Our Impact

I had the opportunity to work with Alex and Rory as one of the two organizers of a student-centered residency with the Re-Entry Theater of Harlem for one month from October 20th to November 17th at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Prior to the residency, we met online several times, including weekly meetings in the final month leading up to the residency, to plan how Alex and Rory's pedagogy could translate and apply to the student body at the university.

During the residency they facilitated a workshop with the students of the theatre department's course: Arts, Activism and the Justice System. They also worked with several professors and visited a wide variety of classes across disciplines of Religion, Crime, Law and Justice Studies, Theatre Arts, English and Education.

I was able to witness their transformative arts justice method firsthand on two different instances. The first is when they organized a collaborative arts installation in collaboration with the Louis Armstrong House Museum, followed by a play reading of Alex's play "The Time Traveler" on campus. The event really brought forth for me Alex and Rory's ability to meaningfully connect and build relationships with students and faculty across the university community.

I was cast as the character of the social worker in the play which was about a "returning citizen" and the challenges he faced after release from prison, the failure of social and legal institutions, and the friendships and moments of solace he finds upon his return to society. The play's witty dialogues and delivery of straight and simple truths about mass incarceration spoke to the audience of students and faculty. The metaphor of time travel brought together contemporary and personal struggles with structural and political realities and created space for hope and questioning of the criminal legal system.

On a different occasion, Alex and Rory gave an interactive talk at WCCW (Washington Correction Center for Women) at Gig Harbor, WA. I have been teaching a course in anthropology and gender studies titled "Law, Gender and Justice in South Asia" to incarcerated students enrolled in the BA degree program affiliated with the University of Puget Sound. Alex and Rory brought their "rituals for return" process to my students.

They brought with them a video that captured the ritual for return process that showed a performance of returning citizens in NYC. The participants were activists, organizers, people who had been incarcerated responding on stage to a series of poetic prompts. The exercise titled "You might think" asked participants to feel and imagine the stark difference between their own sense of self and how the people around them and the world at large viewed them.

The video ended with the participants removing their self-constructed masks, both literal and metaphorical—the masks they wore to protect themselves from the world, and shield themselves from the stigma of incarceration. While my students watched the video in class, they scribbled responses on a sheet of paper to the same prompts. At the end of the video screening some students volunteered to share their own powerful and poetic responses to these prompts, while their classmates listened, visibly moved by a shared recognition of one another's pain.

I was grateful to Alex and Rory for creating this moment in which students could sit with their own life experiences and with each other and give voice to them in a "safe and brave" space. All my students would love Alex and Rory to return for a follow up session.

Finally I really enjoyed the discussion Alex and Rory held together at the university on theater programs in prison. The discussion was held after the screening of the film 'Sing Sing' for the campus community. The audience was diverse and included largely students and faculty from the university, people involved in the arts, as well as others with lived experiences of incarceration as well as those with past careers in correctional services. Alex and Rory answered questions with great nuance and detail. They talked about the prison medical industrial complex that thrives on emptying and separating psychological illness from its grounding in material conditions and lived realities of those who are experiencing them; the embodied and transformative experience of arts and theatre based pedagogy for people dealing with trauma and breaking the hold of toxic masculinity by creating spaces for men to sit in circle and be vulnerable with each other.