A Culture of Possibility Podcast #40, James Thompson on Theater in Prisons, Conflict Zones, and Places of Care

NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 40th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 17 May 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.

James Thompson has a been on a long journey that he sometimes characterizes as “10 years in prisons, 15 years in war zones, and my current work is around care.” I like the way he sees that as a logical progression “because in all the work on care I found a language saying, Where is the love in the work? If you start from care, you find this extraordinary register of what humans can do for each other.” It’s an inspiring and thought-provoking story. Please tune in and listen.

James is a Professor of Drama, focusing on applied drama, at the University of Manchester in England. You can learn more about his many publications and research projects here. François and James met in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s. It was a 2021 essay entitled “To Applied Theatre, with Love,” that appeared in The Drama Review that drew our attention and inspired us to invite James to the podcast. It turns on James’ experiences in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2011 (part of the In Place of War project), and reaches far into reasons to do the work and to do it with love.

James explained that he started his work “in the 1990s, running an organization here in Manchester, UK, which was called the Theater in Prisons and Probation Center. So I started my life working in prisons in the UK, primarily, but then also in prisons in Brazil, in partnership with both a colleague, Paul Heritage, and also what was then Augusto Boal and the Center for Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. But actually prison is probably the second point for me, because I started off as a sort of agitational propaganda theater-maker in the late 80s, committed to as much social change as I could muster with a with a guitar and a few friends. Having been doing lots of street theater work, campaigning theater work, I got an invitation to a prison. And it was going into a prison where I suddenly thought, ‘Well, all this rhetoric that we have familiar to a certain type of left arts politics of the late 80s In the UK was suddenly thrown on its head as you were pushed into a room full of perhaps the most diverse community of individuals in terms of class, racially, at the time in the UK.’ I suddenly felt ‘Well, this is actually the work that I claimed I was doing before, but never really was.'”

We asked James to describe the next part of his trajectory.

“I’d been working on violence in prisons and with young people who had convictions of violence or are affected by violence. Around 2000, I was invited by UNICEF to go and work in northern Sri Lanka, in the middle of the civil war zone, with communities affected by violence, particularly using theatre for young people affected by the violence of that civil war. I was invited to run workshops training artists how to use theatre to work with young people. They invited me as an international partly because of the sensitivities of the war zone. They didn’t want a southern Sinhalese person, because the only Sinhalese people there were with the army on the streets. They didn’t want a Tamil person because there was internal Tamil politics which might have caused problems. So they invited me somewhat falsely as some sort of neutral outsider.

“One of the things that was remarkable for me about that trip is that everything I’d read about Northern Sri Lanka had suggested that it was in the middle of a terrible civil war and the arts had been destroyed and were very weak because of the situation. I was invited by the local drama department at the local university, the 10, 20 or so children’s theatre companies, the local playwrights, poets, artmakers, and there was this vibrant, extraordinary, artistic kind of particularly theatre-making community, and an astounding children’s theatre movement in that community. I thought, I’m interested as a practitioner, but what was remarkable is the fact that in the middle of this war zone, where you might assume that people have stopped making art—because literally the bombs, the room was shaking as the work was being done—but people are going ‘No, no, no, we still want to make theater.’ My tendency is run away, and their tendency was ‘We’re doing Julius Caesar, how can you find a toga?’ So this got me interested: surely what we need to do here is to document the work that these people are doing, to share this rich, extraordinary work that was happening, and ask the question why is it happening? Why do human communities still continue to make art in the most extraordinary environments? In a sense, that question propelled me for 15 years of work.”

The podcast features a very interesting exploration of that question as James experienced it in many places around the world. He touches on a range of priorities, from commemorative and memorial work to creating safe space for children to work advocating for human rights and political campaigning work.

“There is something about people continuing to make art that asserts themselves as fully human,” James said. “The famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—people would see you go to a war zone, but surely they need food and water, then they need shelter, and then they need this… On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s got self-actualization at the top and art goes there. People assume you can’t do that until everything else is sorted. What turns that on its head is people going ‘Don’t talk to me about food and the trains and stuff like that. Can we not sing a song?’ Because somehow actually making art was often one of the first things people wanted to do.”

James’ essay “To Applied Theatre, with Love” describes three shifts in his own relationship to applied theater work, all of which are discussed in this episode. All are powerful, but for me, talking about the role of love was especially engaging. It starts with the loss of a beloved colleague during James’ work in eastern Congo, and the feeling that he’d “fallen out of love with the work I was doing, lost some sense of connection to it, commitment to it, or love for it. I didn’t know quite why I was doing it anymore.” This loss catalyzed his thinking about the transition from naive enthusiasm to critique to a sort of distanced measuring of impact, all of which magnify the ability to find fault, and made him want to regain the ability to see what is wonderful about this committed amazing work.

We talk about the role of academia in these attitudes, and how much development work succumbs to the lack expressed in a proverb James shared: “The donkey rider doesn’t feel the heat of the ground. Development work,” James said, “has a lot of donkey riders who turn up to help communities, but feeling the heat of the ground is about knowledge and about understanding that knowledge comes from different places. Feeling the heat is also a sensory activity. It has warmth, it has something of your body…. Maybe it’s not as simple as saying put the body back in, but something about holding onto that sensory richness of this work, complexity, naivety, ambivalence of it, the mess of it because resolving into neat codes of practice and professional criteria doesn’t necessarily make it better practice.”

This is one of the most thoughtful and nuanced episodes we’ve shared. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did!

Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.”

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