|
|
Rehabilitation Through the Arts was founded in 1996 by Katharine Vockins, a volunteer community leader, as an extension of Prison Communities International. After working in the prison ministry program at Sing Sing with her husband, Pastor Han Hallundbaek, Vockins became curious about the imaginations, the life stories, and the creative voices of inmates. She formed RTA as an attempt to compensate for the government’s 1994 slashing of Pell grants for higher education in prisons. Wanting to explore the possibility of creating an outlet for the inmates to express themselves, Vockins sought to share her experience as an actress and stage manager in various community theatres and went about implementing the prison theatre program.4 Shortly after forming RTA she enlisted the assistance of Lorraine Moller, then a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre Studies at New York University, who became the program’s artistic director for the next several years while Vockins served as the program facilitator, or executive producer.
The participants meet with the staff and guest artists twice a week, for two-hour long workshops and classes. These sessions help the men work on their skills in writing, reading, and public speaking. The classes also teach the inmates acting, directing, stage management, and set design. The classes are used to begin to develop poetry or short plays, helping the men to “learn to communicate a compelling story fully and clearly through the structure of a play, or the freedom of poetry.”5 The larger goal, though is to help them create their own works: to tell their own personal stories in a fully realized aesthetic composition. Original plays—either one-acts or full—lengths—are created in the workshops, which are then presented to the prison population and a small selection of invited guests in the form of full productions. The program then enters its next phase: over a course of four or five months, the plays are then rehearsed. The original two-hour allotted session is gradually expanded, until the final week before the show’s opening, during which the ensemble meets six times a week.6