Experiential Education

Jan Cohen-Cruz: Episode Six: Experiential Education

In this podcast, we intertwine first-person tales of prison theatre workshops across three continents reflecting on the prison system, theatre, collectivity, and love. The frame is a love story from one of the workshops between Finn, who was incarcerated, and me, Jan, who cofacilitated.

This way we were learning from each other, Finn. I think it happened in a lot of the workshops, we were discovering things, we were letting parts of ourselves show. But it was partly because we had this collective. We were all holding each other up.

Finn K.: Right.

Jan: Did you get that? I don’t want to romanticize it, but I think it was happening.

Finn: Oh no, no, no, no, no. I know exactly what it was. See, so when I went to the workshop… It’s all new to me. Everything’s new.

Jan: In this episode you’ll hear what we were all learning through working together and the challenges we faced. We begin with Jan, played by Kathryn Erbe.

Younger Jan [Played by Kathryn Erbe]: Much of what held meaning for me before the workshop no longer did. My aspirations, most theatre on the “outside”—dust to dust. I could hardly understand what anyone saw in such a life, which seemed terribly self-involved and impervious to the conditions of so many people, often unseen but all around us. I was Jonah and believed that I was learning what I’d been sent there for.

Jan: Ausettua—

Ausettua Amor Amenkum: I went into both LCIW [Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women] and Angola [Louisiana State Penitentiary], bringing my skills and experiences, hoping to help someone. They taught me how to be determined amid a seemingly defeated situation, to never give up on oneself. They allowed themselves to be receptive to learning and growing. They were not ashamed to speak their truths and be vulnerable on a stage. They were willing to take their spiritual walk with others, understanding that their paths are different, but through the use of the performing arts in prison they found their voice. They mastered how to make valuable use of their time, preparing for successful reentry as valued, contributing, returning citizens. It is so easy to remain focused and positive when you are in the free world, but how would you function if you were removed from the comfort and love of your family and home? For these participants, performing arts are the vehicle to self-discovery, forgiveness, and hope. Their ability to remain positive and focused is unparalleled in my experience.      

Jan: Here’s John.

John Bergman: I think we were very lucky in the first couple of big joints that we went to where the officers who we had to interact with—there was a wonderful one, Vera Cunningham—were relatively good. When we first went in, we were messing up. Then we went down to a prison, and it was really clear that the officers just hated us and had no problem overtly saying so. They were perfectly happy to spread that sort of nonsense throughout the entire system. Actually I decided enough was enough and sent a letter to the commissioner of prisons. We confronted it. And damn me if he didn’t write back and say, “You need to come into the prisons again. We have no problem with you doing that,” and all the rest of it. It took a long while before I realized what that was teaching me, which was that these are organic islands in which we’re there for a tiny little time, and when we go, everything else occurs.

Jan: George and Jess in Scotland.

George Ferguson: I guess my experience on this project helped me to see the benefits of performing arts as a tool for working with young people in the criminal justice system. Not only was it giving them an opportunity to create and perform and bringing them together as a community, but it was also giving them a sense of agency and purpose. It was giving them a voice and providing them with a platform.

It also brought me back to the question of risk that we as the prison management are always thinking about. We know that the risks are there, right? But we can and we do put processes in place to negate these risks. For example, when prisoners attend visits, or go to educational programs, or work in the joiners—woodshop—or the builders—construction—or the kitchen, we decide what could go wrong, and we put things in place to make sure everyone is safe as they can be. Why should a project like this be any different?

Now I look at things from the total flipside–what are the benefits of working in new ways? How does that outweigh the risks? If something does happen, then how do we just manage that risk? How can we think in new ways?

Here’s an example: We were in rehearsals for MOTION. In one section, the young guys were going to wear superhero costumes as a way to explore masculinity and what young boys learn at an early age. The head of operations was very opposed to that, allowing superhero suits into the prison. I asked him, “Okay, then talk me through why.” He said, “Because it’s civilian clothing; it’s a risk." And I said, “I can totally understand the security risk. However, do you not think our staff might notice if the Fighting Man or the Hulk or Captain America is trying to get out the front door?” And we laughed. And he said, “I see where you’re coming from.” And we made it happen.

At the end of the day, you've got to remember that a performing arts project is run really different from the culture of the prison. This way of working was new to staff within their usual responsibilities; some of these bridges hadn't been crossed before. There had been shows and events in the prison before but not quite in this way or to this scale, and we didn’t really know how to manage the conventions that came with it. We didn’t know how to navigate things like blackouts when you were doing a lighting plot or a backstage costume change. We had to develop new ways of working and make everyone comfortable with them.

Jess: It was a game changer when we started to collaborate on what we could achieve. I had done loads of prison projects before and was always met with, “No, you can’t possibly do that—this is a prison, remember?” When I worked with you, things started to shift.

I knew that this project was ambitious. We were making a show in a prison that people would pay to come and see. And it was going to be part of a national theatre festival. We wanted to raise the bar aesthetically and illustrate the value of the work of the young people and what they wanted to say. In previous prison theatre projects, I was never allowed a blackout or a costume change. Also, officers’ radios and alarms would be going off throughout because you know, security first. But you were like, “Actually, we can mitigate these risks and put other security measures in place. This a show. So, it would be kind of undermining if our radio goes off.” So, you made the staff in the theatre space take the batteries out of their radios, and you allowed a blackout and for the young people to change backstage. Honestly, I thought it was amazing.

I suppose in that sense you were trusting the young people to rise to the challenge, and they did. Because of that, they got more and more responsibility as the process progressed, and, of course, they flourished as a result.

I was then able to use it as a precedent for planning other prison arts projects to demonstrate that it can be possible to do things like apply professional theatre production processes, invite members of the public in as audience, and document a work properly. Because it’s about showing that we value the young people and their work. We see them as human beings; we believe in them. That shared humanity is so important to me.

And we also made decisions about the content of the show based on that idea. One of the first things that happens in the show is that the young people shake hands with members of the audience and look them directly in the eye. That was so the audience would recognize that the young people wanted to connect. We wanted to convey a message that we are all human beings, and we were breaking down the othering that happens when we view some people as “criminals.”

Jan: Back to Kathy, Mama Glo, and Ausettua in Louisiana.

Kathy Randels: Where does the notion of criminality come from? How has it gone hand in hand with systems of othering and separation, rather than seeing people who do harm and commit violence as having been victims of violence in the first place? We’ve just said, “You are a monster, and we will treat you like a monster.” Some incarcerated people say, “Fine, you wanna make me a monster, I will show you a monster!” And some, like Mama Glo, go on a long journey inside and find the depths of their own humanity, despite how we treat them. 

Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams: In 1971, I was involved in the taking of a life of a Caucasian man. The person who pulled the trigger, she said she did it! But it didn’t matter to the system who actually pulled the trigger but who’d been killed. I spent fifty-one years in prison for being there even though someone else pulled the trigger. After the person who actually did the shooting passed away in prison, I still remained there another twenty years. 

I was sentenced under the “10/6” practice, which means if you kept your nose clean, the Attorney General would decide if you would be released after ten years and six months. Rumor has it, the man who was killed was related to the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. So, it became a personal thing. Somebody had to be punished. One of the males involved worked for the governor—he only did sixteen years. There was all kinds of discrimination in the system. It doesn’t have to be color; the whole darn system need to be revamped. It’s who you know who gets the breaks. Same thing when you go up for a pardon—who has the influence in society, who writes the letter on your behalf. It took a village to free me, and they had to fight to get it done.

Kathy: The racism, sexism, and paternalism on Louisiana’s Pardon and Parole Board is appalling—they treat the grown adults who come up before them like eight-year-old children. Like Mama said about writing the right letter, who you know on the Pardon Board. Each Pardon Board member takes one case on as their own and brings it before the others. And it is so clear when the person has decided to lift up the incarcerated person they are standing for and when they have decided, “Oh, I’m not letting this person out. I’m going to make them look as bad as possible.” 

Jan: Here’s John and Saul.

John: When we attempt piecemeal change in a prison system, we’re completely forgetting the other parts that got them in there. There’s the social justice part, and then there’s the police part. Police have no idea how to interview the victims or the perps to get the whole story. A member of our company, Patrick Tidmarsh, went on to train police how to be human when they interview folk. So if you get the victim’s whole story, and the perpetrator’s whole story, and the prosecutors who instead of trying to win the case are focused on the whole story, including everything that goes into it, you get a completely different justice system than the one we’ve got right now that simply favors people with money and the notion of winning.

Do you remember the sexual assault on the counselor we knew? I was working in that prison in a little sort of island, surrounded by barbed wire. The horn went and I said to the prison officer, “What’s going on?” And he said, “All the men have to go to their bunks,” and I said, “What do we do?” And he said, “You have to wait till we figure out what’s going on.” At some point we found out that this counselor we knew was being held hostage. It didn’t look like the prison had much of a game plan. All the staff were being kept in the prison, which just intensified the grimness of it all. People were in shock, including me.

She'd been in there for hours and hours, and there were stories coming out, you didn't know if they were real. Gradually all the prisoners became enemies in the officers’ heads and in many of the therapists’ minds, too. Except the chief clinical psychologist—an astonishing, brilliant woman—who brought some of us back to thinking like human beings. She said, “Has anybody been around the men?” And everybody looked at her and said “What?” “Has anybody been around the men? They're gonna be shocked.” She went around the men, and the men were just as freaked out as the free people. Obviously, they knew her. They lived there. Some had been there twenty years. So the notion in all the staff’s minds about a hideous rape fantasy was not true. They were frightened. That experience marked me, burrowed down into me.

Saul Hewish: I was more affected by a guy who slashed his face after a project I did in prison some years later. It was one of those instances when I had a feeling about it–that something wasn’t right. I thought it was my fault in some way. The other men in the project told me it wasn’t. He was mentally ill and was asking for some additional meds, as was his right. But the staff refused and that was his response… How did you feel that assault on the counsellor affected you?

Especially for those of us working around issues, for instance, of sexual abuse, and particularly of children, we all experienced, as we listened to the men, a sort of projected ugliness, a patina that felt like slime. As if we were being covered in it. 

John: I think for years, given that we took a lot of risks to go to very protected but very dangerous places, that the balance between the danger and mostly being successful and feeling safe tilted a little after the assault. And moments in rehearsal or drama therapy sessions when the guys bared their teeth, so to speak, and threatened to come after you, added to the feelings about the assault and other scares I had had, and raised the levels of my internal anxiety. I mostly tried not to think about it. And we had our strategies for taking our minds off that part of the work.

You make me remember San Quentin. We were accompanied by an officer who was on some type of special detail. He was very laconic, but he was how we were gonna stay safe. We had a full company of actors. We were going to do a performance off the loading dock, for the prisoners in their cells, and some workshops. Then we were to go to the education building, which was just this dilapidated brick building. We did a workshop with the guys and decided that the theme was a cabaret, and then we went to eat.

We were eating in the joint. It was hamburgers. Not too good but free. We come back into the prison again, and the officer on the gate says, “Do you know that we use Western hostage rules?” I said, “No, what are they?” And he grins and says, “Goodbye!” I now know that Western hostage rules mean they don’t negotiate for hostages, and that always chills you just a little bit and sticks in your mind. 

So, we went back to finish off this workshop. It was really a throwaway workshop, a one-off. I decided that the theme for the cabaret was gonna be burgers. And so, the guys go off in small groups, try to work it out. One guy becomes the speaker and says, “Yeah, okay, man. So, here's what's going on.” And he said something that momentarily chilled me: “Wherever you look, there's body parts and blood.”  7:00 in the evening. We were on the sixth floor of an old brick building in a prison, and I had a bunch of young company members working with me. And he continues, “Then something happens, man. And all the body parts come together and make. . . Burger Queen!”  

And everyone laughed, relieved, and started creating the burger cabaret. We always said that if we were good for anything at all it was to give these guys a respite from the nightmare that prison really is. But our officer was gone, and I looked for him. And he wasn’t laughing. And he looked at me like he was really angry. I went up to him and said, “If we fucked up, you need to tell us whatever it is.” 

And he said, “No. I've worked here eight years. The reason why I wasn't walking around with you guys was because I've been on the tiers, and they’ve thrown bags of piss and shit in my eyes. And I been in the hospital, and they sent me up with you guys, and I didn't particularly want to do this thing at all. Then I watch what you're doing, and what makes me mad is they never told me that these guys could be like this.” I never forgot that prison officers could be reached. When you work closely with the men in prison, the excitement and details of the work make you forget the danger that is always underneath.

Saul: Some of the characters were more than dark—they did seriously horrendous things to other people. And a very few were very invested in what they did. When you had to act those people, it was difficult to not be touched by that darkness.

John: We called it “slimed.” If we are honestly talking about how the work affected us, and not just burbling on about how beautiful everyone was, is, then especially for those of us working around issues, for instance, of sexual abuse, and particularly of children, we all experienced, as we listened to the men, a sort of projected ugliness, a patina that felt like slime. As if we were being covered in it. 

So, here’s a story, one that has a touch of the slime but also a touch of the heroism, and maybe a way for people to see into how close to the edge we often were. So, we were working with a group of men, all of whom had been convicted of sex offenses, major sex offenses. We were trying to make little forays into reducing their shame. We were playing a game we called “Dirty Word Opera.” Everyone had to come up with a dirty word which would get used in an improvisation that had nothing to do with the meaning of the word, like hailing a taxi on the moon. For some men it’s really difficult. We came to this prolific offender and he had one word, and it was the way he said it: it was tongue. It was just one of those moments that seemed to add itself to my inner ugly suitcase. 

But the same time I had a guy who’d had sex with an animal. He couldn't understand why I was saying, “I want you to imagine it's sitting in the chair, and what I want you to do is to apologize to it.” Now, the same time there’s also a guy there, whenever any of the other guys were being questioned about anything at all, he thought that it was his job to jump into the trenches with him and try to stop it. And the therapist that we were working with kept saying, “Now you just leave John alone. He's got work to do.” He wanted to beat me up. Finally, the man really apologized to the imaginary sheep. And everybody, therapists and the men in treatment, experienced relief, excitement, and that thing that happens in theatre: a real catharsis. And though one hour before I was trying to slough off another slimed experience, an hour later I was flying, excited, delighted, proud of the men who I had worked with. 

Saul: And then we’d get off the road for a few weeks and fill up with some routine because we had to come down, cool down.

John: Oh yeah. Did we know that we were really just changing the tuning in our heads? Wow. Did we know that this was often because of the darkness that we would have to breathe? Don’t know—just remember we cleaned the house, then went to town and religiously ate bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon.

Saul: And puttered around the secondhand shops. Bought odd stuff–-you were buying old clocks. Then the Chinese meal and home to a movie.    

John: I don’t think we consciously realized what we were doing. It was routine to calm the inflammation. We saw, heard, experienced so much darkness!

Saul: When we tried to talk about these experiences in mental health conferences, they invalidated us! They’d say we were essentially frivolous, as if we wore bells on the ends of our trousers. That we had funny little tricks—referring to warm up games or role reversals, for example—or that we wore funny masks so we were close to just being clowns. And because we were clowns, that means that our techniques were fake, no matter what. Always at these conferences, when you and I would keynote, you could see the look they flashed because we said we were theatre persons. We were up against it all the time. It takes a toll. Makes you feel less than. That had an effect on us.

Jan: Here’s Alex and Kevin.

Alexander Anderson: I recall one session, you came in, and you were going through some personal, financial stuff. And it created something for people. I’m thinking of Dick, who said, “I don’t want to hear that shit from you!”

Kevin McCray: I remember.

Alex: Rafael told Dick, “You can’t talk like that, Dick. You need to shut up!” It got to the point where Rafael wanted to fight Dick. Why? What did Dick do other than feel something? Look, Dick sees you as a white man who’s supposed to have it together. And if you don’t have it together, that’s your business. Because he’s not together. The part I couldn’t understand was why Rafael and a couple of other people wanted to attack Dick. And I thought to myself, “Why? Why couldn’t he express himself and we just left it at that?” But it created such a conflict where everyone was telling Dick, “Leave this space. ‘Cause you’re doing… something.” To me, that was the heart of it. What was Dick doing that was so violating that even the Black folk wanted to violate or attack him? Was it because of Kevin, because they love Kevin so much? Or was it because of the dynamics? Malcolm called it the “house nigger” and the “field nigger,” you know? 

Kevin: Well, as painful as it is for me to dwell on that moment, let’s dig into it a bit.  I was in freefall, personally. I was in a very bad place. And looking back on it… I think I was trying to bridge a gap by kind of saying, “Look, I’m fucked up, too.” Maybe if I admit how fucked up I am and how bad things are, then I can—I don’t know. It wasn’t wanting to pretend I was something I wasn’t. In fact, it was the opposite. I think it was wanting to communicate that we’re not so different. “I’m a mess as well,” you know? On one level I do understand that it’s not the space for me to come in and cry tears about whatever’s going on for me. It’s just not appropriate. But I’d like to hear more about how you understood Dick’s reaction. 

Alex: The reaction isn’t intellectual or cognitive. It’s on a very deep emotional level. I guess Dick’s reaction was, ”You can’t be fucked up… because I’m fucked up. Because if you’re fucked up, then we’re all fucked up.”

Kevin: Wow. OK. I didn’t see that until just now, with you explaining it. I always thought the reaction was more: “Fuck you, privileged white guy; whatever your problems are, they’re nothing compared to what anyone in this room is dealing with.” 

Alex: Yeah, I don't think so. To me, that would be the intellectual, cognitive level. But I don’t see Dick seeing it on that level. I see him reacting to you… you were expressing your humanity.  

Kevin: I think that’s what I was trying to do. 

Alex: But for Black people, whites are like superhuman. You know? To hear a white person speak about their humanity and their vulnerability, I guess some Black people, on a certain level, can’t perceive that. If you’re conceiving white as being all right, all together, if you’re perceiving whiteness as being your teacher, your principal, everyone that’s above you, and if everyone that you need to sort of surrender to, is white… It impacts me as well. I refer again to Native Son. I see it all the time. Blacks are one way when they're amongst themselves and another way when they’re amongst whites.

When you and I came into the room together, I would let you do your thing, and I would just sit back. For example, I remember that I was to work with Shanae, Anita, and two other women. Shanae clearly said, “I don’t want to work with Alex. I want to work with Kevin.” And I wondered why. I was watching her struggle and watching you working with other people. Then at the end, after we did the performance and everything, she went around saying we caused her harm. She really bad-mouthed us. You know, I can’t get space at Fortune Society anymore. I can't get that relationship back because she told people how I harmed her. She never mentions you! And I never even worked with her!

Kevin: I remember. Shanae struggled to write her story, detailing ways she had been sexually and emotionally violated over the years. I encouraged her to edit it, and I did some cutting myself, but the result was still very explicit and raw. She was adamant about wanting to tell her story, but it was too much exposure to too many strangers, without enough support following the final ritual. I understand how Shanae could have felt exploited. The situation actually is my greatest shame and regret from all of the rituals I’ve been involved in. And right, Alex—you weren’t even involved at all.

One of the things that helps is being in the theatre space, where you can play out roles, right? So if this role doesn’t work, let’s try out this other role.

Alex: So that, the situation with Dick, my own feelings and what I was going through, was getting me into a space of… lessening myself. I was falling back on not wanting to cause people to leave the program. I decided to take the role of being quiet and let Kevin direct and let them get whatever they get from Kevin. But to myself I’m saying, “This is wrong; they shouldn’t be treating me like that,” that, in fact, I had more insight into things than Kevin because I come from that space that y’all are coming from. So, with the help of Kevin, I can help put it in a way that will relate to your own personal experience of being Black in this society. But if you think Kevin can give that to you better, then by all means, go ahead. But don’t hate me when it doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to, because that’s your choice.

I’ve found that going on in other spaces, too. It wasn't just something you did, like thinking, “I want to get closer to the group, I want to be human.” And at times, you needed it. I saw it. You needed the group to embrace you and tell you it was going to be alright. 

Kevin: I think maybe I can articulate it a little bit better now. I think speaking up that night was my attempt to flatten the hierarchy. What you’re saying is that screwed everything up. It screwed Dick up. I mean it’s very parental. And if the parent is out of control, what does that mean for the kid? That the kid’s not safe. You’re describing a very paternalistic dynamic that has existed—that still exists, I guess—between Black people and white people; if the master is saying, “I’m messed up,” then what does that mean for everybody else? But I think my intention was, if I’m just real about what’s going on, then we can stop having this “me on top” dynamic. We can see it more like we're working together. But it completely backfired.

Jan: Finn and I were going through changes as well.

Younger Jan: Finn could only allow himself to live if his life could manifest values antithetical to the act that now defined him. He found it in the vision of the collective house—a hunger for community, for a meaningful and good, altruistic life—which I shared with him. We nonetheless diverged in what we saw as the obstacles to attaining communion. Finn saw nearly everyone as only out to get their “endless needs” met. I’ve known many people who were at the same time committed to community and caught up with personal ambition and fulfilling individual desires.

Why, to Finn, was it so absolute, one or the other? I believed that cultural conditioning glorifying individual ambition was an obstacle to community but that the two impulses could and often did exist together in the same person, including me. The counterculture was important for giving people a context with other-than-mainstream values. Values are a soil, part of an ecosystem. It’s almost impossible to practice non-mainstream values without others who share them. My life has only confirmed that impression.

Kevin: Let’s talk about solutions. How do we change the perception of the white guy in charge that can happen when the white guy walks into the space? 

Alex: It is a very powerful dynamic. But I think one of the things that helps is being in the theatre space, where you can play out roles, right? So if this role doesn’t work, let’s try out this other role. And if this role doesn’t work, what about this role? People can’t take it personally because we’re just playing out roles and seeing which fits. What we actually did was an evolution, allowing the roles to change. I changed my role. Now that people see and interact with me in the role and get comfortable in it… it wouldn’t be a problem now because they’ve already experienced me in the role and we’ve calibrated to one another, in relationship. They’ve seen me as a… director.

Kevin: As a leader.

Alex: Right. And that wasn’t easy. That took getting rid of old ideas. I had to show how I am a leader. That’s the thing about walking into this theatre space with Black people—at least this particular population. You could just walk in and say, “Hi, my name is Dr. Kevin Bott.” And bam! They would give you the leadership. Doctor? Ok!  You know? But me, I have to step into the space. A lot of people don’t really get that I’m a social worker. I have to remind them, repeatedly. Like, “Don’t forget, I’m a social worker. I have insights about things y’all are going through based on that.” I had one guy ask me, “You have a Master’s in social work?” I said, “Yeah, why? What’s the problem?” And he said, “No, I just wanted to know.” I think that’s great. But it often isn’t enough for me to come in and say I’m the director of the program. I have to actually show them why I’m the director.

I wound up having to shape a lot of their pieces because they were struggling. They have a lot of trauma, and they don’t have experience dealing with it in healthy ways. And I say, “In this space, we’re using theatre to help us express something about ourselves to the community. This is about changing ourselves, developing ourselves, and healing.” The point is, I was able to earn that respect and recognition because people could say, “Ok, he’s in a space that we’re not used to and we’ve never been in before.” So they gave it to me.

If you walk into the space now, there really wouldn’t be any conflict like that. Because I’ve been able to do some teaching, some mentoring, calling people after rehearsals, uplifting, writing pieces for people, some poetry, and creating some stuff. That showed me in a light I needed them to see me in and helped me establish myself in the role I needed to be in for the process to be successful. And in my experience, a lot of Black men don’t trust that. They don't trust leadership or can’t accept leadership like that.

Kevin: Do you mean from another Black man? 

Alex: Right. You know, that alpha male bullshit gets in the way. “I’m better than you. You’re not better than me!” When we do this work again, we need to be changing roles, all the time. Until people get an understanding that we’re both the same. It comes back to this theatre space and the idea of changing roles.

Jan: So, all these workshops became spaces where we learned from each other. And we questioned how we’d seen things before. We didn’t always know the boundaries. Finn and I were ready to do anything the other asked of us, for better and, as you will hear, for worse. Tune in to Episode Seven: In the Name of Love.

The theme music you are hearing was composed by Sasha Paris-Carter.  The musicians are Daniel Knapp on cello, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, Joanna Lu on viola, Mary Knapp on accordion, and Rene Ferrer on bass guitar.

This is Jan, signing out.