Using puppet/object work to co-create a scene about solitary confinement.
For Broadway Advocacy Coalition’s Theater of Change course at Columbia Law School, I co-facilitated a theater piece with (not for) the brilliant organizers at #HALTSolitary who are fighting diligently to abolish solitary confinement (and mass incarceration) across New York State, Columbia Law School students, and theater artists to create a theater piece. Using devising techniques like puppetry and improv, we created vignettes about implementing solitary confinement for legislators in Albany and NYC DoCCS, as well as using legal research, trauma-informed interviewing, and powermapping to develop a rigorously researched engagement strategy for the piece. Most gratifying was our final vignette, where law students, advocates, and theatermakers alike toasted a future without solitary confinement and prisons.
