The art of living in prison: A pragmatist aesthetic approach to participatory drama with women prisoners

Abstract

Across the fields of applied theatre and prison theatre, there appears to be little analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic engagement for participants in prison-based participatory practices. This article presents a pragmatist aesthetic frame that I developed to analyse the experience of a drama programme I ran in a women's prison. This frame evolved alongside the practice, drawing largely from John Dewey's (1934) Art as Experience and a selection of contemporary scholars who, influenced by Dewey, work in the areas of aesthetics, ethics and education-most notably Richard Shusterman (2000, 2008) and David Granger (2006). I also incorporated narrative within this frame as an interpretive and expressive structure for experience, and a key element within my applied theatre practice. I began to conceive aesthetics in terms of an 'art of living', identifying a 'poetics of renewal' that informed the selfand world-creation of participants in the drama. I share this theoretical framework as a possible way to integrate the instrumental and the aesthetic in applied theatre theory and practice, specifically in a prison context. KEYWORDS aesthetics applied theatre participatory drama prison theatre somaesthetics women prisoners

Prison Theatre and an Embodied Aesthetics of Liberation: Exploring the Potentials and Limits

“…I believe that there is unique potential in exploring the aesthetic within prison theatre, where aesthetic engagement and experience are informed by their situation within an oftenalienating institutional space. Elsewhere I have discussed how the tensions between the institutional context and the moments of freedom, beauty or transcendence that occur in the drama space become integral to the aesthetic (Woodland 2013(Woodland , 2016. Further, a liberatory approach to an aesthetics of prison theatre positions aesthetic experience as a vital aspect of human (and non-human) flourishing.…”

“…The first, Living Stories, was a twelve-week drama program that drew from a range of drama approaches and strategies including text-based work, improvisation games and drama skills development. Living Stories culminated in a devised performance showing for peers and staff about inspiring women from history (Woodland 2013(Woodland , 2016.…”

The Limits of Rehabilitation and Recidivism Reduction: Rethinking the Evaluation of Arts Programming in Prisons

“…This is undoubtedly also linked to increasing pressure on artists to demonstrate concretely the value of their work to the public, to the institution, and to funding bodies (O’Keefe & Albertson, 2016). Such external pressures can result in an instrumentalist focus (Woodland, 2016), and can serve to shift the agenda of arts programming toward that of the institution (McKean, 2006). And so, artists working in corrections must find a balance between their own objectives, the desires of the participants, the funding requirements, and the expectations of prison administrators.…”

“…This was particularly important for the artists who ran the 9-week program in the MSU that we evaluated (see Figures 1 and 2 for some of the art projects). Like Woodland (2016, p. 225), the artists were ‘interested in the potential for [their] practice in prisons to move away from an explicitly rehabilitative agenda.’…”

Indefra og udefra – serendipitet som kunstfagdidaktisk princip i Teater Bag Murene

“…Flere teaterprojekter i faengsler knytter an til det, man kan kalde et rehabiliteringsfokus, hvor de indsatte bliver rehabiliterede når de deltager i de kunstneriske processer (Balfour, 2000;Bottoms, 2010;Keehan, 2015;Tett et.al., 2012;Thompson, 1998). Andre teaterprojekter er mere rettet mod teaterproduktion og tager blandt andet udgangspunkt i et stykke dramatik, en tekst udviklet af deltagerne eller iscenesaettelser af de indsattes egne livshistorier (Goddard, 2013;Prendergast, 2013;Sutherland, 2013;Woodland, 2016). I det følgende afsnit introduceres teaterkompagniet TBM og forestillingen Innefra og Ut, hvorefter vi redegør for kompagniets kunstneriske arbejde i faengslet.…”