Abstract
Prison theatre practitioners and scholars often describe the sense of imaginative freedom or “escape” that theatre and drama can facilitate for incarcerated actors, in contrast to the strict regimes of the institution. Despite this, the concept of freedom or liberation is rarely interrogated, being presented instead as a given—a natural by-product of creative practice. Drawing from John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatist aesthetics and the liberatory pedagogies of Bell Hooks (2000) and Paulo Freire (1996), I propose an embodied aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre that adds depth and complexity to claims for freedom through creativity. Reflecting on over twenty years of prison theatre practice and research, I propose that the initial “acts of escape” performed through engaging the imagination are merely the first threshold toward more meaningful forms of freedom. I frame these as the following three intersecting domains: “Acts of unbinding”, which represents the personal liberation afforded by experiences with theatre in prison; “acts of love”, which expresses how the theatre ensemble might represent a “beloved community” (hooks); and “acts of liberation”, which articulates how these experiences of self-and-world creation may ripple out to impact audiences and communities. An aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre can, therefore, be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal; an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential, and its limits.
Highlights
Theatre has likely been performed in prisons and other sites of incarceration for centuries, with documented examples ranging from the 1789 convict staging of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in Australia, to theatre and art occurring in prison and internment camps in the Second World War, to Herbert Blau’s famous 1957 staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in San Quentin Prison
Drawing from pragmatist aesthetics and liberatory pedagogies and politics I seek to demonstrate how liberation in prison theatre can be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal, an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential
While the ensemble might be working towards a performance goal, in prison theatre, equal weight is given to the process of creation—what happens in the workshop space as the group progressively develops the trust, imaginative capacities, performance skills and confidence to make the show
Summary
Theatre has likely been performed in prisons and other sites of incarceration for centuries, with documented examples ranging from the 1789 convict staging of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in Australia, to theatre and art occurring in prison and internment camps in the Second World War, to Herbert Blau’s famous 1957 staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in San Quentin Prison (see Balfour 2004; McAvinchey 2011). Drawing from pragmatist aesthetics and liberatory pedagogies and politics I seek to demonstrate how liberation in prison theatre can be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal, an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential. They build their philosophies around core concepts of experience, growth, inquiry, communication, mediation, problem posing/solving, consciousness-raising, ethical social action and transformation Despite these similarities, Keans suggests that a key difference in their approaches is that where Dewey extolled the virtues of transformative experience in supporting an engaged and active citizenry, Freire adopted a more radical stance, seeing it as a precursor to structural revolution. Pragmatist aesthetics foregrounds the “art of living”—the embodied, relational act of making selves, worlds and cultures; introduced as an aesthetic theory by Dewey in 1934 but known by Eastern philosophers and Indigenous peoples for millennia
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