Prison Performing Arts is a seventeen-year-old, multi-discipline, literacy and performing arts program that serves incarcerated adults and children -- at St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center, City Workhouse, City Justice Center, County Jail, Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, Northeastern Correctional Center (NECC) in Bowling Green, MO and Women's Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center (WERDCC) in Vandalia, MO.
MISSION
Prison Performing Arts is dedicated to enriching the lives of adults and young people in the Missouri criminal and juvenile justice systems. We foster individual and social change by providing current and former inmates opportunities to participate in the performing arts as artists, students and audience members.
PRISON PERFORMING ARTS and IRA GLASS In August 2002, This American Life, with host Ira Glass dedicated the entire hour to following the Prison Performing Arts' production of Act V of Shakespeare's Hamlet being performed by incarcerated men at the Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green.This episode is an audience favorite that is frequently re-aired.
ABOUT PRISON PERFORMING ARTS
Prison Performing Arts (PPA) promotes learning through the arts, channeling creative energies in constructive ways and using the arts to provide an environment for self-discipline, commitment and teamwork.
Prison Performing Arts uses the arts to help inmates learn the life skills that prepare them to become productive, creative, and law-abiding citizens. Prison Performing Arts is the only organization in Missouri with the specific mission of creating and presenting performing arts in correctional institutions. Over 80% of the people incarcerated in Missouri will be returning to our communities; PPA uses the performing arts to help prepare them for that transition.
Current activities include: The Theatre Project, Learning Through the Arts,Arts Alive!,Vacation Arts, and Shakespeare at Hogan Street.
The Theatre Projects The Theatre Projects are long-term projects of workshops, rehearsals and live performances of classic plays. Each of the three projects involves ten to twenty-five inmates as performers, designers, and technicians.
PPA Artistic Director Agnes Wilcox directs at Bowling Green and Vandalia. Participants who qualify can earn two college credits each semester through Fontbonne University in St. Louis. At these prisons, this is the only college credit program available to inmates.
Hundreds of prison inmates, prison staff, inmate families and outside guests will see the performances inside the institutions. Adult inmates in The Theatre Projects are from Missouri or committed crimes in Missouri. They are serving sentences ranging from three year-terms to life sentences. Some of them have a long history of incarceration. Participants range in age from 18-60, over 50% are African-American, and their educational backgrounds range from a third-grade education to a Ph.D.
Arts Alive! Arts Alive! creates partnerships with performing artists in the St. Louis region to provide professional performances of music, dance, opera, and theatre to the youth at St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center and Hogan Street Regional Youth Center. The youth work with a volunteer docent prior to each performance so they are better prepared for the performance experience.
Learning Through the Arts Learning Through the Arts provides year-round after-school and weekend performing arts classes to the youth at St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center (JDC). Classes include acting/improvisation, Afro-Caribbean dance, and Capoeira.
Classes are designed to help incarcerated youth learn life skills: focus and concentration, impulse control, cooperation and collaboration, commitment and responsibility.
Vacation Arts Vacation Arts provides intensive performance arts programming – classes, performances, and workshops – during school vacations at JDC, with the goal of having each young person in the institution spend every day of vacation in constructive, creative activities. The Hip-Hop Poetry Project, a Spring Break Vacation Arts program, conducts literacy-oriented Hip-Hop poetry workshops with detained youth, their parents, and teachers in JDC's onsite public school. The student poetry is shared through a concluding performance, CD, and poetry anthology. Other programs include the Prison Performing Arts’ Youth Choir and classes in West African dance and drumming.
Shakespeare at Hogan Street Shakespeare on Hogan Street provides a unique Shakespeare curriculum to youth at the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, a Missouri Division of Youth Services facility. Prison Performing Arts partners with Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis to serve approximately 35 young men ages 12-16. Each student spends a minimum of 90 minutes each week working on Shakespeare with PPA Artistic Director, Agnes Wilcox, or Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis teachers.
