INCARCERATION AND PERFORMANCE

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
-- Henry David Thoreau

"Performance as an artistic 'genre' is a constant state of crisis, and is therefore an ideal medium for articulating a time of permanent crisis such as ours."
-- Guillermo Gomez-Pena

"Performance is about presence, not representation; it is not a mirror, but the actual moment in which the mirror is shattered…. We experience life, therefore we perform-or rather we perform as we live, love, travel and suffer. "
-- Guillermo Gomez-Pena

Currently over 2.5 million people are held in prison or detention in the United States, with over 3,000 on death row. The United States has the highest incarceration and execution rates among industrialized nations. Varied responses to the expanding penal sites and carceral practices have sparked new forms of research, education, and analysis, art and performance, and narrative-all interrogating the meanings of democracy and captivity.

The 2003-2004 Wayland Faculty Seminar "Incarceration, Narrative and Performance" provides an interdisciplinary examination of "incarceration studies" (history, sociology, criminology, community health, and political science); narrative (memoirs, political manifestoes, literature on ethnicity, race, gender, and captivity); and performance studies (theatre, communication, visual art). Through the humanities, arts and social sciences we explore captivity, community, and democracy in the prison state.


Today at 4 pm, Robert Varea, co-founder of the Soapstone Theatre Company will speak at Rites and Reasons Theatre about his work with prisoners.


Find out more about Varea's work


Find out more about the Wayland Faculty Seminar