UnDoing Time: The Medea Project for Incarcerated Women as Social Activism
Dedicated to Joan Little and Many other Sisters "Locked Up"
"…we have had to look from the outside
to make sense of a world that has not endeavored
to include us among its intellectuals."
-Elizabeth Alexander
"Let us not forget to remember that
the struggle continues for all of us."
-Rhodessa Jones
Come Into the Sun, a coalition dedicated to delinquency prevention, reports that between 1970 and 1990 the number of women offenders increased 896 percent from 588 to 5, 858 (Fraden 123). Additionally, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children reports that although black women comprise 7 percent of California's population they constitute 34.1 percent of the prison population, with Hispanic women following at 22.7 percent (124). In "Imagining Medea", Rena Fraden documents the nine-year journey of the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women. Fraden includes interviews, photographs and analysis of the successes and challenges the Medea Project encountered as the project gained momentum within the prison system.
Angela Y. Davis, Berkley scholar and noted prison industrial complex abolitionist, writes in the forward to "Imaging Medea", "One of the important contributions of the Medea Project has been to demystify the relationship between crime and punishment. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause of expanding prison populations has been widely contested" (xi). The statistics fail to present the social factors such as drug addiction, racism, domestic violence and poverty that heavily skew these numbers. In the following excerpt from "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women", Mama Pearl reveals why she began engaging in illegal behavior. "I got three daughters. My older daughter was born deaf and dumb. She's the reason I went to jail in the first place. You see, I embezzled some money from the company that I was working at so my daughter could get special training so that she could take care of herself, despite her handicap" (Elam 369). This monologue illustrates the choices some mothers are forced make to support their children. The staggering figures, along with Davis' thoughts and Mama Pearl's scenario, suggest the overarching sociopolitical issues affecting how and why women go to prison and speak to failed rehabilitation programs and high levels of recidivism within the California Department of Corrections.
Rhodessa Jones created the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women after the California Department of Corrections hired her to teach aerobics. The project incorporates physical theater, writing, dance, and healing modalities to "explore whether an arts-based approach [to rehabilitation] could help reduce the number of women returning to jail" (culturalodyssey.org/medea/). "The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman in the theater workshop, who was incarcerated for infanticide, was ostracized and taunted by other inmates. [I] told the women the story of Medea and Jason and asked the group to interpret it in relationship to their own lives, to consider ways in which they were like Medea, but also different," says Jones (Warner, 484). The Medea Project staged "Big Butt Girls, Hard-headed Women, Buried Fire, Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead, and Reality Is Just Outside the Window during her tenure at the San Francisco County Jail. Jones' project, subversive in creation and application, high-jacks the space of the prison industrial complex and provides a venue for women to actively engage in narratives around their incarcerations.
Beginning in 1987, Jones facilitated workshops on Wednesdays with the women. She began with twelve women who were assigned to her aerobics class. Soon, her enrollment ballooned to over fifty women once the word spread that there was a place women could heal and rehabilitate themselves through acting. The project provided time and space for the women to meditate, through the practice of performance, on the complex social factors involved in their individual journeys to jail. Jones, a trained actress, dancer, and choreographer, noticed immediately that the women desired a space to express what court systems, lovers, and family members refused to hear. Her process shows physical activity as an extension of language, and language as an extension of the body. Harry Elam notes,
"The correlation between "aerobics" and "Big Butt Girls" is not ironic nor trivial, but purposeful. Aerobics hones and shapes the body. The use and abuse of women's bodies is the center of Jones' performance piece as well. Jones reveals the pressures, constraints, degradations, and exploitations enacted on and against the bodies of these "Big Butt Girls" and "Hard-Headed Women" by their society, their lovers, their families, and even themselves" (10).
Elam's idea speaks to what Teresa Ralli teaches in her Voice of the Body workshop at Casa de Yuyachkani in Lima. In this workshop, Ralli leads participants through a series of yogic breaths and asanas, modern, improvisational and experimental dance movements to free the voice from certain blocked spaces in the body. Her workshop teaches participants about the intimate connection the body and the voice share and reveals a process of healing that happens when the voice is freed from the body. Ralli insists participants move like poetry, like water, free from silence's viscous restraints.
The inaugural production of the Medea Project, titled Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women "explores an underclass of women who are intentionally silenced and ostracized by the systems of power" (Elam 9). Ralli's workshop enlivens the chakras from the deep dark spaces of the root chakra to the bright spaces of the crown chakra to dislodge the voice locked inside the body. In one session, Ralli led participants through a series of vocal exercises. The call and response exercise included a series of whispers, chants, shouts, screams, and various other exclamations. During the session, several participants incorporated rhythmic hand drumming and stomping to express what the voice could not but the body could. At some point, each participant's body and voice were tuned, which tuned the voices and bodies for the entire group. Not only did each individual body and voice make music, but the entire community harmoniously connected and functioned as a cohesive entity. By exploring the sound of the spirit inside each body, each participant unravels an instinctual voice that allows the individual to listen, reinvent and revise the narratives that create the soundtrack to their personal triumphs and traumas.
The project serves as a site for exploring alternative rehabilitation modalities. Jones utilizes Brechtian and Boal methodology as well as critical ethnographic practices as espoused by Dwight Conquregood and D. Soyini Madison to engender personal narrative, thoughtful interaction, and shifts in consciousness that leave lasting impressions on those women who share these experiences. Fraden offers, "This is a case study that describes how the Medea Project creates and alternative, sometimes oppositional space, and how it reshapes theoretical and practical boundaries that mark off the aesthetic, commercial, political, moral, personal, and religious realms we inhabit at present, evaluating which methods work best at creating more permeable boundaries" (xv). Fraden's ideas speak to what she, Jones, and Davis express as the knowledge that much work has to be done to alter the lives of these women or the prison system. Her ideas illuminate the importance of teaching and rehearsing a practice that could work one woman at a time to create a massive restructuring of the prison industrial complex and possibly other institutions as well.
Jones' project uses one of the few resources afforded to women in prison. A resource even the prison can not arrest to critique women's imprisonment. Time is a major resource in prison. Sorrentina, one of the characters in "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" exposes what doing time does to the body as she undergoes a detoxification program in solitary confinement.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The lord be with thee.
Blessed are the fruit of thy womb.
J e s u s.
Holy Mary, mother of God.
Pray for us sinners now,
And in the hour of our death.
I'm so damn tired. I'm tired of being sick and tired. She's fucking dogmeat, man. Just one little shot. This bitch, snitches at Work Furlough. She was getting stoned, too. Piss in a cup. Piss on your family, okay. Fuck you. Count time, my ass. When will this shit end? This is the longest nightmare I have ever had.
During a brief stint as a GED instructor in a male medium security prison I learned the value of time and how time is practiced. I watched men watch the clock, ask each other about what time it was, and ask each other about how much time they had. Some of the men talked about "filling" time with reading, or completing puzzles, or various nefarious activities, but time was always a topic of conversation. Perhaps, the men where attempting to "grasp" time, to "retain" some semblance of time and their power over it. They counted minutes to lunch time. They counted days to canteen visits. They counted weeks between visits and letters to hold onto their relationship with those on the outside. I learned about how time orients society and how this orientation impacts the prison as a microcosm of society. I learned that several of my students worried if they didn't see me walking across "the yard" at a certain time every morning. They thought up all kinds of scenarios from sicknesses, to car wrecks. A few even thought that I may have been searched and detained for drug smuggling one morning. The point is time in prison creates positionality to the others "locked up", to the self, and those on the outside. Relationships are heavily affected by time. Some of the men were broken by how much time they had and felt they could never do or perform all of their time. While others, with lighter sentences, moved as if they were on vacation at a resort. Those men most always earned their GED's, increased their technical skills and stayed out of trouble. They did time, instead of allowing time to do them. Wherever one is situated in society, time is a resource and a commodity that institutions within society want to benefit from. Money is made based on time and bodies. The men talked about choosing GED courses over the road squad because they refused to let the prison make money off their labor or time. They chose GED courses because they felt they would reap the benefits of education before the prison system and in that way they resisted the prisons construction of time and labor.
The Medea Project performs a similar resistance as practiced by the men a Warren Correctional in northern North Carolina. Fraden writes, "In other words, as women's presence behind the walls continues to grow, so does their performance of the invisible labor summoned by the expanding prison population as a whole" (xi). The Medea Project serves as a model and a practice for returning the fruits of incarcerated women's labor back to those women. So much focus is placed on what inmates will do after they are released from prison, but very little attention is placed on the road to prison. It is almost as if the prison system resets time at one's admittance. But time is multi-directional and the project unravels it. In essence, Jones instructs the women on how to steal time from the jails, how to bend time to their benefit instead of letting time defeat them. This project absolutely is about destabilizing time as a method of psychically, emotionally, and spiritually escaping prison. The Medea Project serves as a site for what Angela Davis calls "theorizing on the ground" about how best to equip women with the tools needed to create their own relationships with time (past tense, present, and future) and space while matriculating through the prison system and beyond.
It is also important to spend some time thinking about what cultural business radical theatre practice accomplishes in space of the prison. Specifically, how do these virtuosic bodies and voices, occupying multiple spaces and times, under Jones' direction and tutelage circumvent the prison space? Moreover, how do the women's voices and bodies along with stealing back time, also steal the prison's space. We can think about how the women steal their bodies back from society and the prison through performance. We should also think about how the women take up prison space with their voice and performance. A large part of the performance of the prison industrial complex continues the dehumanizing social practices women experience on the outside. This practice of alienation dismantles relationships women have with themselves and other women. The destruction of these relationships possibly prohibit women from recognizing how their individual struggles comprise a larger tapestry of experiences that effect the majority of incarcerated women.
Birthing these personal narratives begins to address the stigmatism associated with women offenders and the traumas the share. Through activating the voice of the body, the space of the body transforms but also the space of the prison changes as well. Jones believes "through love, through the power of the ancestors, through the linkage of past to present and future, a body can "catch a body". The needless loss of black lives to the prison system can be overcome through collective consciousness and the formation and assertion of community" (10). Jones identifies the development of a community as a foundational and fundamental step in her process with the women. Fraden includes photographs of correctional officers smiling as they observe the women's rehearsal process. She also describes one moment when she observed one of the women's inmate identification bracelets as the performed at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. Both of these incidents illustrate how the space of the prison was altered by the Medea Project. Unfortunately, the prison system is large enough to hold multiple narratives and the participants in the Medea Project maps another narrative onto the space of the prison.
Thiong'o's article, Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space, asks us to consider the politics of geography, "open space", "openness", "territorial space" along side issues of body, movement in postcolonial Kenya. I agree with Thiong'o's assertion that the tug-of-war occurring between the artist and the state is a power struggle in which both parties seek leverage over space and also seek to perform autonomy. Through examining the personal agency of bodies in space, or restrictions thereof, we examine the states colonial/postcolonial practices of domination, oppression, and censorship which seek to squelch community performances of resistance. Taking a cue from Thiong'o, I wonder how the Medea Project pushes the limits of the function of the prison space. Certainly, the prison is not a space for artistic training or the site of major
rehabilitation. However, we should consider the potential of the performance space that no longer serves as a site of prescribed action.
Jones reveals that "benign neglect and blind rage" make the women's problems
"too immense and too great". She says, "But I was raised in a family by a mother and a father who taught me that when you're called to something too great, too immense, you can always take it to God. Now the African in my American teaches me to take is to the Ancestors" (374). Here the Jones articulates a poetics of presence that challenges spatial frontiers. The preceding quote conceptualizes a framework, a set of tools that extends back and into the future, and is all-encompassing like faith and belief in the in the omnipresent strength and fortitude of a trans-national family. It may be helpful to read Thiong'o ideas about re-scripting space along side Jones' work. Both projects seek to replace the narrative of space created by the ruling power structure with that of the marginalized population. Their projects "fill in the gaps" as Suzan-Lori Parks describes in
an interview with Shelby Jiggetts in Callaloo Journal.
Elam notes, "She challenges audience members to recognize their personal connections to these women. "Who are these women? She's your mama. She's your lover. That women who is gonna carry your child." Jones points out that the system of crime and punishment touches all our lives and that we all have a responsibility to act for social change."(10) Jones' work urges us to reach past our comfortable or uncomfortable positions to recognize how we are all implicated in the phenomenon of the prison industrial complex. Jones writes, "In jail. A black woman artist, working in jail. I look out at all those faces. There's my mother's face, my sister's face, and my daughter's face. And I'm wondering how in the hell did they get here in the first place. And I realize that it is but for a flip of fate that it could be me in here and she out there" (367).
Fraden includes a monologue from Slouching Towards Armageddon that works to vaporize these boundaries. She writes, "A white prisoner, Angela Wilson (Confusion), delivers a piece that speaks about her frustration with landing in jail. Wilson describes her rage at finding herself in jail as a kind of second jail, her "own personal lockup." She recognizes, as the monologue progresses, that she is responsible for herself: A killer I've allowed myself to be—of me. Here, all locked up in this place. Heart, mind, body, and soul, all agree, we can't wait, to be set free, of this prejudice against—me." Wilson describes a prison not comprised of brick and mortar but prison as an experience or set of experiences, an embodied prison she "can't wait to be free of". This monologue highlights the psychic "lock up" women can experience on "the inside" or in society. In this sense, prison is an invisible state of being that affects and is affected by a series of personal and
social events. Again, Jones' turns the spotlight on the audience members and calls for everyone in the room to participate in the work of imagining their own prisons. In an odd and uncomfortable way, Jones builds a community in the safe space of the theatre that diffuses notions of identity and space through the performance of private narratives in public. Again she reiterates, we are all involved and implicated in the stark increase in women going to prison and living on "lock down".
This monologue alongside Jones' dramaturgical practice of conflating classical mythic texts and street language or aerobics and theatre therapy builds on a larger legacy of black women's cultural practices of healing around the kitchen table or on the front porch. Jones' project destabilizes the canon and allows diverse voices to express similar issues that take place in classical texts. In this respect, we maybe able to read Jones' work, in part, as a project against genre. Elizabeth Alexander talks about reading as a poet in her most recent collection of essays Power and Possibility.
I assume I have always "read as a poet," which is to say, there are various shapes of poetic argument in prose. Reading as an African-American woman intellectual poet? Reading, as my lodestar Audre Lorde would have it, with all of my selves active and present and vigilant and alive. The great utility
of so much black feminist theory was the guiding truism that black women have blazed alternative routes to making sense of the world, that regardless of our differing circumstances, we have had to look from the outside to make sense of a world that has not endeavored to include us among its intellectuals. Alexander reminds us how poetry, specifically black women's poetry, conceives alternate configurations for black women in this world. Alexander's ideas engender thoughts about the social and political work theatre must accomplish for black women. It must create new avenues, wide enough for black women to walk down. It must allow for our full citizenship in the world. It must be a space where we can explore the totality of our being. Her ideas in some ways, talk about poetry more as an interwoven series understandings and performances that are larger than genre.
Actually, her ideas refute genre as Suzan-Lori Parks performs in her anti-genre essay "New Black Math". A project that challenges the silence and the disease resulting from traumatic life styles and the trauma of the prison industrial complex cannot be bound by genre. It would be a re-manifestation of the restrictions placed on them by society and the prison system. Possibly, we could understand Jones' work as one to dismantle the prison industrial complex but also we would think about it as one that dismantles the prisons that stratify communities of women, that render us unrecognizable by our sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends locked up, locked down, or locked away. We are all co-participants in this madness called a world.
One performance of "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" is performed as a one-woman show in which Jones performs the poems, stories, and monologues written
with Regina Brown, Mama Pearl, Lena Sorrentina and Doris to reveal the porosity of identity. Jones transitions between the four characters and herself as the artist, diminishing the frontiers separating women by infusing one narrative into another. She embodies and performs the question that creates the working hypothesis of the Medea Project: Can a body catch a body? The choreographed falls and recoveries, swirls and facial manipulations show a merging of bodies and narratives that make each individual story a part of a larger healing narrative.
Sara L. Warner writes about her experiences observing the process in her essay "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". In one of the sessions she observed, the incarcerated women demanded to know more about Jones and the other facilitators. Warner writes, "I soon learned that what separated the women on the outside from the women on the inside was for the most part circumstantial. The volunteers' histories were similar, if not the same, as the women in orange: sexual abuse, foster care, drug addiction, domestic violence, and poverty (489). Jones requires that the participants are honest with themselves and with the group. In order for her to require this, she must also practice full disclosure. Her honesty shows the women that there are other choices for the same circumstances. In what is commonly referred to in southern black communities as a "come to Jesus" session, everyone reveals who they are and relationships can be built on equal solid footing by all the participants.
The violence of the prison industrial complex insists on the hierarchical construction of power and domination that systematically marginalize oppressed women. While Jones' project makes this crystal clear to Medea Project participants, she also makes them aware that the prisons are not only at fault. The project emphasizes the amount of women who are trapped by circumstance or limited opportunities for advancement. Jones makes it apparent that at any point in time anyone could be backed against the wall and may end up sitting right where the participants are sitting. In an NPR interview she talks about how art has made the difference between her and some of the women "locked up" in the San Francisco County Jail. Lesley Yalen and Cynthia Cohen make known in "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work" that, "Arts and culture are important means through which people and communities come to understand, express, and communicate their ideas, emotions, needs, hopes, concerns, and memories". I agree. Art elicits a process by which we can bring memories from the corners, from the forgotten spaces of the past to the present. But that process extends past the present, it must. Artistic and cultural practices also serve as tuning devices. Tuning individuals into themselves and their communities. Just as two drummers will eventually breath in unison, it is possible that a community that creates art together will eventually be tuned into each others needs and desires for social and civic movement.
Bibliography
Alexander, Elizabeth. Power & Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Cultural Oddyssey. http://www.culturalodyssey.org.
El Grupo Yuyachkani. http://www.yuyachkani.org.
Elam, Harry and Alexander, Robert, eds. Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. New York: Penguin Group, 1996.
Fraden, Rena. Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones & Theater for Incarcerated Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
National Public Radio. "Medea Project Brings Hope to Incarcerated Women". Oct. 2007. www.npr.org.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. "New Black Math". Theatre Journal 57:4. December 2005. pp. 578- 583.
Thiong'o, Ngugi. "Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space". TDR. Vol. 41, no. 3. Autumn, 1997. pp. 11-30. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Warner, Sara. "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". Feminist Studies, no. 2. Summer 2004
Yalen, Lesley and Cohen, Cynthia. "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work". Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work: Focus on Coexistence and the Arts. July 2007.
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