The Laminated Woman

So I've been volunteering with a family learning programme at HMP Holloway in Resettlement every couple of weeks.  Yesterday, I was there assisting the women in making books for their kids, nieces, nephews...

They had started them the previous week (I hadn't been there) and so this time some of the women arrived with things they'd prepared during the week to laminate in this session. As the children of these women are of mixed ages and interests, there was a mixture of educational books; simple alphabet, counting and vocabulary books decorated with pictures of characters from kids TV. One woman had, with her nail scissors, painstakingly cut out and stuck down dozens of tiny shapes for counting. Others had opted for kind of memory books for their kids; they had brought photographs of memorable outings or school pictures, favourite places, treasured holidays and had stuck them on paper and written captions. One YO (who was serving a sentence for her involvement in the August riots) made a gorgeous wee book of things that she likes to do for her son and things she'd like to do in the future, stories, drawings, puzzles and illustrations.  She was extremely careful to make sure that all the spellings were correct (continuously asking me to confirm what she already knew, but hey) and had clearly put a lot of thought into it.

Another woman had prepared material for THREE books during the week in her cell and was keen to have it all laminated. She was quite determined and slightly manic in her insistance on laminating anything that wasn't nailed down. Unfortunately, due to funding constraints the number of laminating pouches was limited and so it was necessary to ask her to edit a bit.  She mainly wanted to protect the pictures of her two kids, so I began to fit them into pouches: (something you might not know about me, but in my former life as an English Language teacher, I was obsessed with lamination, so at this point I was in heaven!) What was really interesting was the feeling of people desperately trying to be on their best behaviour. This woman I sensed would, in a different situation, have kicked off at not being allowed to laminate everything she wanted and yet here she was clearly aware of being seen to be reasonable and cooperative. She even offered to ask her Mum to take some pouches from her work (in the NHS) to reimburse us next time: robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of defeated the object, so it was declined in the genuinely giving spirit it which it was offered! Despite her best efforts, she was easily frustrated by things which presented even the slightest difficulty and so I had to give her a lot of support. She wanted to make a mood calendar but couldn't concentrate long enough to make sure that the grid had even spaces.  She was on the verge of giving up, so I sat with her and showed her how to measure it with a ruler and divide the rows and columns of the grid evenly.  She kept saying how grateful she was to my colleague that we come to the prison and provide this opportunity for the women to do things for their kids.  No doubt she is grateful, as they all are: for women, incarceration hits hard. Many of the women I have met through these afternoon sessions are in the process of having their kids adopted, at best they are being cared for by a grandparent and on rare occasions, their father. One woman who put her head through the door to see what we were doing, said that she has grandchildren who have never seen her and so signed up for a later date. Having a space where they can come and make things for the important kids in their lives and, more significantly, talk about them, is extremely powerful considering that for most of the women, being able to be with their children is the only thing that is driving them forward to get out of prison and on the straight and narrow.

The woman with the three books had made a mistake: she had had me laminate a page which she hadn't meant to so that her child could write the answers in. Although I was secretly happy that we would save on laminating pouches if she wanted to go this way, I pointed out to her that actually this was better as her child could write things in the gaps and then wipe them away. The woman thought about this for a while and a little later, she said, "Oh!  I get you now! Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant, but he can wipe it off if he makes a mistake."  She seemed really pleased with this idea and it only struck me why later that evening: everything underneath remains protected, but you can wipe the slate clean. You make a mistake and you wipe it clean. 

His Teeth

Continuing on my prison related theatre theme, last night I went to see His Teeth from creative arts company, Only Connect.  I am quite familiar with Only Connect as an organisation because I wrote a case study about their work in the resettlement and rehabilitation of ex-offenders for my dissertation.  However, I had never actually seen a full production by them.

His Teeth, written by Ben Musgrove, is inspired by the stories of Only Connect member Ralph Ojotu and tells the tale of a young man, Eric (Kareem Dauda) who comes to the UK illegally from Lagos, only to find himself under the control of human traffickers Roger (Dymond Allen) and Derek (Junior 'Mila' Miller).  Unable to run because of his illegal status, Eric finds himself minding trafficked children and is irresistibly drawn to drug addict Sarah (Eleanor Wyld).  Unfortunately for Eric, Sarah also happens to be Derek's girlfriend and when they finally do manage to run away together, Derek brutally murders (by decapitation) a young boy who was in Eric's care, thus framing Eric for the murder. The plot is complicated by a sub-plot involving the police officer (Harry Raffety) who becomes obsessed with not only catching Eric, but also with Sarah. A confident Harry Raffety handles his character's slightly bizarre progression very convincingly, but despite this, the narrative is often confusing and would possibly have benefitted from further dramaturgical work.

However, Designer Takis' gauze box, inside which the majority of the action takes place and the projection work of Mic Pool, leads us on an atmospheric journey from the jungles of Nigeria, to the council estates of London and are used to great effect to suggest the paranoid and drug-addled mental states of the characters.  Having said that, the gauze box at times was limiting as it meant that often the characters appeared to be in 'soft-focus', which was appropriate sometimes, but I personally would have liked to have been able to see the often nuanced performances of the actors.

Which brings me to the real revelation of the piece: the cast.  The majority of the actors are ex-offenders or at least have a some point been at risk of offending and similarly they have had no or little theatrical training prior to joining O.C.  Only Connect prides itself on producing professional standard theatre (as it's ticket prices will attest!) and certainly the production values here would not have looked out of place in any mid-scale theatre.  Often I suspect people are generally kinder when critiquing theatre staged with non-actors and this practice is open to debate when paying audiences are involved, but certainly these actors could hold their own with any seasoned professional.  While one must give great credit to Director, Maggie Norris for coaxing such detailed work out of her inexperienced cast, Kareem Dauda in particular, brought such vulnerability and poignancy to the role of Eric and, as the central character, he held the play together with great aplomb. Dauda is due to start professional training in the new year and despite his hang-doggedness about the lack of agents willing to come and see an ex-offender during our conversation after the show, I have no doubt that he has a good chance of being able to secure more paid acting work in the future.

Think Tank, New Philanthropy Capital recently published their research into the economic value of the arts in the criminal justice system and coincidentally use Only Connect as a case study in this report. There has also been much general discussion about the economic value of the arts in our society of late, however, much of this discussion, I feel misses the point.  Yes, there are transferable skills to be gained through participation in the arts which will improve people's chances of employment or, in the case of offenders, reduce the economic consequences of crime by reducing re-offending.  However, the focus on the economic is only half the story.  The sense of achievement to be gained from taking a bow at the end of a performance or seeing your artwork exhibited or your writing published cannot be measured in economic terms, especially when one considers that 42% of male prisoners (52% for young offenders) were permanently excluded from school (Prison Reform Trust 2011:54) and that only one in five are able to complete a job application form (ibid.).  If you have already been failed or betrayed by the mainstream avenues to becoming a functioning member of society, these not insignificant moments of victory can be a powerful catalyst to change, after all, many prisoners haven't even been particularly successful in crime or they wouldn't be in custody in the first place!

Director, Chris Johnston (of Rideout, Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) writes excellently about the 'easy dreaming' (Johnston in Balfour 2004:107-122) of the offender which often involves fantastical, but poorly thought through solutions to problems.  He goes on to say 'the act of dreaming is a kind of self-hypnosis in which unsustainable aspirations are buckled on like the armour of ancient warriors' (ibid.)  This dreaming, whilst often being compensatory and escapist, is of course a product of incredible imaginative powers and it is these imaginative powers which, when channelled in a more structured way, can allow the opportunity for participants in arts projects to explore these poorly written personal narratives, articulate the inarticulable and begin to imagine new personal narratives or at least entertain the possibility of their existence.

In the case of His Teeth, and also of Unprovoked (see previous blog post) for Ojotu, Foley and the actors, being given the opportunity to tell these stories, has, no doubt in their own ways, been transformative for the tellers and for the audience a chance to consider what one's own narrative might have been in similar circumstances. While everyone will take something different from stories such as these, one cannot put a price on these experiences.  As Einstein once said 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.'*

*Thanks to whoever it was at the recent Anne Peaker Debate who expressed something similar!