About this project
Staging Justice: Documenting Histories and Investigating Interdisciplinarity in the work of Rideout
Sarah Bartley’s AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (ECR) Staging Justice: Documenting Histories and Investigating Interdisciplinarity in the work of Rideout is a two-year project, which critically explores the landscape of theatre practices in the criminal legal system in the UK, paying particular attention to the work of Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation). Since their founding, Rideout has maintained a unique focus on interdisciplinarity, exploring how performance can interact with other fields (music, dance, psychology, and architecture) to reflect on prison contexts and expand public understandings of justice. Given the cultural, social, and critical complexity of carceral sites, this fellowship investigates the potential of Rideout’s interdisciplinary practice as a model that enables engagement with divergent and shifting prison ecologies.
More broadly, the histories and distinctive creative practices of prison arts organisations in the UK are at risk of being lost if they are not documented. Theatre in prison practices are acutely transient, as the implicit ephemerality of performance is coupled with opaque systems of incarceration and a politically charged reticence of the prison service to publicise arts practices that take place in prisons. Rideout is one of a set of pioneering UK arts and criminal justice organisations established in the eighties and nineties that are still led by a founding member. Over the next decade many of these founders are likely to retire, prompting a seismic shift in arts criminal justice practice in the UK as a change of leadership at these foundational organisations, or their potential closure, alters the landscape of the sector. During this fellowship, Bartley will specifically focus on Rideout in order to develop research strategies that attend to this imminent period of change and address the potential erasure of particularly distinctive prison arts that accompany it.
The primary aims of this fellowship are to reorient research and practice agendas to:
- Explore the political and aesthetic value of interdisciplinarity for attending to the multiplicity of prison sites and experiences of incarceration;
- Investigate the complexities of, and propose specific approaches to, archiving the work of prison arts organisation at a time when there is a urgent need to record the histories of established arts and criminal justice companies in the UK.
The project will deploy several methodological approaches through various collaborative activities. Interviews with the Rideout team, board members, artists and participants who have worked with the company, and other practitioners working in arts and criminal justice will create an oral history of Rideout. A collaboration with the University of Bristol Theatre Collection will create a publicly accessible archive of the company’s work which will be drawn on for this research. Three interdisciplinary Creative Residencies will be coordinated in collaboration with Rideout at partner prisons to explore how interdisciplinary approaches operate in their work. These residencies will be documented ethnographically in order to critically interrogate this model of creative practice. Finally, a practice-as-research approach will be taken to conduct a series of research-informed theatre workshops, delivered in collaboration with Rideout, for people with experience of incarceration to devise a performance that draws on key scholarly texts on justice and punishment.