Neither That Nor That: Trading Stories at the Intersection of Arts and Penal Welfare

Summer Shapiro and Taraina Grant in The Medea Project’s “My Life in the Concrete Jungle” (Photo by Pat Mazzera) click here for slideshow

In February 2007, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, the city’s oldest alternative arts space, launched The Prison Project, a yearlong exploration of the California prison system. While Intersection has a reputation for producing high-quality original avant-garde productions, the institution is less recognized for its commitment to community-based performance processes. The Prison Project’s first public performance was an Open Process Event in which representatives from the Prison Activist Resource Center, California Prison Focus and The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women entered into a public conversation with Intersection artists and staff. At that event, a representative from the Prison Activist Resource Center (as well as a number of audience members) requested that Intersection use the year to solve extreme sentencing practices, healthcare issues, the lack of drug treatment programs, the dearth of prisoner re-entry programs and poverty, among a host of other issues. “We can’t do it all,” Intersection’s Executive Director Deborah Cullinan responded throughout the evening. “We are artists, and that is the kind of contribution we can make.”[1]

Months later, in a personal interview, Cullinan reflected that it is difficult for Intersection to tackle social issues without being expected to become a social-justice organization. “As soon as we become, that,” she said, “then we’re not an arts organization anymore. And as soon as we become that, certain sets of people will come with us and certain sets of people just won’t. But what we can do as an arts organization is build a bigger room for more people with different agendas. … We can provide a cultural space for dialogue.” “When we don’t talk enough about art,” she explained, “[our work is] perceived to be too community. And then, when we talk too much about art, it’s perceived to be not authentic enough. … We have to be able to articulate that [our work is] different. It’s neither that, nor that, but something new and different.”[2]

Rhodessa Jones in The Medea Project’s “My Life in the Concrete Jungle” (Photo by Pat Mazzera) click here for slideshow

Rhodessa Jones, founder and director of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women negotiates this same tension between art making and social activism when she reflects upon her two decades of work with women imprisoned in penal institutions stretching from San Francisco to Trinidad to South Africa. In contrast to Intersection, The Medea Project is well known for its community-based performance processes but less recognized for its commitment to producing high-quality original avant-garde art. Jones first began working with incarcerated women in 1989 when she was invited by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Neighborhood Arts Program to teach aerobics at the San Francisco County Jail. “I went inside the jail,” Jones says, “and bam, there were all these women in jail. And all I knew was easy intimacy. I wanted to just trade stories.”[3]

I'd go in and do all kinds of workouts, and I was 40, and I'd talk about my life. I'd talk about my granddaughter and my own relationships with men, and about being a hippie, and they were fascinated that I was telling them all this stuff. One woman came up to me and said, “Why you telling us your business?” I said that I'm interested in creating bridges that'll take us all out of this prison, and this woman said, “Then you're not the police?” I said, “No, I'm an artist,” and she said, “What's that?” That has been what I've been trying to answer ever since. What is an artist in that situation?[4]

In my dissertation research on U.S. penal-welfare performance in the 20th and 21st centuries, I have been working to develop language with which to speak about performance practices that, like those of The Medea Project and Intersection for the Arts, are “neither that, nor that.” In examining performance practices that spill over the boundaries between culture work and social work, I have found myself returning to Jones’ question: What is the role of an artist in this situation? How do, and indeed, how can artists contribute to the development of their communities? What forces must be in play to produce this intimate yet socially engaged “cultural space”? What kinds of labor, artistry and infrastructural support are necessary to maintain arts-activist practices and the communities with which they engage?

My research method strives for its own kind of “easy intimacy.” Rather than observing from a distance, I have attempted to stretch the ethnographic principle of participant observation, “trading stories” with arts organizations while collaborating as a fellow artist and organizer. In January 2006, I joined The Medea Project for the company’s seventh performance collaboration with women inside the San Francisco County jail system. For the following 11 months, I participated in the project as both ethnographer and assistant director as I collaborated with Jones and an ensemble of professional performers and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women in translating Amos Tutuola’s novel “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” into our re-telling, “My Life in the Concrete Jungle.” At the culmination of this process, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, as they have done since the first production in 1992, granted permission for the project’s incarcerated participants to perform on a public stage. For two weekends in October and November 2006, the production played to sold-out houses at The Lorraine Hansberry Theater, one of San Francisco’s premier theatrical venues.

Intersection for the Arts (Photo by Nina Billone)

In January of 2007, I began collaborating on Intersection for the Arts’ Prison Project as both ethnographer and liaison to the Community Advisory Board. While Intersection has engaged in theme-based work throughout its 42-year history, The Prison Project marks the first occasion in which each of the organization’s programs has joined under the same theme. In addition to a theater piece developed by Campo Santo with resident writers Ntozake Shange and Jimmy Santiago Baca, an original performance art piece by Erika Shuch’s ESP project, a series of jazz performances by Howard Wiley, and a gallery show, The Prison Project has also hosted a series of community-based Open Process events where activists, artists and formerly incarcerated people come together with Intersection audiences to engage in dialogue about the prison system; they have partnered with The Building-Bloc collective to sponsor The Mutual Aid Pen-Pal Project in which artists and prisoners correspond for 12 months in order to develop a joint art project; and they have brought together over 15 of the major prison activist organizations across the state to form a community-advisory board. The year culminated in the Prison/Culture symposium on March 1, 2008, which was co-hosted by San Francisco State’s departments of Criminal Justice and Art.

While Intersection’s work is more easily aligned with avant-garde art and The Medea Project’s with community theater, both may be understood as part of a larger body of urban community-based performance that has emerged over the past three decades. Scholars and practitioners in the field explain that the form was born in the 1970s and 1980s just as the radical popular performance experiments of the 1960s died off. The historical narrative posits that, in the ’70s and ’80s, artists who had engaged in the independent radical performance ensembles of the ’60s (such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino) became increasingly frustrated with the top-down model in which activist artists would present works to the people, and they began shifting their focus from product to process as they developed democratic methods of creating theater of, by and for the people they hoped to reach.

This transformation tends to signal a related shift from activism in opposition to activism in partnership. Bill Cleveland highlights the institutional component of this historical development when he explains that, from the 1970s on, “professional artists began to look to society’s forgotten corners for a new constituency.”[5] The penal-welfare framework exposes how these forgotten corners are often linked through a series of civic institutions such as schools, hospitals, shelters and prisons. Overall, critics and practitioners in the field of performance and social change either laud or lament activist-artists’ contemporary engagement with the welfare state: in either case, this “institutional turn” in popular activist performance has come to signal a movement away from social rebellion and toward social maintenance, away from fighting against the system and toward working within it. While a clean “turn” cannot be located at this or any time in history, it is significant that in the 1970s and 1980s artists in the United States began to unite not only under the term “community-based performance” but also under a shared ethos of institutional enmeshment.

While Jones describes her work as arts-activism and while she maintains that The Medea Project furthers the cause for social justice, she, like Cullinan, also resists any alignment of her work with a particular political agenda: “I’m an artist,” she says,

I’m a creative survivalist. I didn’t come with any politics other than theater saved my life. You can be in my dream if I can be in your dream. This is what I know, sister. This is how you make bread, this is how you make community, this is how we can take care of our children, this is how we can live in the world as women. It’s very homespun, it’s very much mother wit.[6]

“This is about a girl,” the Medea ensemble proclaimed at the top of the 2006 production as they burst through the theater’s backdoors and rushed the stage from behind and within the audience.

This is about babies, cities — San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond. This is about Army Street, 6th Street, the Helen Hotel. When the days of dead luck came to the hood, the girl was caught in the concrete jungle, another land of the dead. Disappeared into the Bush administration — somewhere between the jailhouse, the crack house, the ho house, the no house, The White House — anaesthetized by fire and smoke, she was missing, gone for several lifetimes. Until this day, she wonders, can she get back home?

Both The Medea Project and Intersection’s methods of trading stories, not only engage but also stage that engagement with “the jailhouse, the crack house, the ho house, the no house, The White House.” From this perspective, the intimacy (or the building of bridges) for which both companies strive is not only characterized by interpersonal but also by inter-institutional relations. Both The Medea Project and The Prison Project work, albeit in different ways, by forging ties with the prison system, rehab centers, halfway houses, arts organizations and grassroots activists. From this perspective both the art and the activism of The Medea Project and The Prison Project lie in striving to create a “cultural space” that brings together different art forms, different people and different institutions.

However, because of their position as “neither that, nor that,” The Medea Project and Intersection continue to struggle for cultural and social legitimacy. “We call it a glass ceiling here,” Cullinan says of Intersection’s position within San Francisco’s arts community.

We’re here. We’re stuck. We can’t seem to get out of the budget size we’re in and the challenges that we face that way. … We’ve been thinking quite a bit about this space. … How do you get bigger while staying intimate and rooted?... If we had our way we would be a bigger institution. I don’t think that necessarily means simply a bigger space or a bigger budget, but rather we would have more capacity … to be more thorough and truly follow through in everything we do. … It seems so straightforward to me that if you thought of artists not as artists but as citizens that bring a certain strength and a certain perceptive ability to the table, then I just think we’d be a in a different place.[7]

Even though The Medea Project has managed to survive and to produce seven different collaborations over the past 15 years, the partnerships it forms are not sustained by continuous funding sources. Because the work is structured around the ephemerality of a single production and because the funding for the work is directed toward one production at a time with no guarantee that there will be another and with no continuity between projects, the work must continue in “easy,” intimate and informal circles. When women leave the project in the middle of the process or when the group disbands after the final show, participants are encouraged to keep in touch with one another. They are specifically invited to call or stop by the office whenever they would like. Jones makes a concerted effort to help participants pursue employment and schooling and she welcomes capable Medea participants to take part in smaller performance opportunities throughout the year. However, after the final production, The Medea Project returns to the jail only once for a wrap-up session. Jones then pursues her solo performance projects and her teaching, while other participants pursue their artistic projects, focus on their day jobs and/or work to find a day job.

While Jones notes that there are advantages to being enmeshed with the prison system but not fully institutionalized within that system, she also expresses regret that The Medea Project has not yet been able to build the kind of infrastructure that would lead to sustainable and continuous work. In late August 2007, almost one year after the opening of “My Life in the Concrete Jungle,” Gina Dawson, one of the core Medea ensemble members, hosted a dinner party for the company. I was unable to attend the event, so Jones sent me an email to fill me in on all I had missed. After listing everyone who had been there, Jones mentioned that a number of the professional performers had either been on vacation or engaged in artistic projects out of town. She concluded by noting that each of the incarcerated women who had performed in the production had fallen out of contact with the group. “Tanya is haunting the streets out in front of [the jail at] 850 Bryant,” Jones wrote. “Sean says she sees her often there. Mele surfaced for a minute then disappeared cell phone is not working. No Dana. No Leyah, no Taraina, no Darle … may the good spirits watch over our asses!”[8]

A version of this essay was presented as part of the Arts, Neighborhood, and Social Practice colloquium at the University of California, Berkeley, November 2007.

Nina Billone is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the history of performance at San Quentin Prison, the development of the California Arts in Corrections programs, and the contemporary work of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women and The Prison Project at Intersection for the Arts. She is also a performer, director and teacher with a specialty in ensemble-based theater and literary adaptation.

NOTES

[1] Deborah Cullinan, Open Process Event 1 Feb. 2007.

[2] Deborah Cullinan, Personal Interview Nov. 2007.

[3] Rhodessa Jones, Post-performance discussion 29 Oct. 2006.

[4] Sam Hurwitt, “On The Inside Looking Out,” San Francisco Chronicle 29 Oct. 2006: PK-24.

[5] William Cleveland, “Art in Other Places: Artists at Work in America’s Community and Social Institutions” (Amherst, Mass: Arts Extension Service Press, 2000) 49.

[6] Rena Fraden, “Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women” (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 23-24.

[7] Cullinan, Personal Interview, Nov. 2007.

[8] Rhodessa Jones, Email to the author 26 Aug. 2007.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2008