Features Essays Published 9 September 2011

Life on the Inside

Mark Farrand, of Jean Abreu Dance and arts venture company firstdraft, discusses the background and ideas behind the company's 2010 work INSIDE, an exploration of life within prison walls which makes its London debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall this month.
Mark Farrand

Steve is an ex-con from Shotts, a maximum-security prison near Glasgow.  He did time for aggravated assault and burglary in 2008 and got out two months before INSIDE premiered in Edinburgh in 2010. When I asked him if he enjoyed the show he said that he did: ‘some of it took me back, back inside.’

There couldn’t be a more resounding endorsement for the piece. An ex-con came to see a show about prison life and found the experience engaging. He liked it because it was realistic, but also because it was a cathartic experience for him This comment worth more than any five star review or any Sunday supplement (0ver) analysis. It was plain and honest – and that gave it weight.

INSIDE is not supposed to be a sugar-coated, glamorous account of prison life, rather an attempt to show harsh reality of prison life. The piece is particularly concerned with the hierarchy that inmates establish within the prison system, a way of creating their own sense of order. The audience are put at the top of this pile, as prison guards, made to feel just as culpable for the abuse as the participants.

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The brutality of this world is at times depicted in an overtly physical and vicious way while in other places it is shown to be more subtle and psychological. The act of buggery may be commonplace in men’s prisons but it is no less horrifying for it; while the constant and subtle bullying, the drip-drip of verbal abuse, the light assertion of power with a flick of the hand, is made more painful by its unrelenting consistency. We hope that at times this feels so unsettling that the audience will have to resist the urge to get out of their seats and stop it. We hope that the full horror of water boarding and other techniques of interrogation and restraint used most recently on Al-Qaeda suspects, will come to mind when you watch the piece.  Jean was choreographing INSIDE at a time when the events at Guantanamo were front page news and this has influenced the piece.

At a deeper, primal level, we hope that the drama of the piece shows how people develop defence mechanisms for coping with confinement. The constant rocking behaviour displayed by apes and elephants bred in captivity is mirrored in the piece, through rhythmic and repetitive swaying. There is also a need among caged apes to repeatedly touch a part of their bodies, in a ritual of self-recognition. We hope that the piece conveys the unbearable sensory deprivation and loneliness that played out in the minds of captives like John McCarthy and Terry Waite when they were held for five years in Lebanon.

Within this world of confinement, though often misplaced and random, often with strings attached, one usually sees acts of human kindness. These are rarely unconditional, rarely for nothing, and something is usually expected in return. Yet there are occasional acts of sympathy after breakouts of excessive and unexplained brutality – and we hope to show this too.


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