With our students and collaborators, we created By Our Hands, a play that invites audiences to witness the stories of incarcerated, racialized, and unpaid labor in Georgia across more than a century: from the construction of the Southern railroads, the 13th amendment of the U.S. constitution, and the Black Codes to contemporary stories of family separation and experiences of time. Each scene draws from archival documents or contemporary writings by our incarcerated collaborators, always using verbatim text (with some original transitional writing by our script supervisors, Angela Hall and Philip Brankin) and theatrical metaphor and choreography to bring the stories to audiences. The "Bones" characters are the ancestors and the keepers of history, while "Joker" addresses the audience directly, inviting them in to the histories. An excerpt from a documentary about the project, prepared by Kimberly Binns, offers a terrific window into the project overall by combining performance footage, rehearsal footage, and interviews with the students.
