Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System

Caoimhe McAvinchey, Sheila Preston, Michael Balfour

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474262569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System offers unprecedented access to international theatre and performance practice in carceral contexts and the material and political conditions that shape this work. Each of the twelve essays and interviews by international practitioners and scholars reveal a panoply of practice: from cross-arts projects shaped by autobiographical narratives through to fantasy-informed cabaret; from radio plays to film; from popular participatory performance to work staged in commercial theatres. Extracts of performance texts, developed with Clean Break theatre company, are interwoven through the collection. Television and film images of women in prison are repeatedly painted from a limited palette of stereotypes – 'bad girls', 'monsters', 'babes behind bars'. To attend to theatre with and about women with experience of the criminal justice system is to attend to intersectional injustices that shape women's criminalization and the personal and political implications of this. The theatre and performance practices in this collection disrupt, expand and reframe representational vocabularies of criminalized women for audiences within and beyond prison walls. They expose the role of incarceration as a mechanism of state punishment, the impact of neoliberalism on ideologies of punishment and the inequalities and violence that shape the lives of many incarcerated women. In a context where criminalized women are often dismissed as unreliable or untrustworthy, the collection engages with theatre practices which facilitate an economy of credibility, where women with experience of the criminal justice system are represented as expert witnesses.

1

Interplay: Tracing Personal and Political Transformation through Popular Participatory Theatre in Westville Female Correctional Centre, Durban, South Africa

Miranda Young-Jahangeer

Introduction: A transformational politics

My narrative of facilitating prison theatre in a South African women’s correctional centre for the past nineteen years begins in a bedsit in West London in 1999. It was there, one chilly Sunday morning, that I came across a newspaper article on Geese Theatre Company. I had never heard of theatre being done inside a prison before. The idea was thrilling. South Africa was a fledgling democracy with crime on the increase. I was in London temping to fund travel. It was an incredible adventure, but it was the Mandela era and my Masters in Applied Theatre wasn’t going to be of any use. This frustrated me. I began to cut out the article with a growing sense of purpose and by the time I had finished I had made the decision to return home and be part of the future of South Africa. After a series of uncannily synchronicitous experiences, within six months I was making plays with women in Westville Female Correctional Centre.¹

I have chosen to open this chapter with this brief narrative for a number of reasons. First, this work since its inception has been about stories and storytelling as a form and strategy of transformation. Postcolonial feminists (Mohanty and Torres 1991) emphasize the necessity for women on the margins who have been ‘written out’ of history to use theatre, poetry and literature to sing, dance and act their way back into their own truths in order to manifest personal and political change.

Second, this narrative is my narrative. Although this chapter will focus on the narratives that the women have told, I am telling this story. I am a part of it, as is my subjectivity. Too often when writing up applied theatre work with communities, all the focus is on the impacts of the project/s on the participants (Guerra 2015). The facilitator remains a faceless catalyst. This, according to Tim Prentki, is dangerous: ‘Facilitation requires a constant, dialectical flow between facilitator and participants … If only one party is open to the possibility of alteration, we are in the territory of the monolithic expert imparting higher level knowledge to those less intellectually gifted’ (2015: 76). In light of South Africa’s very recent political past, it was fundamental that the deconstruction of this binary was integral to the work.

With the theatre projects at WFCC, developing critical consciousness through dialogue (Freire 1970) has therefore been both the objective and an integral part of the pedagogical process of the theatre-making. This implies fostering both a political reading of the world and yourself in it. As a white, middle-class South African woman who grew up under apartheid and benefited from its racist advantages, this ‘dialectical flow’ has been essential not only in our respective transformation but in providing the proverbial ‘jailer’s key’ which opened the gate to glimpses of freedom – alternative realities.

Lastly, this chapter is about tracing transformation and my observations around the interplay of national and personal politics as performed by the women of Westville. Democracy catapulted South Africa into rapid transformation. Although current debates centre on how little has changed for the economically marginalized (Mbembe 2014), the country has indeed seen profound change. Every conceivable landscape has been altered: physical, ideological and political.

The then head of education at Westville Correctional Facility, Pooben Pillay, who was employed during the political changeover of the mid-1990s, recounts an ‘almost overnight transformation’ (personal conversations 2003) from secrecy to an air of transparency. During apartheid, prisons had become closed institutions (Oppler 1998), which meant that all media and outside inspections were prohibited. Any inhumane and torturous activity could therefore go unchecked, and it did. Further, to add to the performance of power (Foucault 1977; Kershaw 1999) so evident in the prison system globally, the prisons were run on militaristic lines with staff ranked as paramilitary personnel although they were merely civil servants (Oppler 1998).

Without doubt, the prioritizing of the prison system as a focal point of transformation had much to do with the legacy of political prisoners (Nelson Mandela – the newly elected president – being the quintessential example). This brought to the new grand narrative of the country an understanding around the relativity of crime. Unfortunately, with the rise in crime post-democracy, this is now in constant contestation as many cry, ‘Bring back the death penalty!’

Nevertheless, the shift in policy from punitive to a rehabilitatory approach was profound. In the revised Correctional Services Act (1998: 16), it is stipulated that, in their aim of promoting a just, peaceful and safe society, the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) must protect and promote ‘human dignity … social responsibility and human development of all prisoners’. Prisons at this time were thus open to alternative approaches, which could assist them in fulfilling this mandate. Thus, in 1996, the DCS introduced recreational activities for the first time and, in 2000, the popular participatory theatre (PPT) programmes (Kerr 1995) began in WFCC.²

Popular participatory (prison) theatre

PPT is a form of applied theatre (AT) most akin to Theatre for Development (TfD) (Prentki 2015; Kerr 1995). As its name suggests, this form has as its objective the broad, problematic term ‘development’. The community, with the guidance of a facilitator, devises the plays. They are typically never scripted or titled and remain fluid and improvisational. Popular theatrical forms of the participant community (in this instance, Zulu song, dance and games) infuse the performance.

Within TfD a range of theatre forms exist and, while current literature (Prentki 2015) emphasizes its roots in dialogic pedagogy (Freire 1970), its past and present manifestations still often display ‘the anomaly of participation’ (Kidd and Byram 1982; Mda 1993), a mere cliché to impress funders with no real substance. PPT is a form that aims to distinguish itself from these exhortatory examples. It is politically motivated and was conceived here with the intention to open up spaces of democratic debate inside the heart of the prison. In that respect, the work in the prison is perceived as neither rehabilitation nor therapy.

Although the programmes have yielded numerous pro-social impacts (Young-Jahangeer 2002), the focus has been concerned with collective and communal accountability. The old Zulu proverb, ‘umunthu umunthu ngabanthu’ (‘a person is a person because of people’), sums up our philosophical base. This idea is well aligned with the Marxist–Socialist philosophy underpinning Freire’s pedagogy, a seminal influence in this form, and emerges out of a politics that has noted the marginalization of African and female communities’ ‘ways of knowing’ (Chilisa and Preece 2005: 33) and seeks to counter it.

Consequently, within less than a year, four powerful women inside had become my ‘co-investigators’ functioning as co-facilitators and partners in all aspects of the programmes. Thus the methodology in many respects freed me from being ‘the white woman in the centre’, as did the fact that, although the majority of women participating in the projects are fluent in English, the plays and much of the dialogue is in isiZulu, a language I am not fluent in. This allows me to experience the benefits of exclusion (Bharucha 2000).

The Prison Theatre projects operate as part of the Drama and Performance Studies curriculum at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.³ Initially there was one undergraduate course, and Drama students and inmates worked separately (but with facilitation) over two months to devise plays on an issue. On a given Saturday, we bussed students into the Prison en masse to spend a morning of play-exchange.⁴ Debate around these issues became complex and detailed. Part of the strategy was to upend conventional binaries of educated/uneducated by repositioning the inmates as experts.

In 2002, we introduced a second programme involving postgraduate students in a course entitled Theatre for Debate. Here, students work in the prison intensely over a period of a month. Their role is to co-facilitate inmates in the creation of a participatory play that stimulates discussion for an audience of other female inmates.

There are a number of characteristics shared across this body of plays: they were devised and never scripted, without titles or even fixed character assignations, and actresses can switch roles that they have rehearsed for the final performance. Mostly their character names are their own names.

My analysis of the key concerns/issues articulated by the prison theatre at WFCC over the past fifteen years will be the focus for the second half of this chapter. If we understand that ‘it is the social actors who use the conceptual systems of their culture [such as theatre] … to construct meaning, to make the world meaningful and to communicate about that world meaningfully to others’ (Hall 1997a: 25), then such an inquiry can give invaluable insight into the ‘conversation’ that incarcerated women are having with the shifting landscapes of the not-so-new South Africa and with each other.

In my investigation, I identify three loosely overlapping phases: the politics of the issue (2000–4), the politics of identity (2002–10) and the politics of human rights (2010–14). These delineations are by no means discrete and do not presume to reflect trends in applied theatre in South Africa as a whole. However, what is significant is that this is a largely stable group of women (many have done the programmes more than five times) who have, through a process of discussion, collectively decided what debate the play will instigate. The plays respond directly to current areas of concern. Further, they understand and experience the multiple ways in which the prison theatre at WFCC can and has negotiated power at numerous levels.

Most typically, it has initiated interpersonal exchange, which has helped to renegotiate cultures of behaviour among the women inside, and to mobilize them around a common cause. However, it has also been a means through which the women have effectively spoken back to operations and policies within the prison system. This is expanded on later in the chapter.

The women of Westville

As this chapter focuses on the intersection of context and personal (embodied) politics, it would be amiss not to frame this example within the feminist politics of female incarceration in Africa as symptomatic of global hegemonies. South Africa as a society of cultural diversity is nevertheless bound by its relationship to patriarchy, which is entrenched in all the cultures of South Africa to varying degrees (Willemans 2013). Certainly, the use of critical pedagogies (Darder et al. 2009) to challenge patriarchy and create a female space of creative expression and societal critique was part of the ambition.

The subject of women and imprisonment in Africa directly engages the political–economic and spatial containment of women in terms of race/gender/class intersections (hooks 1989). In this way the imprisonment of economically marginalized women of colour, globally, I believe, can operate as a metaphor for, and is borne out by, the experiences of the majority of these women in their daily lives. This conclusion is based on fifteen years of plays which describe often with humour, grace and occasionally anger what it is to exist in a world where there are no ‘systems’ that operate to your advantage (Tatum 1997: 7). Yet, besides the obvious metaphoric associations, these systems of advantage have very real impact on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Caoimhe McAvinchey
• Wicked (1991)
• 1 Interplay: Tracing Personal and Political Transformation through Popular Participatory Theatre in Westville Female Correctional Centre, Durban, South Africa Miranda Young-Jahangeer
• ‘Four Walls’, Voices from Prison (1987)
• 2 ‘They Pink Dress Ain’t Done Shit’: Sex, Dress and Quare Activism in a Women’s Gulf Coast Prison Lisa L. Biggs
• Decade (1984)
• 3 Daughters of the Floating Brothel: Engaging Indigenous Australian Women Prisoners through Participatory Radio Drama Sarah Woodland
• ‘I am a theatre’, Voices from Prison (1987)
• 4 What Works: The Affective and Gendered Performance of Prison Aylwyn Walsh
• Extract I from Inside Bitch (2019)
• 5 Possible Fictions: Split Britches, Biography and Fantasy with Women in Prison Caoimhe McAvinchey
• Extract I from Killers (1980)
• 6 Theatre as Collective Casework: Clean Break Theatre Company’s Charged (2010) Molly McPhee
• ‘Prison Loves, Prison Hates’, Voices from Prison (1987)
• 7 Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company: The Arts – Unapologetically Transcendent Maud Clark AM
• Extract II from Killers (1980)
• 8 The Meeting Place: Collaborative Learning in a University–Prison Partnership Rachel Conlon
• Extract II from Inside Bitch (2019)
• 9 Acting Out: An Interview with Sherrin Fitzer Ashley Lucas
• Inside a Cloud (2016)
• 10 ‘There Is Still Life in Me, Despite What I Have Done’: Assuaging Woundedness through Collective Creativity Katharine E. Low and Clara Vaughan
• ‘Dirty Rule Makers’, Voices from Prison (1987)
• 11 The Stella Adler Studio Outreach Programme at the Rose M. Singer Center for Women at Rikers Island Correctional Facility: An Interview with Joanne Edelmann and Tom Oppenheim Caoimhe McAvinchey
• 21.23.6.15 (2018)
• 12 In Their Shoes: Participation, Social Change and Empathy in Open Clasp’s Key Change Kay Hepplewhite
• Index
• Copyright