Abstract Imprisoned at the end of Shakespeare’s play that bears his name, Richard II ruminates on his incarceration:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world,
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
In the end, Richard concludes:
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears.
"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me," sets the tone for the summation of Richard’s exploration. He recognizes the irony of his situation: when he was king, he was careless with his time and responsibilities. Now that he is powerless and imprisoned, time is "wasting" (consuming) him through the slow, agonizing pace of his confinement.
Finally, Richard transforms himself into a living, breathing "numb’ring clock" (a counting clock). He breaks down the mechanics of time-keeping into his own physical and emotional experiences:
While a normal clock is a tool of order, Richard’s internal clock is one of pure sorrow.
Not unlike Richard, Kenneth Brown, a founding member of the Phoenix Players, a theatre group of incarcerated men at Auburn Correctional Facility, created and performed a piece in MAXIMUM WILL, a 2012 performance that took place in Auburn in 2012. The parallels are evident:
What should one do while enclosed in three
walls of steel?
Frozen by time in a youthful body as the soul
grows old.
A maturity seen through the catacomb of the
mind.
Restricting the human nature within one’s heart
…
To lose the ability to choose
To lose the ones you love
To lose one’s self in a distance from the world.
— ”Frozen in Time” by Kenneth (Kahlid) Brown
(Phoenix Players Theatre Group, 2012)
Culturally, in our modern carceral state, we mostly have one story of the incarcerated, reinforced by texts and images that deal in a concrete way with who inhabits our prisons and why they are there. And those who are incarcerated have a reductive image of themselves, reinforced by labels and the very environment into which they are confined.
This talk explores the way a single story traps the incarcerated individual in a traumatic environment while at the same time, that same story is employed to reinforce the necessity of the carceral state in the public’s mind.
Through a very briefly gesture to the ontology of space and our reliance on “concrete knowledge” that limits our perceptions, this talk takes a deeper dive into storytelling, transformation and the Phoenix Players Theatre Group at Auburn Correction facility, and, by so doing, suggests ways and methods to create alternative stories about prisons and those who are confined in them. Finally, the talk makes the claim that artistic practices in prisons are fundamental to altering the narrative that most incarcerated individuals internalize during their incarceration.
Bio Dr. Levitt has been a Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University since 1986. Professor Levitt has had a distinguished career as a freelance director in New York and regionally. Professor Levitt teaches classes on the carceral system, including Cages and Creativity: The Arts in Incarceration and Prison Theatre. His other courses include a seminar on HAMLET, a Shakespeare survey course: Shakespeare in (Con)text and a course on stand-up comedy: Funny business; the Political, Social & Cultural Importance of Stand-up Comedy. In addition, he has taught various levels of acting classes, solo performance, directing, and new script development. He is one of the faculty coordinators for the Cornell Justice, Education, and Prison (CJEP) minor housed in the Government Department.
Lunch will be served. Please RSVP.
