The performance drew about 90 people on both Friday and Saturday to see the show, which starred inmates, Dartmouth undergraduate students and two professors. Participants of the program have been meeting weekly since the beginning of the term, and the show was the final artistic display of their collective work.
"Telling Stories for Social Change" is a class taught this term by Hernandez and Spanish and Portuguese professor Francine A'ness, combining theory and practice to teach students about the prison system in the United States, according to Hernandez. It serves as one component of Hernandez's non-profit organization called "Telling My Story," which provides a platform to allow the voices of marginalized groups of people to be heard, she said.
"I strongly believe that every single person has a voice, and a lot of people are not being heard," Hernandez said. "A lot of people are socially invisible, and that social invisibility can take us to a very unhealthy social place and social dynamic."
The inmates built a cardboard wall as the backdrop for their performance, which featured the title of the show and on which a variety of themes and emotions were written in graffiti letters. In addition to words such as "mother" and "stress," the wall also included "711" and "420," references to heaven and marijuana, significant to the inmates as code terms often used by cops. The set itself demonstrated the program's facilitation of self-expression even before the start of the show.
The performance began with the cast drumming on white industrial-sized buckets, interspersed with questions to the audience such as, "What is acceptance?" and, "Is it worth trying to change society?" After the musical introduction, the cast broke up into different skits based on eight words four negative and four positive that the group had chosen in the weeks leading up to the performance. These words, which included justice, anger, companionship, loyalty, loneliness, fear, hope and guilt, were written on pieces of cardboard, and one member carried them across the stage throughout the performance. The last segment of the show was the performance of an original song, titled "Runaway," written by an inmate and sung together with Emma Orme '15 and Reese Ramponi '13.
"There were a lot of similarities between the students' words and the inmates' words, so I think the first step was to see that we care about a lot of the same things," Orme said. "So we're on the same page to begin with, and then we asked questions that are kind of unanswerable."
"Pros and Convicts" ended with 30-second testimonials from the individuals involved in the performance, both students and inmates. Many students discussed the effect that "Telling Stories for Social Change" had on them. Some inmates chose to focus on different subjects that are important to them, including marriage, vulnerability and relationships.
The skits all told stories about jail and the justice system, which ranged from a party drug-bust scene to two inmates simply conversing in their cell. One of the more powerful skits was an abstract phone call scene, which started off with interspersed conversations occurring on stage together but transitioned to overlapping dialogue and repeated apologies. The scene ended with two participants saying, "Please forgive me," followed by, "We're way past forgiveness it's time to move on," which in turn was followed by silence.
The program focuses more on the process of opening dialogue and putting together the production than on the actual final performance, according to Ali Oberg '13, who took the class in the fall. "Telling My Story" allows the inmates' to tell their stories from their own perspectives rather than the students' interpretations, she said.
"I think that the experience of collaborating in a competitive world is really healthy," Hernandez said. "I strongly believe that collaboration takes me and any individual farther than competition."
It was clear from the show that all of the participants had to open themselves up and learn to be vulnerable throughout the process, which was exactly Hernandez's goal. The inmates exposed both their fears and wishes in the final production through their acting, conveying the truth behind what it is really like to be incarcerated.
"I strongly believe in getting lost, which is not necessarily what people like," Hernandez said. "I believe in the acknowledgement and the providing of the time and space for mistakes, for doubt, for questioning, for vulnerability and it's not an emotional state at all. It's just a process."
Ramponi is a member of The Dartmouth Staff.
