Women who have served time in Canadian prisons are imagining more hopeful futures and reclaiming a sense of joy through a restorative art-making program co-led by filmmaker and York University Professor Brenda Longfellow.
The Circle Project, created in 2019 by Longfellow, from the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, and Vancouver-based restorative justice advocate Brenda Morrison, brings together artists and formerly incarcerated women to produce art in a variety of mediums that is then featured in public venues to help change public perceptions about incarcerated and criminalized people.
So far, the women have shared their stories in an interactive documentary that grew out of a storytelling circle, and danced near a sacred burial ground in Vancouver’s Cates Park in theatrical masks they helped design. Others struck poses from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in hair, makeup and costume as part of a tableau vivant.
The tableau vivant, translated as living pictures, made its debut at Simon Fraser University as part of a public talk on prison abolition, before moving on to exhibitions at festivals, the Audain Museum in Whistler and galleries in Kingston, Peterborough and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. Videos of the projects are also posted for viewing on The Circle Project’s website.
“Corrections Canada or the prison system defines people in relationship to the event that put people there,” says Longfellow, a professor in York’s Department of Cinema & Media Arts. “But we're welcoming them as themselves in the present moment. We welcome their curiosity. We welcome their openness to engagement.”
Participants in the program have mostly been women, and often Indigenous women, who are disproportionately represented in the justice system. But more recently The Circle Project has been expanded to include men currently serving time in Victoria’s William Head Correctional Institution.
The minimum-security prison is home to William Head on Stage (WHoS), the longest-running prison theatre company, which has staged a public theatrical performance each fall since 1981. The Circle Project is collaborating with WHoS to co-create a video installation inspired by the theatrical traditions of Italy’s commedia dell’arte that will be filmed inside the institution and feature a dozen performers in full costume, wig and makeup.
“I was able to go into some of the workshops and the men there talk about how it's the one place where they feel their humanity,” Longfellow says. “In the institution they’re administered, they're regulated, they're told when to get up, when to have breakfast, when to go to work and school, or court. But when they come into the theater space, they can be something else, and so they rediscover their sense of humanity.”
Although she doesn’t use the statistic herself, Longfellow points to Corrections Canada data indicating the rate of recidivism for people involved in these kind of productions is zero. “They’re transformed in some ways,” she says. “Play is therapeutic.”
Longfellow and Morrison, who is director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at Simon Fraser University and an associate professor in the School of Criminology there, are also seeking to change public attitudes toward people who have been involved in the criminal justice system.
“The tradition in society is to cast people who are incarcerated as 'other;' they are criminals, they are 'the bad people,'” Longfellow says. “So part of our work is to create an emotional connection and have these people thought about as human beings with complicated histories.”
In The Circle, a documentation of a storytelling circle held in Vancouver, Natasha Warren said she never expected to go to prison.
“I don’t think many people do,” she told the camera. “But I am proof that it can happen to anyone. People don’t really realize that – you’re one mistake away from where we all have been.”
Visit The Circle Project online for more.