Common Space in Prison
From the 1st of June 2023 the two teams joined together and the sessions were conducted with the extended team of young inmates and students/prospective teachers who worked intensively for several weeks in order to devise, rehearse and perform a participatory theatre performance for an audience consisting of the rest of the inmates, the prison’s administration and a few guests. At the same time, this participatory theatre workshop was designed and implemented so as to promote language and mathematics literacies. In this report, 10 of these sessions will be presented and discussed, selected to reflect all the successive phases of this participatory theatre project, from the beginning of the collaboration to its culmination to a performance at the end of the academic year. The goal is to present the steps and the actions as they were implemented and each led to a following stage, in order to describe the process through its main milestones and key events.
01
1st Workshop
01/06/2023
In the first meeting with the students and young inmates we mainly focused on encouraging all members of both groups to get to know each other and gradually nurture a space of acceptance and free expression for all participants. We played ‘warm up’ and ‘getting to know each other’ games and used music and dance to create a positive and welcoming environment in a rather ‘unfriendly’ space like what initially seemed to be the young offenders’ prison school. The next step was to invite the inmates to use the interview guide we had worked on during the previous weeks and invite them to use it in order to get to know the students and ‘break the ice’ among the two groups. This allowed us to explore the linguistic repertoires and linguistic biographies as they were shared among the members of the team. Translation was needed throughout the session and we covered this need by asking participants from both groups to assist and use any language spoken by the group i.e. turkish, arabic, greek, english, languages spoken by inmates and some of the students. We used this practice of collective translation in all the following sessions.
02
2nd Workshop
13/06/2023
After meeting with all the students in the first two sessions with the inmates (5-6 students/prospective teachers joined each session) the group continued working on team building and encouraging trust and acceptance among the participants. In the following sessions we practised exercises and games to strengthen the team and gradually started working on theatre improvisations, body movement and rhythm, communication and expression. These activities helped to encourage language skills development such as production and comprehension of spoken language. We also implemented activities based on rhythm and introduced activities about division and fractions so as to promote understanding of basic mathematics notions and operations.
03
3rd Workshop
03/07/2023
The team consisting of the young inmates and the students started exploring terms relevant with the theatrical practice such as the theatrical play/script, the scenes and the acts, improvisations and rehearsals, roles and chorus, stage and backstage, aiming to enhance comprehension of spoken and written language. Some participants had never been to the theatre, however, they all wanted to get involved and act; therefore, the need to become familiar with the terms and acquire a common ‘language’ emerged at this stage. Translation and body language helped to ensure common understandings of the terms and the steps we were about to start taking. Moreover, we continued working on activities relating to maths such as division, fractions and percentages.
04
4th Workshop
06/07/2023
As the team was about to start working on a participatory theatre performance we encouraged all the members to think and decide on what each one wanted to talk about. What were the subjects that concerned them, what message did they want to send to their audience, which ideas were they interested to explore through theatre practices and how could we all choose the starting point in order to build a performance which would reflect everyone’s thoughts and include everyone’s voice. These questions were answered in this and the following sessions through brainstorming and dialogue in which the team discovered that there were several topics and notions that concerned everyone. This group of activities encouraged intercultural dialogue and the development of intercultural awareness amongst participants. Moreover, during this process, we used mathematics activities based on understanding totals and subtotals in order to help participants understand and visualise the outcomes of the brainstorming.
05
5th Workshop
10/07/2023
At this point the group had decided that the topics they wanted to talk about in this theatrical attempt were friendship, family, justice, love, freedom and time as well as the lack of it. Using brainstorming and creative writing games the group moved on to devise a story, a script which would include these notions but would also be funny, interesting, meaningful and futuristic. We ‘borrowed’ some elements from the play ‘Momo’ by Michael Ende which were introduced by one of the educators-researchers and the group agreed to use them to form the basic storyline but also enrich and alter them with their own ideas. The basic roles of the play emerged in this session: the protagonist would be a young girl ‘the little one’ and her friends while the threat or the enemy of this group would be ‘the robots’. These activities nurtured intercultural dialogue and communication within the group and further promoted the production and comprehension of spoken and written language.
06
6th Workshop
17/07/2023
During this session we started working on the plot of our story and how this would be narrated through the different scenes-episodes. We discussed the first couple of scenes that expose the basic characters and the relationships between them as well as the danger they were about to face: a group of robots that wanted to take over the world and steal everyone’s time in order to become stronger. Together with the plot we worked on improvisations so that the participants would explore the characters they were going to play, their movement, voice and behaviour. In this phase we ensured that everyone’s ideas would be tried out and incorporated to the maximum and we found several ways to include elements from the diverse cultural backgrounds of the participants such as music and dance, food, different languages with simultaneous translation. At this stage participatory theatre was used as a tool to promote teamwork, collaboration and the production of narrative texts.
07
7th Workshop
18/07/2023
We continued working on the structure of the play, writing the last scenes and the play’s finale. At the same time, we tried to develop the physical movement of some of the characters, mainly the robots, since their presence would be rather dominant in the play and therefore, their movement had to be quite particular and distinct. The robot scene was based on the mathematics activities we practised earlier therefore, we devised this scene applying members’ acquired knowledge of time and its divisions. Time and its passing played a key role in the play; it was a theme introduced by some of the young inmates and was extensively explored during the rehearsals. At this stage the team started to rehearse the scenes, playing each scene again and again and discussing the scene in between, so as to improve the acting and the rhythm in each scene and make them more natural, funny and convincing. We also started the discussion about costumes, set and props which would necessarily be rather minimal since not many things would be allowed by the prison setting. Everything would be created by the group, therefore, we would only use the necessary objects and minimal setting, while the actors would borrow clothes from each other to create the costume for each role. Participants were interacting with each other within a safe space of democratic, equal participation and co-creation.
08
8th Workshop
20/07/2023
As the date of the performance approached the rehearsals became more and more frequent and intense. We would visit the prison almost every day with some or all the students and we would also meet outside the prison for extra rehearsals with the students. The participants were excited with the process, as they shared that they were helping each other to memorise their lines and practise their movements and the songs. In every session the team suggested new ways to improve the performance and it was amazing to see how everyone became more and more interested in giving the best possible show. Team members in each session were exploring what is funnier, what is more interesting for the audience, how loud should the voices be, etc. The group worked in a very efficient way while all the suggestions and ideas were heard and usually included. At the same time, a new feature emerged; that of ‘saving our partner on stage’. This means that all the members are ready at all times to ‘save’ their co-star in case they are stuck or cannot remember what to say next. This practice of solidarity and mutual responsibility develops within the theatrical practice and is valued among the participants as it strengthens their relationships and the devotion to a common goal.
09
9th Workshop
24/07/2023
This session took place in the large function room where the performance would take place and was what a typical theatre group would call ‘the general rehearsal’. It was noticeable that almost everyone, including the educators-researchers were excited and also quite stressed. The group had this only chance to try out the stage and practise the performance in the actual space where it was going to be presented in a couple of days. Everyone was very focused and efficient; solutions were found, participants were helping each other with movements or set changes and our anticipation grew for the big day. For some moments, everyone’s common concern was to do our best, to give a good show, to share what they had been working on for weeks with the audience and do it in the best possible way…
10
10th Workshop
26/07/2023
The day of the performance was there, so was everyone, dressed in their best clothes, smiling and a bit anxious. We worked on a couple of exercises to reduce stress and unwind and took a few minutes to help each other to relax, remind them that everyone was there to cover any mistake, and that eventually, mistakes do not matter that much, it was our journey that we all valued and enjoyed. The play started after a while and was very well performed, with a lot of energy and smiles, a few mistakes that no one noticed and exemplary collaboration among the team members. The sense of accomplishment at the end of the show was evident and celebrated vividly by all participants and members of the audience after the end of the performance, with a party in which all of us danced and had fun, valued our common experiences and renewed the promise for many more creative experiences to follow. It was an opportunity for getting together, interacting with the audience and celebrating multiculturalism, recognition, acceptance and artistic creation.