that she wishes she could have been a better mother and daughter. Having wishes like this from the inside can be incredibly painful. Many of us can try to repair and rebuild relationships. The extreme limitations that come with being incarcerated seem to make repairing and rebuilding relationships incredibly difficult. Being able to look back and forward in life and think about the changes we want to make to feel that we have lived a fulfilling life is an extreme privilege. I hope you all reading can act on your wishes and guide the wishes of others when you have the chance. After this long night in Marina’s graduate class we returned to the hostel around 10 pm. The next day was my 22nd birthday, and the fabulous friends at Teatro Renascer sang happy birthday to me and put on an amazing show.

Michigan and UniRio students and faculty with the members of the Teatro Renascer workshop.

Because I am a science student, many people have wondered why I am doing theatre and if it has been uncomfortable or difficult for me. One day I hope to go on to medical school. This work is important to me because I understand that I will not be able to change everyone’s situation, but I hope that I can always pass on joy into the world and provide spaces for people to discover themselves and feel at ease. PCAP continuously rehumanizes me by allowing me to work with the population of incarcerated people, and I am lucky that I am beginning to understand how important it is and how grounding it is to feel human. PCAP helps to humanize the people on the inside, and I am very happy to know this.

A Visit to the Women’s Prison in Florianópolis, a post by Stevie Michaels

My name is Stevie Michaels, and I am a student at the University of Michigan. I became affiliated with PCAP, the Prison Creative Arts Project, just one semester ago. After graduation, I plan to attend the Police Academy and become a police officer. I thought that PCAP would be an amazing opportunity to gain a well rounded education about the criminal justice system in the United States. And in the past six months, I’ve gained so much more that simply education. I have found passion, hope, and humanity in every person in the program as well as the inmates that have participated in the workshop that myself and two co-facilitators led in a men’s prison in Jackson, Michigan.

Michigan and UDESC students at the university, getting ready to go to the women’s prison.

Coming to Brazil was not something I intended to do when I began my journey with PCAP. I thought PCAP would be a one semester class and in April, when my workshop ended, I would just walk away. That wasn’t the case. I didn’t want to stop learning about the people and I just wanted to immerse myself in a program that could actually bring change to a system that I found to be so cold. Maybe I couldn’t make a change individually, but as a collective group I found that, at the very least, PCAP brings smiles and fun to the inmates all around Michigan. So I decided to pack my bags and get on a plane to see what PCAP does with its partnerships in Brazil.

On just day two in Florianópolis we had the opportunity to visit an all women’s prison. The prison was right next to a historic men’s prison which is over 90 years old. The women’s prison is perched up on a hill, very small, and one might not even realize it is there. Prior to becoming a prison, it was a storage shed for the men’s prison. When I say shed, I mean it. It is incredibly small, housing 71 women inside it, which is overwhelming. They are currently building an addition onto the back of it so that by June they will be able to house 220 women. At the moment there is no grass, unlike the prisons I have seen in Michigan. Usually there is grass in the “yards.” If you look around you can see the paint chipping off the cement walls, and the unkept corners of dirt buildup and places where the air conditioners into the offices would leak water and rust. Because of the lack of space, the theater space that Vicente, a professor at the university here in Florianópolis, uses is an awkward open “cage” where everyone can see you. Vicente has only done a semester worth of workshops here, as he is still trying to gain more access to run programs in the nearby prisons. This type of area where the workshops are held is different than in the US, and many of the prisons have classrooms.

We spoke with the Warden of the prison, along with three of the women on the Minister of Justice’s staff, who were in a meeting the previous day with both Vicente and my professor Ashley to discuss prison programming and its importance. The entire time a woman from the Ministry of Justice was taking photos and staging photos of us to put in a press release. This was a bizarre experience because in the US no photos are ever taken inside the walls.

Although the prison doesn’t have conventional places to run the workshops, I think that this is a vital place to run them. Because of the lack of space and programming, a workshop could really bring some hope and happiness to a place where there may not be much of it.

Having the opportunity to speak with the Warden has encouraged me to learn more about the laws and rules of the criminal justice system in Brazil, not only to advocate for programming in prisons there, but also to compare to the US and see what we can take and use and learn from each other.

Theatre in a Prison with Mothers and Babies: A post by Alex Bayer

My name is Alex Bayer, and I am entering my senior year at the University of Michigan. I am a psychology major and ultimately hope to be a therapist who works with youth. I’ve always had passion for the arts—I was a dancer for 15 years, participated in theatre throughout middle school and high school, and discovered how much I love creative writing during college. I heard about the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) during my freshman year of college and was instantly intrigued by the idea of bringing different art forms (creative writing, theatre, and fine arts) into a prison, where people are constantly denied of their humanity and self expression. Although I was intrigued, I was also slightly hesitant. I was well aware of the stigma attached to incarcerated people and didn’t know enough about the prison system to justify why I wanted to involve myself in this type of work. After taking a study abroad course in Copenhagen, Denmark, called the Psychology of Criminal Behavior and visiting various rehabilitation programs, my frustration with the prison system in the U.S. escalated. By my junior year at the university, I made the incredible decision to join PCAP.

Alex on the dock behind a restaurant where we ate in Florianópolis.

It’s safe to say that PCAP has changed my life. Compared to all other classes I have taken at U of M, I have never been surrounded by a group of such intelligent, open-minded yet skeptical, and passionate individuals. I facilitated a workshop at a youth facility in Detroit with Adelia and Kaitlin, who are now two of my closest friends. We went to Lincoln every Sunday at 5 PM and led a group of 10 boys in various theatre games. It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with these boys, and going into that facility soon became the highlight of my week. We continued our workshop into the summer, and only stopped because we were all going to Brazil, where we would have the opportunity to visit prisons and hospitals and exchange our knowledge and excitement for the work we do with Brazilian students who engage in similar work.

We are now in our third and final week of our experience in Brazil. Today I went into a prison with two students from UniRio (a university in Rio) and four students from the PCAP program. We went into a facility with mothers and babies, made for incarcerated women who are pregnant during their sentencing and can keep their babies for the first six months of their lives. After six months, these women are forced to find someone else to take care of their baby or hand that baby over to the government.

Before arriving to Rio, I had never visited a women’s prison, only the juvenile facility I worked in during the winter. Going into the women’s facility was much different than what I had experienced in the past. I never went inside this facility; we played theatre games with the women right outside of their rooms on a deck. As we walked up to this deck, we passed a church built for the women in the prison. We then approached a group of women on the deck, and they were all holding their babies or gently rocking them in their strollers. At first, I was so distracted by the cuteness of the babies. The women welcomed us and seemed happy for us to play with their kids; many of them even handed us their babies to hold for a little bit. We began the workshop with a name game, but at this point, a lot of women left. Many of them were preoccupied with other tasks, such as breastfeeding or changing diapers. After the name game, we played a couple of games that involved dancing/singing/hugging, and we got much more comfortable with one another. During these games, we had a rotating group of about 3-4 women, depending on who could participate in each moment.

Following the games, one of the women suggested having a group discussion instead of playing more games—a suggestion I would have never heard when I worked in a facility with teenage boys. The woman began by asking Asma, one of our group members, about the hijab she was wearing. The woman was curious as to why Asma wanted to cover up her hair, and explained that Brazilian women are often very comfortable with displaying their bodies in more revealing clothing. Although Asma was put on the spot a little bit, she handled the pressure really well, and the woman was thankful for her willingness to answer the questions. The woman admitted that she has never really talked to anyone from the United States and does not see many people wearing a hijab, so she wanted to educate herself. These questions sparked openness among the whole group, and a lot more women came to the deck to join the discussion and ask more questions to all of us.

Our PCAP group in class with Prof. Vicente Concilio’s theatre students in Florianópolis.

The discussion was just like it would be with any group of women I met in Brazil—our group shared experiences with these women, and they did the same in return. It felt natural, and I quickly forgot I was in a prison. At the end of the discussion, we hugged and kissed the women goodbye. It wasn’t until exiting the prison that I was reminded of where I was. Right in front of the prison, a police car was parked with a giant rifle sticking out of the window. My heart immediately sank. I knew that it was used for intimidation and that I wasn’t in any personal danger, but it reminded me of the intimidation tactics that are constantly used against the women I just talked to for the past two hours. I was reminded of the fact that these women aren’t free; the fact that these women will have to say goodbye to their babies soon; the fact that one mistake a person makes could lead to being incarcerated and put in inhumane conditions.

Thinking about these facts cause a lot of frustration, but I then remind myself of the people I am surrounded by and become hopeful again. Such strong, resilient people who also recognize the problems with the prison system surround me. Of all aspects of this trip, the people are why I am most grateful—not just the PCAP group, but everyone I have met on this journey. I am beyond grateful for the various professors and students from Brazil who not only include us in their work but also welcome us with wide arms and make us feel at home. The Brazilian students who speak English continuously translate for us during conferences and classes. All of the students we met have taken a huge interest in us, asking us questions about our lives, showing us around, and teaching us about their culture. Although I knew I would have an amazing experience with the entire PCAP group and our fearless, nurturing leader Ashley, I had no idea how much I would connect with the Brazilian students here. I am looking forward to the rest of my week in Brazil and will always carry the love I have received from all of the people here.

The City Behind Bars: A post by Renisha Bishop

Why are the darker skinned people and indigenous people treated the worst in every country? Why are the rumors, stereotypes, misconceptions so standard across the board for these people? They are poor. They are dangerous. They are uneducated. They are criminals. WHY? Is it that the people in control are afraid of their potential? Their strength? Afraid that they would actually be smarter, more creative, intuitive, in fact more powerful? So powerful that they would actually be on the top and not the bottom.

It really saddens me to think about the mistreatment, discrimination, abuse that people face globally. For some reason, I only believed that racism existed in the United States but I was so wrong. My friends here in Brazil quickly dispelled this myth for me. I thought I wouldn’t have much in common with them, but we share much more in common than I ever imagined.

Prior to coming to Rio de Janeiro, I was told that it was very dangerous, that I shouldn’t walk around by myself. I really feared for my life. I was paranoid for the first couple of days. I thought there would be people just waiting to rob me for the little I had. Once I got adjusted and saw more of the city, it seemed just like any other major city in the US. Rio really reminds me of Los Angeles for some reason.

I’ve been to two different prisons here in Rio; both are facilities for women, but one had a wing for women with infants. During our workshop with the mothers, I was able to hold a two-month-old for almost the entire workshop. It was a different experience, being inside of a jail with babies. Babies are a source of innocence and pure joy, but the reality of their futures is dark and unfathomable. The women are able to keep their babies for up to two years legally, but since the facility is over-crowded, they are only able to keep them until they turn six months. Then the babies go with their mother’s family or are given to foster homes. Most of the women don’t have any family to raise their children until they’re out of prison, so the babies are given to the foster homes. It’s a hard process for women to give their babies away. I felt the pain of uncertainty while being inside of the prison with them. It was such a stark contrast. The happiness and innocence of the babies but the heaviness of the women. I was glad that we were there to take their minds off of their realities for a brief moment with theater games. But it’s always sad leaving workshops knowing that once we leave it’s back to reality for them.

The other women’s prison I went to was very different than the first. As soon as we got there, it was a small room near the gate with a small opening where the sun could barely peak through. These two women came to the small hole to speak to us. I was very disturbed that two women were in that small room, and we were told to not speak to them. Once we got into the prison, the other incarcerated women warmly welcomed us affectionately with hugs and kisses. We all sat through my professor’s performance about families who had loved ones incarcerated. We were all deeply moved by the various monologues in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. I left the prisons and returned to a chic neighborhood that had bars around the houses and apartments. It’s a crazy dichotomy. Everyone is behind bars for various reasons. Who are the real criminals here?

Renisha Bishop is a recent graduate of The University of Michigan. 

Our first week in Rio, including a visit to a men’s prison: A post by Katelyn Torres

My name is Katelyn Torres. I graduated from the University of Michigan in May, and it is safe to say that the Prison Creative Arts Project courses were some of the best courses I’ve taken throughout my college career. Art has always been a significant part of my life, and whether it was dancing, making music, or painting with acrylics, it has always been my greatest passion. The courses I took at the university also resulted in the cultivation of a new passion; social justice. When I discovered PCAP classes, I realized that they were a mixture of the two, which could not have been more perfect for me. In the course this year, I had the privilege of facilitating a theatre workshop at Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan, with my classmates, Justine, Kevin and Erich. We had a large group of talented, incredibly creative men with whom we truly fell in love. While I was initially nervous to walk into a men’s prison, the room in which we held our workshop each week came to feel like one of the safest spaces in my life. We had so much fun, and the men were so appreciative of the work that we all do through PCAP. I love this work so much. And it just so happens that visiting Rio de Janeiro has always been at the top of my bucket list. I am so grateful for the opportunity to do work that I love in a place to which I’ve always wanted to travel. And what an incredible experience it has been so far.

The people that we have interacted with thus far have been so beautiful in so many ways. I’ve noticed that in Brazil, people just seem to care less about how other people choose to dress, act and live their lives. Perhaps it’s different in other parts of the country, or even within other populations in Rio, but in the areas we’ve been exploring this seems to be the consensus. The women are natural. The sun and humidity serve as the makeup that illuminates their faces. Some shave, some don’t. Some wear bras, some don’t. Anything goes when it comes to clothing. And everyone is accepted and loved. I’m finding myself feeling so much better and more comfortable in my own skin- wearing less to no makeup, leaving my hair in its natural state and wearing whatever clothing I feel like wearing.

I’ve never been hugged and kissed more within a two week time span than I have since my arrival in Brazil. I love this aspect of Brazilian culture. It so starkly contrasts the somewhat distant, “Hi, nice to meet you,” (followed my a firm handshake) greeting one would receive in the U.S. Neither is wrong, but the Brazilians’ lack of value placement on personal space makes me feel much more loved and welcome in new spaces.

Brazilians also seem to have a different concept of time and timeliness. If something starts at 8 am, perhaps it will really start at 8:17, or later. They are not incredibly uptight about being on time (to the minute) like we are in the United States. It’s not a rat race. I feel my anxiety levels depleting in this country. It’s a very liberating and stress free atmosphere.

Our first week in Rio was a crazy one, saturated with different classes and workshops and events. We went into Brazilian prisons for the first time, which was an experience that I will not soon forget. My group (4 people) was assigned to the men’s prison, Evaristo de Moraes. This facility used to be a bus terminal but was transformed into a prison. We took the bus to UniRio, met two of the student facilitators and from there, took another bus to the facility. Upon pulling up to the area, the differences between this prison and the one in which I held my workshop in Jackson, Michigan, were immediately apparent. A group of about 40 individuals sat outside beneath a roof waiting either for visits or to drop off items for their loved ones inside. Of the 40 people, all but three were women.

As is anticipated when attempting to enter any prison, we ran into some difficulties getting in. The guard working at our entrance insisted that he did not have the proper authorization and documentation to let the Americans in, even though this had been organized well in advance. So, we returned to our small bus in the dirt parking lot and sat in the back waiting for things to be sorted out. It was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we were in our “prison attire” which always consisted of conservative clothing (often long sleeves and long pants) and closed toe shoes. Leaning my head against the window, I kept the van door open in hopes of ventilating the space with some sort of breeze. This breeze never came. But something else did begin to circulate in the van. I started to hear the soft hum of feminine voices flowing together and looked over to see the group of waiting women forming a circle, holding hands. One woman was speaking to the others. She told them about how necessary it was to pray for their loved ones that were inside of the prison- how much they need their prayer and how much they need God right now. All of the women began to sing a song. I’m not sure what song it was, and I couldn’t understand much of it. But they sang it so beautifully and so passionately that it gave me chills. I could feel the pain and suffering that they’ve endured as a result of their loved one’s predicament; a pain and suffering that is not always acknowledged the way it should be.

The inside of the prison shocked me a bit. It was very dirty. The floors were made of dirt. The walls and the cell bars were riddled with stains and rust. Guards walked around fully padded and armed with intimidating firearms. The men were not in uniforms like those that I was used to seeing in the Jackson prison. They wore flip flops and shorts and t shirts and, to me, sometimes were not distinguishable from those inside who were not incarcerated. The prison was not surrounded by barbed wire, and my group and I spoke about how it looked like it would be much easier to escape from this prison than from those we’d seen in Michigan. We soon came to the realization that while it may seem this way, that is not the case. We learned that guards in Rio prisons use their guns very liberally and will shoot on the spot without much forethought. Or afterthought.

The things we’ve done this week have been diverse, yet they all relate to one another. For example, another of this week’s most prominent experiences occurred on Friday. While half of the group went to see Ashley perform her play in a women’s prison, the other half of us went to take a tour of downtown Rio de Janeiro. It was a bright, sunny day, and we walked around the city looking at old buildings and landmarks. The tour concluded with a visit to a small museum filled with ancient African artifacts. We were taken into a room which looked like it was some sort of construction, and we were led into a connecting room in which a documentary was shown to us. This documentary reflected on slavery in Brazil. The video was difficult to watch, yet incredibly important. I was shocked to discover that slavery was not abolished in Brazil for 30 years after it was in the United States. African American and Afro-Brazilian history have a great deal to do with the way our prisons systems are today, so this was supplementary to our prison work in Brazil. As the documentary continued, it began to discuss slave cemeteries and how the bodies of slaves were handled. It was then that I realized we were sitting on a Brazilian slave cemetery. Exiting the documentary room, still in a daze from the film, we entered the room that appeared to be under construction. It wasn’t. Peering over the edge of a large hole in the ground, I saw an archaeologist with a small brush in one hand and a petite sand shovel in the other. She was kneeling on the dirt, gently brushing an object that I couldn’t quite make out at first. Suddenly , I realized what it was, and this realization hit me hard.

The archaeologist was brushing away dirt from the skeleton of a woman, a former slave, who had been buried there. The skeleton was still somewhat submerged in the dirt, but the entire body was clearly there and intact. As she gently grazed the woman’s teeth with her brush, a wave of emotion jolted through my body. I’ve watched videos and read books that told me about the horrors of slavery and about the inhumane ways slaves were treated even after death, but it had never felt as real as it did that day.

So far, our trip to Brazil has been filled to the brim with exciting new experiences, many of them life-changing. We’ve met new and incredible people who’ve taught us so much about their culture. We’ve gone on new adventures and tried new foods. And we’ve created bonds and memories that will last a lifetime. I’m so excited to see what the next week holds.

The Centre for Christian Spirituality: Arts Programming in and about Prison in Cape Town, South Africa

I’m now back in Michigan, getting ready for the start of the new school year. I apologize for not doing any Brazil blogging while in Brazil, but we had such a lovely, jam-packed trip that my schedule simply did not afford the time. I am going to post a little more on South Africa before writing about our adventures with the PCAP Brazil Exchange this year, but rest assured, I’ll get there as soon as I am able.

A poster from the Robben Island Museum.

When Andy and I were in Cape Town, South Africa, our first order of business was to head to Robben Island to see the historic prison turned museum where Nelson Mandela had spent the majority of his incarceration. Unfortunately, we only got to see the small museum on the mainland shore where one catches the ferry to the island itself. August is winter in South Africa, and a rain storm and high tide caused the cancellation of all boats to Robben Island on the one day when we had time to make the trip. It feels wrong to have been on a prison-focused research trip to South Africa and to have missed Robben Island, but we couldn’t do anything about that.

Despite this, our time in Cape Town was quite productive. We met with staff members and formerly incarcerated participants of two local theatre projects and learned quite a lot about the nature and content of prison theatre in this part of South Africa. The rest of this blog post is devoted to one of those projects, and a later post will describe the work of another group called Young in Prison.

In the lobby of the beautiful Baxter Theatre, we met with Laurie Gaum from the Centre for Christian Spirituality and a reentrant named Lesley who has performed in a couple of theatre projects organized by the Centre. Laurie coordinates events for the Centre and has done a number of projects both inside Pollsmoor Prison (for some interesting photos of the prison and those who live within it, click here) and with reentrants in Cape Town. The Centre for Christian Spirituality was founded in 1986 by Father Francis Cull and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Centre’s website and the brochure that Laurie gave me both indicate a strong predilection towards addressing social justice initiatives as well as worship and spiritual contemplation. The language of justice and reconciliation appears frequently in their promotional materials, and this seems fitting not only because of the South African nation’s history with Apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but also because of the Centre’s active work in and around prisons. As Laurie described the Centre’s programming to us, he talked a good deal about masculinity and gender-based programming to help incarcerated men and reentrants explore both their spirituality and their family histories.  The Centre engages in visual art workshops which encourage prisoners to work with clay in silence and writing workshops which focus on gender biographies, family history, sexuality, spirituality, and leadership. He spoke of using theatre to enact “images of the male soul.”

The Centre is currently engaged in producing a series of dramas based on spirituality as it relates to social issues. The first of these, entitled Other, focused on stigmas of sexuality and HIV/AIDS. Though we didn’t hear a great deal about this production, we did learn that it involved a chorus and projected images on stage.

The second of theses dramas, called Fatherless, used three real life stories portrayed by their authors. Lesley Thomas, the reentrant who accompanied Laurie to meet us, was one of these author/actors. Fatherless grew out of a workshop that Laurie had been co-facilitating on masculinity in which a number of participants described instances of fatherlessness. In the production the three author/actors each told their own stories in different areas of a church. The audience stood in the middle and shifted to face each performer in turn. Lesley’s story had to do with going to prison and leaving his children as a result. Lesley grew up without a father and then was not present for his own children before or during his incarceration. He theorizes that everyone in prison is there because they focused too much on themselves and not enough on the other significant people in their lives. Lesley noticed while he was in prison that most of the men around him told stories about being fatherless and that the vast majority of visitors to the prison were women. He saw no fathers coming to visit their incarcerated sons.

Fatherless had two performances at the church in its initial run, and now officials in prison are talking about wanting to bring this performance inside the walls. Because the performance was created by volunteers, three of whom are professional actors along with a director and his assistant, Laurie worries that the group will be hard to hold together long enough to take the show to a new venue. They are also talking about the exciting possibility of taking the production of Other to the professional stage at the Baxter Theatre.

The Centre’s drama project focuses on masculinity because the participants find this theme both significant and difficult to address. They want to continue creating original performances and hope to address the issue of violence against women and children in one of their upcoming projects. The Centre works with a major NGO on issues of gender violence, and Laurie and Lesley are both trained as Gender Reconciliation facilitators. They see performance as an ideal medium for raising awareness and stimulating community involvement in social justice issues.

Lesley wants to change cultural perceptions in South Africa about incarceration as a rite of passage into manhood. He feels that many South African men actually want to serve time in prison because becoming a part of a prison gang earns them respect both inside the walls and on the streets when they return home. He says that many people believe that if you have not been in a prison gang, you aren’t a real man.

In our travels throughout South Africa, people kept recommending journalist Jonny Steinberg’s book The Number which recounts one man’s journey through life in a prison gang. (I confess here that I have not yet read Steinberg’s book and apologize if I am in any way misrepresenting prison gang culture in South Africa. I cannot tell you how much accuracy the following account holds, but I can say that we heard basically the same story from a number of different people throughout our trip.) The three main prison gangs in South Africa all identify themselves by numbers: the 28s, the 27s, and the 26s.  Apparently there are a few other numbers, but those three are the largest and most powerful. The shorthand explanation of the gangs that we received from several different people went something like this: The 28s control sex inside the prisons–both protecting some people from rape and bartering with the bodies of others. The 26s control drugs and money, and the 27s negotiate between the two. Once you are inducted into one of these gangs, you are a member for life, and your gang status and rank (accorded in military terms with the titles of general, captain, etc.) follows you both after you leave the prison and throughout any subsequent returns to prison.

Lesley managed to serve ten years in prison without joining a gang, and he now works with incarcerated boys, encouraging them to eschew gang life as well. He says many people believe that you have to join a gang in order to survive but that he teaches boys how to avoid this fate.

Lesley studied music throughout his time in prison. During Lesley’s incarceration (and perhaps now as well), imprisoned musicians had special privileges to sit outside and play their instruments. Les bonded with his children during visits by playing music for them, and since his release, he has grown closer to his son and daughter by playing music with them at their local church. Lesley plays the clarinet, and his children play the clarinet and trumpet. They have a new life as a reunited and committed family, and Les and Laurie continue their work with the Centre, striving to help other men learn to live peacefully.

*Many thanks to Laurie Gaum for his helpful feedback and edits on this post!

Theatre Programming in a Women’s Prison in Durban, South Africa

I’m in Rio de Janeiro with my University of Michigan students but trying to catch up on blogging about my South Africa trip before I launch into our adventures in Brazil. More to come soon.

Durban is a lovely beach town. Since I couldn’t take pictures of the prison, this will have to do for an illustration.

Durban, South Africa is a beautiful seaside town–not exactly the place where you’d expect to find an enormous complex of prisons known as the Westville Correctional Facility. Andy and I were introduced to both Durban and Westville by Miranda Young-Jahangeer, a professor of drama and performance studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Miranda has been doing theatre work inside Westville for the past fourteen years. She’s worked with men and youth at the prison at different times, but she prefers to work with incarcerated women and has focused on them throughout most of her time at Westville.

Miranda drove us about twenty minutes outside of Durban to the prison.  Separate men’s and women’s prisons as well as youth facilities can be found inside the fences of the Westville complex, as can several rows of apartments for prison staff members and their families. One staff person told us that she chose to live inside the gates of the prison because the facility provides bus service for her child to attend the local school. She had lived somewhere outside the prison walls but had chosen to move into the staff housing in the prison complex for reasons of convenience, despite the fact that she does not like her job.

The guard at the main gate to the prison knew Miranda, and she signed a register before we drove through the entrance to the facility. The prison complex is vast, and we did not even come close to seeing all of it. Miranda parked near the women’s prison, and when we entered the building, we each signed a sheet at the front desk. We did not show identification, answer any questions, or get patted down. A guard gave visitors’  badges to me and Miranda (but not Andy because apparently men don’t need them at the women’s prison), unlocked a metal gate, and let us into the prison. Everyone there seemed to know Miranda, and undoubtedly her long relationship with this particular prison made entering it far easier than it would be for other people. In Michigan prisons, even when we know the staff well, my students and I still face some pretty significant security measures–advance security clearance, identification, metal detectors, pat downs, lots of questions about our plans for the day. It felt very odd to be able to gain access to a prison so easily in a country so vigilant about security. Miranda reminded me that the folks who run prisons in South Africa can be every bit as capricious and changeable as their U.S. counterparts. Prison authorities at Westville have have moved or cancelled performances and activities at the last minute, and Miranda has seen other groups try unsuccessfully to gain access to this facility which she and her students enter with relative ease. Prisons are nothing if not full of contradictions.

A prison staff member named Veli has worked with Miranda for many years, helping to set up the theatre workshops inside the facility. Veli’s brother had held the same position at this prison, and when he passed away, she took his place. When I asked Veli if it had taken time to build a solid working relationship with Miranda, she said that she took up right where her brother left off. He had had a positive relationship with Miranda and her work in the prison, and Veli saw no reason to feel differently. Veli and Miranda led us up a flight of stairs and into a small activities room with several desks with sewing machines on them. The theatre workshop is on hiatus for a few weeks but will start up again in late August or early September. Unfortunately our travel schedule wouldn’t permit us to make the trip during a time when we could see the workshop in action. Instead we had a conversation with Miranda, Veli, and one of the incarcerated women (whom I’ll call P.) who has been doing theatre in the prison for nearly all of the fourteen years Miranda has been facilitating workshops there.

When P. came into the room, she greeted each of us with big hugs, and I was startled at how comfortable she felt in doing that, particularly with Andy–a man she’d never met. In the U.S. physical contact is strictly monitored, particularly between visitors and prisoners and between people of opposite genders. Often women in prison do not feel especially safe around men, and in the U.S. it would be even more unlikely for a prisoner and visitor to have physical contact with a prison staff person in the room. We didn’t see any male staff members working at the women’s prison, and Miranda tells me that very few male staff work there. That might explain the apparent lack of restrictions on physical touch. However, Miranda also reports that the number of incarcerated women in South Africa who report having been sexually or physically abused is above the global average, which hovers around 80%. This refers to abuse incurred prior to incarceration. I would assume that the predominantly single gender environment in female prisons in South Africa greatly reduces the amount of sexual abuse that women endure during incarceration. After reading an early draft of this blog post, Miranda also noted that P.’s hugging is a cultural signifier of her role as an older woman in the prison, a mother figure. A younger woman would not have hugged us so effortlessly, but P. did so as a way of showing that she trusts us and that we are welcome in her space.

The three of them–Miranda, Veli, and P.–asked about our work and why we were interested in theatre in prisons, and then they told us about some of the workshops and performances they have done together. Miranda teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in which students come into the prison to do theatre work. Her students will sometimes develop a performance of their own for the prisoners as a way of starting a conversation about a relevant social issue. At other times, the students work with the prisoners to devise an original performance–sometimes in response to the performance the students brought into the prison.

P. loves to sing, and music is an integral part of each performance. Most South African prisons have a choir inside them, and once a year the national Correctional Services will pay to bring the incarcerated choirs from across the country to the same prison to have a choral competition. This astounded me. The only time that I’ve ever heard of prisoners going from one institution to another to perform in the U.S. was for a huge play called The Life of Jesus Christ at Angola prison in Louisiana. For that production, which in recent years has been revived once or twice a year, women from a prison a few towns away are brought to Angola to rehearse and perform in this enormous passion play. That only requires coordination between two prisons.  I can’t imagine what a logistical feat it must be to move incarcerated choirs (presumably men and women) from all corners of South Africa to a single location for a competition. A 2007 documentary film called The Choir follows one group of prisoners to the National Prison Choir Competition.  I haven’t seen the film (if anyone knows how to acquire a copy, I’d be grateful for the information), but I’d love to see both the film and the actual competition itself some day.

Apparently most of the theatre work that these folks have done together in Westville has dealt with social issues of one kind or another, including HIV/AIDS, gender discrimination, and the poor treatment of prisoners. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, this is not a thing we can do in most of the U.S. because prison administrators feel that any critique of the system could lead to unrest or violence amongst the prison population. This does not seem to be the case in South Africa–or at least not in the work of theatre folks and prisoners I met. I was trying to explain to Miranda, Veli, and P. that we can’t even mention prison guards in our plays, and Veli said that if they couldn’t make fun of the guards, they wouldn’t have ever a play.  Mocking the guards has been a major point of comic relief in their productions, and for the most part the guards don’t seem to mind.

In one notable production the women in the prison were responding to the terrible conditions at the prison clinic. The AIDS epidemic was claiming many lives, and often the bodies of prisoners remained in beds at the clinic for days before being removed for burial. This meant that other women confined to the clinic would have to lay for days on end next to the dead bodies of their friends. The play that the women devised about this situation included a character of a particularly unkind nurse in the clinic, and Miranda didn’t realize until the performance of the play that the nurse in question was not only a real person but was being represented in such a way that she was totally recognizable to the entire prison audience. The nurse was in the audience of the performance along with 250 incarcerated women, and at some point during the play, the nurse got up and fled the courtyard where the play was taking place. As the nurse ran away, the women in the audience all raised their arms above their head and shouted “la la la la la,” mocking her in unison. In a bizarre twist of fate, that same nurse ended up becoming a prisoner at Westville sometime later, and she joined the theatre group and became a much-beloved member of the troupe.

A performance like this would have shut down a prison theatre program in the U.S., but seemingly the only enduring consequence of this at Westville is that the audiences for the group’s plays are now much smaller. Big gatherings of the entire prison population for the sake of a performance are no longer possible, but the theatre group endures.

In thinking about the theatre work at Westville, I’m struck by how much national context and culture matter in terms of what is and is not permissible inside prisons. The legacy of Apartheid in South Africa has left people throughout the country with a publicly acknowledged sense that prisons often enforce the unjust whims of the government. In the U.S. we tend to defend our own sense of righteousness and see prisons as one part of the long arm of justice, believing that the people inside them brought all the negative aspects of their confinement upon themselves. During our trip, someone in South Africa told me that everyone in the country knows someone in prison or someone who was incarcerated at some point. South Africa has the highest incarceration rate in the continent, but the U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet most of the folks I meet in my own country genuinely believe that they have never known someone who served time. This can’t possibly be true of the majority of us, but the cultural silence and stigmas surrounding incarceration prevent us from having meaningful conversations about it. South Africans continue to struggle with myriad social problems, including mass incarceration, but their ability to speak openly about this particular type of injustice is one of the things that made it possible for a former prisoner to become president and lead the country into a new era of democracy. This ability to acknowledge the problem of mass incarceration fueled by racism has certainly not led to greater justice or a significant reduction in the prison population, but I can’t help feeling like the ability to name and discuss this issue has to be a step in the right direction. How can we move towards a higher form of justice unless we can honestly describe both the world in which we now live and–to paraphrase Ghandi–the change we would like to see in our lives.

The Atonement Project: Restorative Justice and the Arts

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) is excited to announce an opportunity to be part of its new Atonement Project initiative—an arts-based restorative justice program that seeks to start meaningful conversations about crime, incarceration, and reconciliation.

Anyone whose life has been touched by crime or incarceration in any way is invited to join a weekly Atonement Project arts workshop in either Detroit or Lansing. Workshops are facilitated by University of Michigan students enrolled in PCAP Director Ashley Lucas’ Atonement Project course. Workshops began February 1 (Detroit) and February 4 (Lansing) and run for 12 weeks. Contact Ashley Lucas at lucasash@umich.edu for more information or to register. You are welcome to join even if you already missed the first weeks of the workshop.

Project Description

The Atonement Project is an innovative, arts-based approach to addressing issues that many crime victims and people who have committed crimes find difficult to discuss (i.e. forgiveness and reconciliation). We wish to create spaces, both through an interactive website and through arts workshops in prisons and in communities affected by crime, where the arts and creativity can help us bridge the divides created by crime and incarceration. The ultimate goal of the Atonement Project is to bring together people whose lives have been shaped by crime so that we can join our efforts to prevent further harm to our families, loved ones, and communities.

Drawing on a broad variety of art forms, including visual art, creative writing, theater, music, poetry, and dance, the Atonement Project uses creative expression to engage participants in tough conversations about crime, punishment, and reconciliation. Technology, including the Atonement Project website, video, digital photography, social media, and interactive online tools will enable web users to have access to the products of our arts workshops and participate in larger conversations about forgiveness and atonement.

The use of creativity and art in examining issues related to atonement and reconciliation is a central component of the Atonement Project. Many people respond more openly to and are able to connect with the experiences of others when they read their stories and experience visual art. The art created in our workshops and displayed on our website will focus on the following three areas of the atonement process:

• Acknowledgement: Recognizing how we have hurt and how we have been hurt by others.
• Apology: Apologizing to those we have hurt, and apologizing to ourselves for the hurt we have caused ourselves.
• Atonement: Atoning through direct actions in our community, with people we have hurt as well as ourselves.

Community Workshops

Anyone whose life has been touched by crime or incarceration in any way is welcome to participate in community workshops, and there is no cost involved in participation. Workshops will take place once a week for two hours and will run for twelve weeks. We ask that participants try to come to all workshops, but we understand that not everyone who participates will be able to attend every single week.

Each workshop will be a space for participants to collaborate as a group on creative writing, performance, and/or visual art. No prior artistic training or previous affiliation with PCAP is required. Everyone is welcome, and no particular skill set is necessary for participation.

Detroit Workshop

Saturdays, 1-3pm

February 1-April 19, 2014

U-M Detroit Center (South Studio)

3663 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201

Lansing Workshop

Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30pm

February 4-April 22, 2014

Michigan State University

Snyder-Phillips Hall C301
362 Bogue Street (close to the intersection of Bogue and Grand River)
East Lansing, MI 48825

Contact Ashley Lucas at lucasash@umich.edu to register.

About the Prison Creative Arts Project

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) was founded in 1990 with the mission to collaborate with incarcerated adults, incarcerated youth, urban youth and the formerly incarcerated to strengthen our community through creative expression. Housed in the University of Michigan’s Residential College, faculty and students work with community members both inside and outside prisons to engage in theatre, dance, visual art, creative writing, slam poetry, and music.

More information, including a link to the Atonement Project website (which we hope to launch later this month) will appear on this blog soon.

Meanwhile, my dear friend Margarita Mooney (a sociologist at Yale) visited our class and wrote a fantastic blog entry of her own that explains our work beautifully.  Thank you, Margarita, for your support of the Atonement Project and for your wonderful visit to the Atonement Project class!

Play in Tehran Draws Attention to Juvenile Executions in Iran

My dear friend Jules Odendahl-James–an excellent dramaturg and scholar who shares my interest in prison theatre work–forwarded me a link to this article about an interview-based play in Tehran about juveniles on death row in Iran.  Another really interesting and beautiful play on a similar topic was written by my good friend and former colleague Mark Perry.  A New Dress for Mona describes the life and death of Mona Mahmudnizhad, who is considered a martyr of the Baha’i faith because the Iranian government executed her for her beliefs in 1983.  Mona was seventeen at the time of her death.  Amnesty International and many other human rights groups have taken stands against the execution of juveniles, but the practice continues in Iran. The United States outlawed the execution of juveniles in 2005 (not very long ago by international human rights standards), but we still sentence juveniles to life without parole.  Amnesty International reports:

There are at least 2,500 people in the US serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old. The United States is believed to stand alone in sentencing children to life without parole. Although several countries technically permit the practice, Amnesty International knows of no cases outside the US where such a sentence has been imposed in recent years.

We need far more theatre and other types of art to draw attention to what happens to young people all over the world.  Congratulations and many thanks to the Iranian theatre practitioners do this work and to Mark Perry who writes from the United States about Iran and the Baha’i faith.  May your work have many audiences, and may our governments evolve to end juvenile executions and life without parole.

Gorky Never Looked Like This Before: Teatro na Prisão in a Men’s Prison

We, of course, could not take our cameras with us into the prison when we visited Teatro na Prisão’s workshop, so in view of the fact that I don’t have many photos to post in regards to our trip to the men’s prison this past Tuesday, I decided to begin this post with a picture of my student Hector Flores Komatsu, who has yet to appear in any of the other photos on the blog despite the fact that he’s been doing fantastic things as part of this exchange program.  In fact he’s the one of us who will stay here for the longest, spending a full month in Rio and returning to the U.S. in early August.  Hector (now known in Rio as Heitor–the Portuguese translation of his name) is a directing student at Michigan and has been attending many directing and acting classes at UniRio during his time here.  He’s working with UniRio students to make plans for future collaborations in which actors, directors,

and designers visiting from one campus to the other could work on short student productions for a few weeks at a time.

In this photo Heitor is eating Brazil’s national dish, feijoada–a black bean stew with several kinds of sausage and many different cuts of beef and pork. It’s served with rice, black beans, shredded collard greens, chunks of yucca, yucca flour (which is kind of like cornmeal), and pork rinds, all of which can be mixed into your feijoada in whatever amount you like.  Slices of oranges are also served on the side.  The students and I sampled this Brazilian staple at a restaurant in Ipanema called Casa de Feijoada, and we loved it.

On Tuesday, July 16, 2013, we accompanied the students and faculty of Teatro na Prisão to the men’s prison where they conduct a theatre workshop.  Here’s a picture of us at UniRio before we got on the bus to the prisons.

Pictured here from left to right are Renee Gross, Jodie Lawston, Sarah Thompson, Natália Fiche, me, and Viviane Narvaes (the UniRio professor who leads the workshop in the men’s prison).  The men’s prison where Teatro na Prisão facilitates a workshop is just down the road from the women’s prison we visited last week.  By all appearances, the women’s prison we visited stood on its own away from any other prison complex, while the men’s prison is inside a walled and gated compound with multiple prisons for men inside.  The UniRio students told me that the various prisons in the compound house prisoners grouped by various kinds of categories.  Some of the prisons house men who have committed a particular offense.  In Brazil as in many other countries, sex offenders are a high risk for being attacked or abused during their incarceration, and one of the UniRio students with whom I spoke on the bus ride said that one of the prisons in this complex houses only sex offenders so that they will not be in general population with other prisoners.

The prison we visited is just for men who used to be state employees.  One of the UniRio students said this prison houses former government and court officials as well as former professors from public universities.  The men in the theatre workshop (one of the workshop’s incarcerated participants informed me) are all former police officers who are housed together in two pods (smaller housing units) in one of the two main sections, called gallerias, of the prison.  I never did find out who was housed in the other pods in the galleria we visited or who lives in the other galleria, which is entirely separate from the one we visited.  Apparently other men in that galleria are eligible to participate in this workshop, but right now only six men, all from the pods where former police are housed, have chosen to do so.  The men in the workshop discussed how hard it has been to encourage others to join the group.  Some former participants in the group are no longer part of the workshop because they had behavior problems in the prison or because they were transferred to other prisons.  Others in the prison believe that participation in theatre would cause people in the prison to think they were gay and will not join the group for that reason.  I would speculate that the fact that the group is now completely made up of former police officers might deter men from other groups in the prison who would perceive any such homogenous faction to pose a difficult challenge for a new person to find social acceptance among men who have already bonded with one another and share common life experiences.

The idea of housing former government officials together is not unique to the Brazilian prison system.  We have prisons in the U.S., sometimes referred to as “protection units” where not necessarily the prison’s entire population but a fairly high number of the prisoners housed there are former law enforcement, district attorneys, or judges.  Also, U.S. prisons sometimes segregate their inhabitants by race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gang affiliation in efforts to prevent violence.  These forms of segregation can offer the type of protection that they are meant to provide but can also exacerbate tensions within prisons.  These practices most commonly occur in the U.S. on a smaller scale than what we’re seeing here.  The Brazilian prisons within this complex, if I understand this correctly, are segregating on the level of entire prisons being made up of one category of prisoner, whereas what I’ve seen more often in the U.S. is usually one wing or section of a prison being set aside for a certain category of prisoner or a prison having a higher percentage of a certain category of prisoner within the general population of one facility.

Getting into the men’s prison was a more complicated and intimidating process than what we’d experienced last week at the women’s facility.  After we dropped off the group going to the women’s prison, the UniRio van drove us inside the gate to the prison complex, and a uniformed guard with a large pistol strapped to his hip got on the van with us to take our IDs and compare them to the list of approved visitors.  Apparently the list of us foreigners was not with the first set of papers he’d picked up, and he and Professors Fiche and Narvaes got off the UniRio van for what felt like about twenty minutes to straighten it all out.  Then they came back with two guards who checked all of our names off the list and compared our faces to our passport pictures.  One of the guards stayed on the van with us as the UniRio driver took us deeper into the prison complex, past at least three other prisons, to the building we were to enter.  Before the eighteen of us went into the gatehouse, the guard took our passports inside.  We stood outside and formed a circle.  Prof. Narvaes reminded all of us that we do not go anywhere alone inside the prison, even to the bathroom, and that those of us who had never been to this prison before should never be without at least one of the experienced Teatro na Prisão folks to guide us.  As we held hands in the circle, she asked each of us to look to our right and say in Portuguese, “I will take care of [the name of the person standing to your right].”  Prof. Fiche stood on my left and promised to take care of me, and then I looked to my right and promised to take care of Andy.

The eighteen of us went into the front room of the gatehouse where Profs. Fiche and Narvaes introduced me to the director of the prison–a man whom an UniRio student told me he’d never seen in the entire year he’d been coming to this prison with Teatro na Prisão.  Today because there were so many foreigners visiting the theatre workshop, the director stayed with us throughout our entire visit.  The guards in the gatehouse all wore holstered pistols on their hips, and one woman carried a large rifle.  As in U.S. prisons, the guards beyond the gatehouse in the interior of the prison did not carry guns.  They took us three at a time into a separate room where we walked through a metal detector and signed a visitor’s log.  After everyone had gone through this process, we went further into the prison, leaving our passports at the front gate.

This prison, like the women’s one we’d seen, was made completely out of concrete, but the men’s facility seemed to have dozens of gates made of iron bars which could close and section off portions of the hallways.  Most of these gates were wide open as we made our way further into the prison, but even without the gates closing behind us as we walked, we could feel the presence of the layers of cages we crossed through.  I saw two visiting booths for families who have to talk to one another on phones through a pane of glass, and it struck me as so odd and painful that Brazilian prisons would be so similar to U.S. ones in that particular detail.  Jodie and I observed repeatedly during this trip when people questioned us about the differences between U.S. and Brazilian prisons that really they are very much alike.  Nothing we saw in the Brazilian prisons surprised us.  It all felt painfully familiar.  I wonder how many of these similarities are due to the homogenizing forces of globalization and how many of them developed simultaneously yet independently.  It seems likely that both globalization and a cross-cultural willingness to devalue the lives of incarcerated people are at play in carceral systems all over the world.

As we walked down the main hallway of Galleria A, we could see the pods where the men lived branching off the hall on our right side.  The pods are built around narrow open air courtyards, which looked dismal but at the same time received quite a bit of sunlight, which is a comfort that most U.S. prisoners do not have in their living spaces.  The opposite side of the main hallway seemed to have rooms that were used for other purposes, though I couldn’t really see into most of them.  One of these rooms, toward the far end of the hall, is the meeting space for the Teatro na Prisão workshop.  It’s a rectangular concrete room with iron bars in lieu of a door.  Old wooden theatre seats line three of the walls, and the fourth has a huge and quite remarkable wooden table pushed against it.  This room also has an adjoining doorway, with another set of iron bars, leading to a smaller room which serves as the prison’s library.  A couple of the UniRio students who came with us spent the duration of our visit to the prison sifting through books in the library.  Apparently they are helping to cull the books that are worn out and molding.

A line of six incarcerated men all wearing orange tee shirts with the name of their theatre troupe on it.  (Sorry! I couldn’t take notes while in the prison and now can’t remember what the wording on the shirts said.)  We shook each man’s hand and greeted one another as we made our way into the workshop room.  Then we visitors took seats along the walls, while the UniRio students, Professor Narvaes, and the incarcerated workshop participants formed a circle and did a few warm ups.  Then they left the room en masse, and we tentatively followed them into the main hall of the galleria to see where they’d gone.  They gathered at the far end of the hall and then came back to us in a festive procession which included singing, dancing, tambourine playing, and waving straw fedoras and large pieces of brightly colored fabric above their heads.  The procession was the only piece of the performance that the many men locked in the pods branching off from the main hallway could watch.  Unlike the Teatro na Prisão group which goes into the women’s prison, these UniRio students and Professor Narvaes rehearse and perform with the men in the workshop, rather than directing and observing without taking roles in the improvised play.

When the procession ended back in the workshop room, we visitors took our seats again, and the workshop participants, including the UniRio folks, formed a circle like the one in which they had done warm ups.  They produced about a dozen rubber balls about the size of tennis balls and in a variety of bright colors.  They tossed the balls to one another across the circle, making rhythmic noises as they did so.  When a new color of ball was introduced, they made new sounds, and the patterns of ball tossing grew more complex.  One UniRio student held up signs periodically during the game.  One sign told us in the audience that we would see a performance of Maxim Gorky’s play Ralé (commonly translated in English as The Lower Depths).  Subsequent signs stated that the performance would include rhythm, music, hip hop, and beat boxing.  Each sign set off the introduction of a new sound or rhythm amongst the performers who were now tossing the rubber balls to one another quite rapidly and making an assortment of interesting beats as they did so.  Some of them also began to sing the song they’d sung during the procession.  My meager Portuguese was not serving me well that day, but I did understand the word feliz, meaning “joy” or “happiness,” as it was repeated frequently in the rather festive song.

As a chorus of the song ended, the ball tossing and rhythms ceased suddenly.  The circle disbanded, and all participants became a tightly packed group in the middle of the room.  One UniRio student jumped out of the crowd and told us that we would be introduced to some of the characters in the play.  He struck a military-looking pose and made a loud grunt.  The other members of the group repeated both the gesture and the sound.  Another male student jumped out of the group, leaned back, crossed his arms, threw his head back, and laughed maniacally.  The others did the same.  A female student struck a flirtatious pose and giggled.  Everyone else did, too.  Then the group broke apart and scattered.  They used the hats and colored fabric from their earlier procession as they positioned themselves in sleeping poses all across one end of the room, many of them lying on, under, or on the floor in front of the enormous table.  They grumbled and poked at each other, stole the fabric from one another to use as blankets, and settled in to sleep for a bit.  Then they all awoke and had a rather comical argument which escalated into a shouting match.  There they ended the performance, and we all sat in a circle on the floor to discuss what we’d seen.

This group is at the beginning of their rehearsal process for this play.  They’ll be improvising scenes based on Gorky’s play in a process similar to what the women at the other prison are doing with Romeo and Juliet.  What we saw was both an introduction to their practice and the first scene of the play.  The musicality and playfulness of the group are remarkable and infectious.  We had a wonderful time watching them and could palpably feel the spirit of fun and joy in the room.  Given their obvious desire to make this space one of celebration, it’s very interesting that the group chose The Lower Depths as the subject of their performance.  Before we entered the prison, I’d asked Prof. Narvaes who had chosen this play as the subject for the group’s latest work.  She told me that she’d offered them a choice between this and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and the prisoners chose Gorky.

Like most great Russian writers, Gorky is not known for comedy.  A Marxist and advocate for the social-democratic movement in Russia in the early 1900s, Gorky was imprisoned at least twice and penned a number of political plays, most notably The Lower Depths, which is widely considered to be a masterwork of the theatre.  The play describes the lives of a group of men living in a homeless shelter.  The 1902 production of the play launched director Konstantin Stanislavski’s storied career.  One of the major tensions at the heart of the play is whether people living in dire circumstances should confront the painful reality of their lives or create more beautiful fictions to distract them from the brutal conditions under which they live.  It’s a pretty dark play, though a very good one.

We only got to see Teatro na Prisão’s first scene of this play, but I would love to be able to see how the rest of their improvisations on Gorky will develop.  Will the pervasive playfulness of the group somehow alter Gorky’s original plot, as the women in the other prison saved Romeo and Juliet from their once inevitable demise?  Or will the level of engagement and energy that these men bring to the workshop be channeled into grappling with both the tragedy of Gorky’s characters and the prisoners’ actual circumstances?  To the best of my knowledge, whatever performance they create will not be seen by anyone besides the members of the group themselves.  No audience of other prisoners or outsiders will be invited, unless something changes between now and then.

What does the absence of a viewing public do to a play?  All social justice theatre finds meaning in the process of rehearsal and creation, but it usually aims to make its most significant impact in performance for an audience likely to be swayed by its message or encouraged to think critically about the issues at hand.  Inside a prison, captives might choose to participate in a process such as this one for a multitude of reasons: to have a way to pass the time, to engage with one’s peers in a safe and productive way, to have meaningful contact with volunteers from outside the prison, to learn, to hone a skill set, to prove something to one’s self or others.  Whatever their reasoning, the men in the workshop must find value in the doing of the work itself, rather than seeking any outside recognition for their participation in this process or this play.  The upside to this work from a social justice point of view is that guards and prison administration don’t seem to be interfering or censoring the work of Teatro na Prisão, and they apparently have only been observing the workshops when we foreigners come to visit.  This, I’m guessing, is why Teatro na Prisão can do politically charged theatre work that I do not believe could be done in most U.S. prisons, but their freedom to be political, like everything else in prison, is rather narrowly confined because their work does not have an audience.  I don’t believe this in any way diminishes the quality or meaningfulness of the theatre practices we’ve witnessed in Brazilian prisons, but the lack of audience does make for a distinct theatrical experience–one in which only the participants can benefit.

I wonder what Gorky would think of this.  Surely he would be glad that people in prison know his work and can experience it performatively more than 100 years after he wrote it.  Perhaps he would also feel, as I do, that both the privileged and the oppressed among us are poorer for our inability to witness a full length performance of the improvised version of The Lower Depths that this theatre workshop will produce.  I know that my life would be greatly enriched were I to have the chance to see it.

Alas, my trip to Brazil has ended.  I am finishing this post from an airport in the United States as I wait for the connecting flight that will take me home to my beloved husband and my comfortable life in Michigan.  Liz Raynes has already safely arrived back in our native country, and Renee Gross returns very soon.  Hector/Heitor will remain for a few more weeks and continue to study directing, but my lovely trip is over.  Thank you to all the folks we met at UniRio and the places where they conduct their workshops!  Thank you UM Brazil Initiative and LACS!  We look forward to continuing this work next summer.

In Rio with Teatro na Prisaõ, or Romeo and Juliet Live to See Another Day

Knowing that we wouldn’t be able to take anything but our passports into the prison with us today, we weren’t able to take our cameras to get pictures of our latest adventures.  This photo was taken a few days ago when Liz Raynes was

standing in front of the Shakespeare mural which adorns the side of UniRio’s theatre building.  This image is apropos for this post because our morning was spent watching the Bard’s work get reinterpreted by incarcerated women.

We rose early today in order to eat breakfast and get to UniRio’s campus by 7:45 AM to meet Professor Natália Fiche and her students.  Fiche and the Teatro na Prisaõ program have been doing theatre work in prisons for the last fifteen years.  Every Tuesday the program goes into two prisons on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro–one women’s facility and one men’s.  We visited the women’s prison this week and will go to the men’s next week.

When we arrived at the prison, we got off the bus while those who were headed to the men’s prison continued on to another location.  Fiche and five of her students led us to a large metal gate where a guard slid open a small panel just large enough for him to look through.  Then he opened up a door in the gate and admitted us two at a time, searching the large bags of costumes that the UniRio students carried with them as he admitted them.  Andy, Flores, and I were near the back of the group, and as those in front of us were being admitted through the door, the guard decided that Andy and Hector would not be allowed to enter because they were wearing shorts–albeit long ones.  Someone dug through the costumes and found two pairs of stretch pants that they could wear.  Both pairs of pants were bright pink, but the guys were very good sports about wearing them for our visit to the prison.  The guards confiscated the offending shorts and held them at the front gate until the end of our visit.

Professor Fiche told us that they had never given her a problem about people wearing shorts before.  Apparently, prisons all over the world have this in common; the dress code seems to shift often and arbitrarily so that visitors cannot possibly keep up with the rules.  We face this all the time in the United States.  In fact, during the last year when my family members have visited my father in a Texas prison, the dress code for female visitors has become much more highly regulated than ever before.  Now when the guards decide that a woman’s clothes are too tight or low cut, have too much writing on them, or are deemed unfit for any other reason, they force women to wear blue hospital gowns over their clothes.  Visitors to prisons, particularly wives and girlfriends visiting their loved ones, tend to want to look their best and have often been very careful in dressing themselves for the precious few hours they can spend with the people they love.  My mother and I have witnessed at least two women forced to wear the hospital gowns burst into tears when the men they loved arrived in the visiting room; the women’s shame and grief becomes palpable to all visiting families around them.  If Andy or Hector were ashamed of their makeshift outfits today, they did not show it.  They laughed good-naturedly about the incident and moved right along with their day.  In this case, the shaming force that prisons often inflict upon their inhabitants and visitors did not spoil our trip.

Once we got inside the prison gate, a guard took our passports, asked us to sign the visitor’s log book, and had us walk through a metal detector.  We then followed another guard across a courtyard and into a cement building.  The room in which Teatro na Prisaõ meets is concrete on all surfaces, like the rest of the building, and has a small raised stage at one end.  The dozen or so incarcerated women in the group welcomed the UniRio students, Professor Fiche, and even us visitors with smiles and hugs.  Those of us who have done work in U.S. prisons were surprised to see that even with a guard in the room, male volunteers and female prisoners were allowed to hug without repercussions.  All of the guards we saw beyond the front gate were women, and at least one of them stayed in the back of the room the whole time we were there to watch what was going on.  We gathered from the UniRio students that this is not usually the case; during their regular workshops, the guards don’t bother to watch.  Because we were there visiting from abroad, the workshop was not only watched by a guard but also visited by the warden.  Professor Fiche had previously received approval over email to video record  today’s workshop, and she had set up a tripod with a camera on it at the start of the workshop.  The warden came into the workshop shortly after we got started to tell Fiche that she was denied permission to film after all.

Teatro na Prisaõ uses both improvisatory games based on theatre of the oppressed and traditional theatrical scripts as starting points for its work.  In the past they have not held performances for audiences but have done theatre exercises strictly for themselves within the space of the workshop.  Now Professor Fiche is working to try to gain permission from the prison authorities to allow the women to perform twice: once for their families and once for the other women in the prison.  Whether or not they will be able to do this, they are currently in rehearsals for an original devised performance based on Romeo and Juliet.

The UniRio students and incarcerated women set up chairs to make an audience for us visitors, and they put a small partition upstage right.  This served as an area for costume changes and also became Juliet’s balcony when she would poke her head over the top of the partition to talk to Romeo.  The women had a great time with the costumes that the UniRio folks had brought, and I have to say that the costumes themselves were very diverse and rather impressive–well worth the women’s enthusiasm.  They even had makeshift swords made out of paper machê for the fight scenes.

While the women were trying on costumes and the debate over filming the workshop was happening, we had some time to talk to the workshop participants before they began their rehearsal.  One woman told me about her five children, two of whom have died.  Of the remaining three, two live with her mother.  In my limited Portuguese, I didn’t understand what she was telling me about the whereabouts of the third child, but it seemed important to this woman that we know that she had a life and family beyond the walls of the prison.

This workshop is using the story of Romeo and Juliet but not Shakespeare’s text–even in Portuguese translation.  The UniRio folks have given the women a basic outline of the plot, and the women improvise scenes using Shakespeare’s characters and plot–or at least as much of the plot as they liked.

This particular adaptation of Romeo and Juliet begins on the streets of Verona where the Montagues and Capulets are sizing each other up for a fight.  This opening scene was very funny because one actor in particular (I believe she was a Capulet) was doing such a good job of goading her opponents with gestures and facial expressions.  As in Shakespeare’s original, Prince Escalus (the lead government official in Verona) appears and stops the fight with a speech about keeping the peace.  The rival families dispersed with another round of intimidating looks and hand motions.

Then the whole cast attends the masquerade ball at the Capulet residence.  Everyone appeared in sequined mardi gras masks and danced to baile funk music as though they were at a modern day nightclub.  The cast was obviously having a great time and seemed surprised and excited by this choice of music.  The UniRio students had brought a small boom box and played a number of selections of background music at different points in the play.  Apparently in prior rehearsals, they’d been playing more classical dance music, and the women in the workshop found it boring and wouldn’t do much dancing.  With baile funk as their inspiration, the dance party became a whole lot of fun for the cast and audience alike.

Romeo and Juliet fall in love at the dance, and when Romeo leaves the party, he is so overjoyed that his happiness is positively contagious.  He runs to his friends to sing Juliet’s praises and then collapses in a lovelorn heap downstage center to contemplate the many virtues of his love.  Juliet’s head pops up over the partition in the back of the stage, and she begins a soliloquy about Romeo’s virtues.  He quickly leaps to his feet and runs to stand beneath her balcony.  They have an enthusiastic exchange and run off shortly thereafter to be wed by the friar.  The two women playing Romeo and Juliet were allowed to share what appeared to be a pretty decent kiss, albeit with Juliet’s wedding veil between them–a level of physical contact that I would not expect to be allowed in prison theatre in the U.S.

At this point in the story, we encounter a most excellent bit of comedy along with a casting change.  In order to give more women the opportunity to have significant roles, a new actor takes over for Juliet just after the marriage scene.  An UniRio student named Paolo had been telling me about the double casting before we arrived at the prison.  He referred to the first actor as “the long haired Juliet” and the second as “the short haired Juliet.”  The long haired Juliet played the character as demure and a bit shy, while the short haired Juliet was far more outgoing and demonstrative in her love of Romeo.  The first time we see the short haired Juliet, she is helping Romeo to sneak into her bedroom so that they can consummate their wedding night.  She darts out from behind the upstage right partition, grabs Romeo by the arm, and drags him into her bedroom.  A number of actors were hidden behind the partition, and they enacted Romeo and Juliet’s love making by throwing articles of clothing into the air along with whoops and shouts.  We, the audience, loved it.

Romeo emerges from the wedding night all aglow with his love for Juliet and stumbles into the street fight that kills both Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin) and Mercutio (Romeo’s dear friend).  Then Juliet distraught by this news takes a sleeping potion to fake her death.  Romeo finds her, believes her to be dead, and then proceeds to get falling down drunk.  (The women unanimously disliked Shakespeare’s ending to the tragedy and decided to change it.)  Romeo passes out, and Juliet is first worried that Romeo is dead, then very irritated at Romeo for having gotten drunk.  She shakes him awake and forces him to his feet where he stumbles around still drunk and trying to explain himself, yet overjoyed by Juliet’s unexpected recovery.  The families reconcile.  Another baile funk dance party ensues.  Curtain call.

After the applause died down, the women and UniRio facilitators cleared away our chairs and formed a circle.  Not only did they include all of us in their circle, they deliberately spaced themselves between us so that each visitor held hands on both sides with an incarcerated woman.  The music began again, and one of the UniRio students jumped into the circle and started dancing.  We all cheered.  He pulled one of the incarcerated women into the middle of the circle and then exited to rejoin the group so that the woman in the middle could have the spotlight.  We danced this way for quite a while, each person in the middle bringing a new person into the center of the circle before exiting to rejoin the group.  Then we held hands again, and Prof. Fiche talked to the members of the group about how important their weekly attendance at the workshop is.  A short discussion ensued, and then we broke the circle.  Out of what felt like nowhere, a table appeared with food and drinks that the UniRio students had brought with them to the prison, and we were all encouraged to eat and drink as we mingled and talked about the performance.  When the food and drink were gone, we all hugged and thanked one another before we left–the women heading off into a different area of the prison as we made our way back to the front gate to reclaim Hector and Andy’s confiscated shorts.

We gathered at a little store across the street from the prison, shared more refreshments, and petted a very friendly stray cat while we waited for the UniRio bus to return from the men’s prison to collect us.  On the hour-long bus ride back, the UniRio students and Prof. Fiche shared snacks with us and much conversation about the theatre work that each of us do, both inside and outside prisons.  Someone produced a tambourine from a backpack and played it expertly as all the UniRio students sang loudly in Portuguese.  We arrived back at the university full of good spirits.  We had planned to meet up with this group again on campus two days from now for their weekly Thursday class in which they plan their activities for the coming week’s workshop at the prison, but as part of the nationwide demonstrations and protests in which many Brazilians are currently engaged, all teachers and students at public schools, including those at UniRio, will be on strike this Thursday.  Fortunately we’ll be here another week and can attend a Thursday class after our trip to the men’s prison next Tuesday.

For now, we’re left to ponder this Romeo and Juliet who chose to live rather than die.  When Jodie and I traveled to Cuba shortly after the release of our book in 2011, we saw the Ballet Nacional de Cuba perform a version of Swan Lake in which the swan Odette not only survives but marries Sigfried and has a big dance in which the chorus of swans become ladies in waiting.  After seeing both this take on Romeo and Juliet inside a Brazilian prison and the Cuban Swan Lake, I cannot keep from wondering if unexpected happy endings are signs of resistance.  When one cannot secure one’s own freedom from incarceration or an oppressive government, then perhaps imagining worlds in which Romeo, Juliet, and Odette can overcome their previously inevitable tragedies gives performers and audiences alike a sense of hope.  We cannot always escape the devastating situations in which we find ourselves, but, like another great character from classical drama–Segismundo in Calderon de la Barca’s La vida es sueño–at least we can dream, especially when we’re in the theatre.

Shaka Senghor on Prisoners and Technology

My dear friend and Prison Creative Arts Project Associate Shaka Senghor gave a talk about prisoners and their lack of access to technology at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City last week.  Check out the video of his speech on his website.

 

Sing Sing Production of Our Town

Click here to read an article about a production of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, produced by Rehabilitation Through the Arts at Sing Sing prison.

New Graphic Novel about Prison Grievances

An innovative new resource for prisoners has recently been written by Terri LeClercq, an advocate for incarcerated people in Texas.  LeClercq’s new book, Prison Grievances, is a graphic novel providing instructions on a fifth grade reading level for prisoners who wish to file grievances within the prison system.

For more information, click here.