Silent partners: actor and audience in Geese Theatre's Journey Woman

Abstract

This essay considers the performance context and aesthetics of Journey Woman, a play devised to initiate a week-long rehabilitative groupwork programme for female prisoners. Although Geese Theatre UK are one of the country's longest-established companies specialising in drama work within the criminal justice sector, this 2006 piece is their first created specifically for female audiences. The essay explores the rationale behind Geese's key aesthetic choices for the piece – including the performers' use of full face masks and the essentially Aristotelian, ‘tragic’ structure of the narrative. These choices distinguish Journey Woman from much of the company's other work, and function to establish a quiet, contemplative mode of spectatorial engagement. With reference to critical sources ranging from Rancière to criminological desistance literature, ‘Silent Partners’ argues that Journey Woman's unorthodox aesthetic approach is well-tailored to its target audience. In so doing, the essay also raises wider questions about the ways in which, and degrees to which, applied theatre practitioners seek to render their audiences as ‘active’ participants in the performance process.

Keywords:

• prison theatre
• Geese Theatre
• mask performance
• applied theatre aesthetics

Notes

1. This and subsequent quotations from Watson are taken from an interview conducted at Geese's Birmingham offices, 29 August 2009. Watson has been a member of the Geese company since 1997, and artistic director since 2003.

2. For example, I have previously discussed the intentional use of non-charismatic, automaton-like approaches to performance in relation to another, very different theatrical menagerie – the Chicago-based, avant-garde ensemble Goat Island (see Bottoms and Goulish 2007).

3. The performers that day (to whom I am very grateful) were Katie Claff, Adrian Dakers, Lousie Heywood, Jon Watson, and Kerrie Frances Williamson. Fostan Hall is a ‘closed category’ women's prison (in the UK, women's prisons are categorised as closed, semi-open or open, according to the level of security in operation), with a ‘Certified Normal Accommodation’ of 283.

4. This and subsequent quotations from Heywood are from the interview at Geese's offices, 29 August 2009. Heywood has been a member of the Geese company since 1991, and is its longest-serving current member.

5. See Baim, Brookes, and Mountford (2002, 194–6); also Thompson (1998, 115). Geese's second full-mask piece was Open Your Eyes (2002): commissioned by the British Council in Bulgaria, it was designed to explore the dangers of people-trafficking from Eastern to Western Europe.

6. This has also been the case with other organisations working in this sector – as for example in the case of the Manchester-based TIPP Centre (Theatre in Prisons and Probation) adapting its Blagg! Programme for women's prisons (see Thompson 1998, 43–62). Conversely, Clean Brean Theatre Company was founded by female prisoners at HMP Askham Grange in 1979: work with and about women has remained its core remit ever since.

7. There is also evidence to suggest that, for many, desistance is less a conscious choice than an in-built consequence of structural life changes such as growing older, forming stable relationships, getting a stable job, etc. (For an overview of these arguments see Bottoms et al. 2004, 371–6.)

8. Text transcribed from DVD documentation of Journey Woman (courtesy of Geese Theatre UK).