The Caged Bird Sings: Conspire Theatre

This woman is an inmate at Travis County Jail out on the edge of Austin, participating in an exercise with Conspire Theatre. When encouraged to explore the room in which Conspire's four week program of community-building, storytelling, and movement exercises takes place, this multiple felon went straight for a cupboard that stood along one wall of the room. “I've been wanting to get inside that cupboard since the first time I saw it,” she said afterward. 

Texas is a state that loves tossing people in jail. We've got more than 150,000 people locked up and we're second only to Louisiana in percentage of population in jail. Here, 310 people sit on death row, including 10 women. There are more than 11,000 women in Texas jails. 

Austin-based Conspire has spent the last two years working with some of the female prisoners in Travis County Jail. The group is part of a four-week program of classes offered to women at the jail called PRIDE. The program is for minimum and medium security inmates who are mostly young parents, and is largely about skills that will help them after their release: parenting, job readiness, and the like. But Conspire Theatre's executive director, Katherine Craft, who worked with female prisoners in London while she was a graduate student there, wanted to offer something different. 

“People have a tendency to talk about giving [prisoners] something that they don't already have,” says Craft of this kind of creative work. This isn't Conspire's position, though. “What we do is create a space” where incarcerated women are free to lower their defenses and explore their emotions and bodies through creative exercises, she says. “They really feel like they own the class.” 

Now, after two years of successful work with minimum and medium security inmates, Conspire is planning to extend their offerings to the maximum security population. It's a need even fellow inmates recognized. “One of the women in our class told us she was upset that women in maximum security had no programming,” said Craft, whose mentors had encouraged her to “ask to reach the people they don't want you to reach.” So Conspire is campaigning for funds to fuel their expansion, via IndieGoGo, a crowdsourced fundraising site. They've met their initial goal ($3,000 to cover operating expenses through the end of 2011) but there are a few days left in their campaign.

 

Conspire Theatre from Katherine Craft on Vimeo.

Michelle Dahlenburg joined the program as a teaching artist this summer, and has already witnessed transformations in the women who work with Conspire. At the final performance of a 10-week project, she watched one woman arrange her classmates for a presentation of their writings. “She was the director,” Dahlenburg said, noting that even women who at first didn't want to read, in the end “were so proud to share the work.” The room filled up with laughter and excitement - not something many people picture when they think of jail. 

An expansion of service into the maximum security population at Travis County will make Conspire part of the PEACE program. Similar to PRIDE, this program focuses on skills for inmates who are facing much longer sentences, and who may never be released. Women explore how to be a good parent from prison, and learn anger management techniques. 

“In maximum security, we're going to have a more consistent group,” says Dahlenburg, citing the fact that women in their current program are more likely to be transferred to another jail, or released, while the program is running. “We can really do community building,” she says. “We can focus on longer-term projects. But we'll have to learn it as we go.” 

The struggle for arts funding is becoming more difficult all the time, and what Conspire do probably isn't as universally popular as, say, children's theater. But their work arises from a desire to create a place where prisoners have a little bit of time to “step outside that hard persona” many have assumed, says Craft. “Letting them take that off” is a goal of their work, and it works: as one participant told Craft, “I can feel myself getting softer.” 

In the long term, Conspire want to find a way to continue services after their participants are released from jail. “We want to create a community on the outside,” said Craft, and they also would like to forge partnerships with other prison-based services, and expand in to other prisons, even just a few times a year. A former inmate who worked with Conspire is blogging about her experiences on the group's website. Craft feels that this is good evidence that, although the impact of work like Conspire's is hard to quantify, it's there. 

If you're friends with musicians, theater folk, inventors, your eyes probably automatically roll back into your skull every time you see a new digital plea for cash on your social network. But when was the last time you saw a call for something as unselfish as this? Conspire's initial goal was to raise enough to cover expenses through the end of year. Check out Conspire's campaign site, watch the video, and decide for yourself.