Rather than beginning with a script, devised theatre is built on improvisations with the performing ensemble—in our case, surrounding the archive: materials in UGA and Spelman’s collections, our embodied memories, and the original creative and scholarly writings of collaborating incarcerated students. When encountering archival materials, we played with them: singing them, dancing them, acting them out, curating them through performance, and expressing them with our bodies, voices, media, music, design elements and artistry. Through community-based theatre techniques, we worked to explore our own relationships to the stories and voices held in the archives, and aimed to break the “fourth wall” between the audience and performances, in order to invite audiences to make the story with us. We began the project through a series of courses in 2019 at both UGA and Spelman, including a Maymester course that brought the two groups together to devise a first version of the show. The show was then created in the Fall of 2019 on both campuses and through weekend rehearsals with the full inter-institutional team. We worked closely with the archivists at UGA Special Collections Library in order to give students and artists the opportunity create directly from the historical archives. A partnership with an organization teaching classes in area prisons enabled us to draw from contemporary writings by our incarcerated collaborators and to receive feedback from them on the performance video (which prompted us to make further changes). Inspired by the Hargrett Library’s exhibit, The New South and the New Slavery, Spelman and UGA students (along with students from Morehouse College and North Carolina A&T State University participating under the auspices of Spelman College) created an original performance piece exploring the history and legacy of incarcerated labor in Georgia. We worked with original archival material, creative writing from our incarcerated collaborators, and professional, Atlanta and Athens-based artists. As part of the project, UGA students developed and led an interactive theatre workshop with incarcerated students at a nearby women’s prison in October 2019. The workshop joined together the UGA class with a course for college credit offered by a community partner inside the prison, and provided an opportunity to consider gender in relation to American history and our daily lives. The UGA students practiced community-based theatre skills as facilitators, while the class inside the prison practiced the critical thinking and writing skills they were developing in their program. Together we explored history, scholarship, and our lived experience of gender from a performative angle. (Photographs of devising from the archives by Shannah Montgomery)
