See Me; Prison Theater Workshops and Love

Project “For Colored Girls:” Breaking the shackles of role deprivation through prison theatre

This article documents the responses of incarcerated men to Dante’s story of Ugolino in canto 33 of Inferno. Reading Dante’s poem in prison theater workshops the men are inspired to write about the ways in which their own children, like Ugolino’s, have suffered because of the incarceration of their father. Interweaving fragments of Dante’s text into their stories the incarcerated readers generate narratives that explore the multiple meanings of starvation. While Ugolino’s children die starving for food, the children of incarcerated fathers are starving for love, family, and community. Like the majority of men in American prisons the participants in these Dante theater workshops are people of color and their writing highlights the impact of mass incarceration on black and brown communities in America at the same time that it demonstrates the continuing relevance of Dante’s poem to readers confronting issues related to justice and its absence in the twenty-first century.

In July 2002, Christopher Hurst supervised Mbongiseni Buthelezi, a postgraduate student in Drama and Performance Studies, who conducted a Prison Theatre project at the Medium B Prison (a men's maximum security prison) at Westville Prison in Durban. Buthelezi used theatre workshop techniques to create a play that addressed expressions of prejudice towards inmates who are living with HIV/AIDS in the prison. The play re‐imagined and utilised Zulu military conventions and combined them with the Brazilian Forum Theatre methods of Augusto Boal. This combination made it possible for the inmate audiences to articulate criticisms about the behaviour of prison staff and other inmates that would otherwise have been difficult in the prison context. The performance form was recognised as something altogether new by the Zulu male participants, particularly because of the negotiations of power occasioned by the performance.

This methodological reflection is based on the author's own experience taking part in participatory theater projects in mainland Chinese prisons over the past 5 years. This article demonstrates how the author's participation in prison theater projects secured otherwise unattainable research access by forming collaborations with various organizations. Participatory theater workshops also offered the space for sustaining long-term rapport. This research note discusses why trusting relationships are the most important guarantee to obtaining valid data in Chinese prison research. The findings contribute to understanding methodological challenges and innovations of conducting fieldwork in criminal justice systems with no formal research access channels.