The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation

by Lisa Biggs

Overview

Winner, 2023 NCA Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies

Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage, Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up “bad” women. Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions—theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest—enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. These case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists—some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society—radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women’s lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258569
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	12/16/2022
Series:	Black Performance and Cultural Criticism
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lisa Biggs is an actor, playwright, and the John Atwater and Diana Nelson Assistant Professor of the Arts and Africana Studies at Brown University.

Read an Excerpt

In this book, I document a history of the policing and punishment of Black women in the United States and offer five examples of how women who have been criminalized use theatrical events and everyday acts of Black expressive culture to redress interpersonal and institutional harm, a process that I call stage healing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2008 and 2018 with Demeter’s Daughters, the Big Water Women’s Prison Drama Club, the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women in South Africa, and Healing Justice Mamas, I argue that, under the guise of rehabilitative prison arts programming, these contemporary drama clubs use performance to investigate, disrupt, and transform prevailing discourses about women’s criminality. Instead of disciplining women to follow orders and adhere to dominant expectations regarding appropriate behavior, these community-engaged arts programs create opportunities for them to examine and to redress their experiences of racialized gender- and sexuality-based violence using original scenes, monologues, poetry, song, and dances that the women create and perform for audiences of other incarcerated women and correctional officials, and in some cases, for the general public. The productions, as well as the workshop and rehearsal processes that precede them, prepare women to advocate for and to enact new, fairer, most just, and more inclusive social policies and practices on both sides of the prison door. They do so because theater for incarcerated women is a vital site for healing, communal change, and cultural struggle, the combination of which is absolutely needed to end interpersonal and state violence and to meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable members of our society now.

...

There is no single or comprehensive history of incarcerated artists or organized formal arts programs for people behind bars in the age of mass incarceration (from around 1970 until the present time). Volunteer teaching artists who work behind bars often point to the September 1971 Attica, New York, men’s prison uprising as the catalyst for their work. The Attica Brothers’ outrage over the horrendous conditions of confinement and the violence they endured at the hands of racist staff members, when broadcast nationally on live television, moved many theater artists to consider teaching behind bars. In the last forty years, teachers, participants, and scholars of prison-based arts programs have documented their impact, writing in vivid detail about how their work breaks up deviant and destructive behavior patterns, teaches critical thinking and decision-making skills, and prepares incarcerated people to lead more productive lives in free society. Examples of such work span programs for adults and children in detention centers and jails as well as in minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security facilities, including segregated housing units (solitary confinement). The scholarship documents how important it is to carve out spaces for creative self-reflection and to build supportive communities regardless of how long a person has been or will be locked away.

Jonathan Shailor’s edited anthology, Performing New Lives: Prison Theater (2011), comes closest to presenting a history of the field in the era of mass incarceration, surveying fourteen programs across the US for adults and young people that teach a broad range of theater practices ranging from presenting works of Shakespeare and other classic plays to developing original scripts. Despite the uncertainty that attaches to almost any program designed to help incarcerated people, as in any good theater classroom the participants in the fourteen programs that Shailor features grow as artists through coursework. Actors’ sense of themselves physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually strengthens as they wrestle to unpack and then communicate the meaning of a text. They deepen their interpersonal and communication skills through scene and monologue work and take away a renewed sense of self-confidence, self-worth, and personal accomplishment from the process. These programs achieve these aims in spite of their surroundings, Shailor argues, by offering participants a space of sanctuary, where the “distractions and denigrations of the normal prison context are temporarily set aside.” Over time, as the prisoners continue to train as actors and begin to stage plays, the sanctuaries grow into what he calls crucibles of transformation, in which incarcerated people can develop “mature coping skills” such as “self-expression, listening, teamwork, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving.” Shailor states that these skills help people grow as individuals, build self-esteem and a capacity for empathy, and prepare them to navigate life in open society as moral citizens, thus reducing recidivism—a core concern of every corrections administrator.
 
 

Table of Contents

Introduction    Race, Gender, Crime, Performance

Chapter 1        “She Was No Rosa Parks”: A Black Women’s History of Mass Incarceration in the United States

Chapter 2        How to Stage Healing

Chapter 3        Bad Bad Bad Bad Bad Bad Woman: Making Theater in a Midwestern Jail

Chapter 4        The Pink Dress

Chapter 5        Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Medea Project in South Africa

Chapter 6        It Has Been My Healing to Tell the Dirty Truth

Conclusion      Beyond Incarceration

Editorial Reviews

"The Healing Stage makes the powerful claim that prison performance programs not only serve to enhance the self-worth of incarcerated women, but also provide a space for enacting worlds full of greater justice, collaboration, respect, and Freedom. Moving across disciplines and practices, Biggs unites disparate intellectual, artistic, and activist communities." —Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment

“Biggs’s writing comes alive in her case studies--especially in moments when her mixed participant/observational status leads to a confession of her own fears or deeper connections with the directors and the women participants.” —Rena Fraden, author of Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women and Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939

From the Publisher