Prison theatre and the right to look

ABSTRACT

The Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG) was founded in 2009 by incarcerated men at the Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York. This article explores PPTG’s work using Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) theory of the ‘right to look’ in order to understand how prison theatre functions within and against the visual regime of carcerality. This article describes how PPTG employs non-traditional performance perspectives drawn from rasaesthetics to visualise and re-make the outside world while simultaneously working against the ‘panoptic’ regime of Western theatre to create a different kind of seeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison theatre
• visuality
• rasaboxes
• incarceration
• community-based performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to drawing on previously published text and media, in December 2019 the authors of this article spoke with current members of PPTG about the topic of the visual life of the prison, and collected written commentary from the group in the form of a questionnaire. On this form, group members were invited to voluntarily provide answers to questions such as ‘How would you describe the visual life of the prison?’ and ‘Are there ways to increase or decrease visibility?’ Members of PPTG were not asked to engage with Mirzoeff’s theory, but were explicitly told how their responses would be used. The members of PPTG included in the article have agreed to be named and have granted permission to the authors to share their commentary and writing. For the most part we will use real first names, which is a convention to which PPTG members have agreed. The prison administration does not oversee the writings that come from our sessions, whether they are creative or scholarly.

2 Once again, this formulation recalls Rancière, especially as he theorises the function of politics in distinction from the police: ‘Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ … into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. It consists in refiguring the space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it’ (37). The space of prison theatre might therefore also be considered a space for politics within the prison.

3 According to Minnick and Cole, there are nine basic rasas with corresponding emotions: ‘sringara (love, the erotic), raudra (rage), karuna (grief, but also pity or compassion), bhayanaka (fear), bibhatsa (disgust), vira (courage, virility), hasya (laughter, ridicule), adbhuta (wonderment, surprise), and santa (bliss, peace)’ (216).

4 Literary historian Caleb Smith (2009, 6) calls this narrative of resurrection the ‘poetics of the penitentiary’, which he identifies as one of the USA’s founding political myths.

5 This site archives performance photos and video, as well as text written by PPTG, including scripts and personal essays: http://phoenixplayersatauburn.com. Much of the research in this article was collected from previous performances or writings published on this site.

6 This quote comes from an interview shot for the documentary film about PPTG, Human Again. One of the authors, Bruce Levitt, was also the producer for this film. The interview is not included in the final cut of the film, but is in the authors’ possession. All participants in the film signed a form granting permission for the use of the footage.

 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Fesette

Nicholas Fesette is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Oxford College of Emory University. His current book project examines the prison state as a performing structure that continually re-stages race and class oppression.

Bruce Levitt

Bruce Levitt is a professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. For 10 years Levitt has assisted the Phoenix Players Theatre Group in their training and devising six original pieces that the group has performed for invited audiences. Levitt was the inaugural recipient of Cornell’s Engaged Scholar Prize.

Jayme Kilburn

Jayme Kilburn is a Doctoral Candidate at Cornell University. Her dissertation, Facilitauteur: Agency, Ethics, and Feminist Ideologies in the Rehearsal Room, sits at the centre of a changing directing discipline in which educators and practitioners are coming together to create ethical methodologies for working with actors.