Shakespeare in Prisons

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Thursday, January 18, 2024 12:00 pm

Join us as we launch Shakespeare and Possibility, a series of conversations exploring how Shakespeare at Notre Dame is redefining what it means to produce Shakespeare’s works onstage and in the community in the 21st century. Discover how our work, consonant with the mission of Our Lady’s University, strives to serve the common good in surprising ways for an ever-changing world. 

Our first series offering “Shakespeare in Prisons” details the creation of the Shakespeare in Prisons Network founded at Notre Dame in 2013. This panel features the co-founders of the network; Peter Holland, McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame, Curt Tofteland, Founding Director of Shakespeare Behind Bars, and Scott Jackson, Mary Irene Ryan Executive Artistic Director, Shakespeare at Notre Dame, who reflect on the early conversations that led to the first international Shakespeare in Prisons Conference in November 2013, where prison theater practitioners and scholars together discussed the impact of Shakespeare in prisons programs on systems-impacted individuals. From those humble beginnings the Shakespeare in Prisons Network has produced four conferences and created a network that today comprises more than 350 individuals and organizations from 17 nations on six continents. The growth of this movement is a testament to the power of Shakespeare’s works in carceral settings and beyond.

Experience the first of several conversations this semester in our Shakespeare and Possibility series and discover how Shakespeare’s works are continuing to resonate in contemporary culture some 400 years on Thursday, January 24, 2024. 

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Meet the Moderator: Jennifer Thorup Birkett '23 PhD

Jennifer Birkett ’23 PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Shakespeare at Notre Dame. She researches early modern drama with a specific interest in terms of endearment and the relationship between text and performance. Her scholarship characteristically magnifies quirky details and contradictions in order to arrive at new affordances. She is deeply committed to empowering female voices within dramatic narratives and combatting gender inequality by championing mutuality and solidarity.

While a graduate student at Notre Dame, Jennifer worked as a managing editor for the Religion & Literature journal, co-directed the Early Modern Circle, and served as Social and Professionalization chairs for EGSA. She has taught multiple sections of Writing and Rhetoric, Shakespeare and Performance, and Intro to Film and Television.

Meet the Faculty: Peter Holland

Peter Holland was educated at Cambridge and, when he left in 1997, was Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre in the Faculty of English. He then served as Director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham before coming to Notre Dame in 2002 as the first holder of the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies, probably the only named chair in Shakespeare anywhere in the world that is not in an English or Literature department.

He was editor of Shakespeare Survey, the UK’s leading academic Shakespeare journal for 19 years, co-General Editor, with Stanley Wells and Lena Orlin, of Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press, over 30 volumes to date); with Adrian Poole, of the 18-volume series Great Shakespeareans (Bloomsbury Academic, 2009-13; with Farah Karim-Cooper and Stephen Purcell of a monograph series, Shakespeare in the Theatre (Bloomsbury Academic, 15 volumes to date); and, with Zachary Leader and Tiffany Stern, of the Arden Shakespeare 4th series. He has also edited many Shakespeare plays.

In 2007, Holland completed publication of a five-volume series of collections on Rethinking British Theatre History. He is the author of more than 140 articles on a wide range of topics in Shakespeare studies as well as on David Garrick, English pantomime, Chekhov, farce, Peter Brook, and many other aspects of drama and performance.

In 2007–08, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He is Chair of the International Shakespeare Association. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Shakespeare Institute and of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. In 2012 he received the Sheedy Award at Notre Dame.

Meet the Faculty: Scott Jackson

Scott Jackson (he/they) has served as the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame since the position was created in 2007, providing oversight for the many Shakespeare-related programs housed at the University of Notre Dame, with a particular focus on engaging the local community through the works of William Shakespeare.

Previously he served as executive director for the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre (FST) in Fairbanks, Alaska. At FST he produced and performed in outdoor Shakespeare productions staged under the midnight sun at venues throughout Alaska and around the globe (most notably at the VIII World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, Australia, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland). From 2000–2003, Scott was the business and legal affairs coordinator for Brighter Pictures, Ltd (now a part of Endemol Shine UK), one of the United Kingdom’s most successful independent television and film production companies.

He holds a dual BA in theatre and history from Indiana University Bloomington, an MFA (distinction) in Actor Training and Coaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), and is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher (CKYT-200) under acclaimed practitioner Maya Fiennes. He has produced, directed, and performed in over 175 theatrical productions.

Scott currently serves as the vice president/president-elect for the Shakespeare Theatre Association, where he also served as treasurer from 2013-2017. He has taught acting process at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the University of Notre Dame, Holy Cross College, and Indiana University South Bend. Since 2018 he has taught Meisner acting technique and Mindfulness for the Artist for the Prague Shakespeare Company’s Summer Shakespeare Intensive.

A firm believer in the power of Shakespeare and the theatre arts to affect positive social change, he is a co-founder of the Shakespeare in Prisons Network. He teaches a Shakespeare in performance course and leads the kundalini yoga club at the Westville Correctional Facility, Indiana’s largest state prison.

His leadership in the nascent field of Applied Shakespeare has led to an appointment as a Research Associate for the Von Hügel Institute at St. Edmund’s College in the University of Cambridge. Additionally, he has developed an anti-harm approach to actor training called Foundationing, and presented this research at the annual meetings of the European Society of Criminology, the British Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Theatre Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, Theatre Communications Group, and the World Shakespeare Congress.

He is the recipient of the Shakespeare Association of America’s Publics Award for the production of the 4th International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference in 2020-21, the Robinson Community Learning Center’s Arthur Quigley, PhD award for community service, and the Fairbanks, Alaska Downtown Association’s Golden Heart award.

Meet the Speaker: Curt Tofteland

Curt L. Tofteland brings forty+ years of professional theatre experience to his current role as a freelance theatre artist – director, actor, producer, playwright, writer, teacher, program developer, prison arts practitioner, and consultant.

Curt is the Founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) program, now in its 28th year of continuous operation. From 1995-2008, Curt facilitated the SBB/KY program at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky. During his thirteen year tenure, Curt produced and directed fourteen Shakespeare productions. Multiple participants in the SBB/KY program have garnered Pen Literary Prison Writing Awards, as well as been published in academic journals.

During the 2003 SBB production of The Tempest, Philomath Films chronicled the process in a documentary that premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and forty+ film festivals around the world winning a total of eleven film awards.

Additionally, Curt has worked as a prison arts practitioner in the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women – where he taught college classes for the Jefferson Community and Technical College and created a Ten Minute Playwriting Program, and the Kentucky State Reformatory – where he taught Jefferson County and Technical College theatre classes. Curt continues to facilitate a week-long intensive called the Journeyman for prisoners 18-25 years of age each year at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex, Green River Correctional Complex, and the Northpoint Training Center.

In the summer of 2010, Curt partnered with filmmaker/director/producer Robby Henson and playwright Elizabeth Orndorf to create Voices Inside – a 10-minute playwriting program – funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, at the Northpoint Training Center in Burgin, Kentucky. Now in its twelfth year of funding by National Endowment for the Arts, the program has generated inmate-authored plays that have gone on to be professionally produced at Theatrelab, an Off-Off-Broadway theatre, and the T-Shrieber Play Festival, both in New York City, and given readings at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Participants in the Voices Inside program have garnered one publication, four Pen Literary Prison Writing Awards, and one participant’s play was a finalist in Actors Theatre of Louisville’s 2015 National 10 Minute Playwriting Contest. In 2017 a collection of plays entitled I Come From: A Voices Inside Anthology was published by JW Books. Curt is an Associate Producer of I Come From: Imagination is Free, a documentary by filmmaker Robby Henson.  The documentary features spoken word poets in prisons in Kentucky.

In 2011, Curt created the Shakespeare Behind Bars program at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility (Level II & IV security) in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. In 2012, Curt launched the first Michigan co-gender juvenile Shakespeare Behind Bars (Ottawa County Juvenile Detention Center) / Shakespeare Beyond Bars (Ottawa County Juvenile Justice Institute) program. Additional Shakespeare Behind Bars programs created at E.C. Brooks include: the Journeyman for prisoners under the age of 25 and Shakespeare in Housing Units. In 2014, Curt created three Shakespeare Behind Bars programs at the West Shoreline Correctional Facility in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, a Level I minimum security prison.

Curt created and has facilitated a series of proficiency classes, intensives, and immersions about Creating a Circle of Trust in Arts Within Corrections at the Public Theatre in New York City, NY; The Old Globe in San Diego, CA; Prison Performing Arts in St. Louis, MO; Still Point Theatre Collaborative in Chicago, IL; and Rome Shakespeare Festival in Rome, GA.

Curt has been invited to share his Shakespeare Behind Bars experience through screening the documentary, facilitating a post-screening audience talk-back, teaching master classes, and visiting classrooms at eighty-one colleges and universities (one hundred+ visits) across the United States; Additionally, he conducts Virtual Sessions in classrooms around the country; he has been a key presenter at the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA); he has been a key presenter multiple times at the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA) Annual conference; he has been a multiple presenter at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Regions I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII. He has been a VIP guest and presenter at numerous professional Shakespeare Festivals in North America including: the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario); Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, Or); Old Globe Playhouse (San Diego, CA); Utah Shakespearean Festival (Cedar City, UT); American Players Theatre (Spring Green, WI); Chicago Shakespeare (Chicago, IL); Actors’ Shakespeare Project (Boston, MA); Chesapeake Shakespeare (Ellicott City, MD); Great River Shakespeare Festival (Winona, MN); Southwest Shakespeare Company (Mesa, AZ); Rome Shakespeare Festival (Rome, GA), Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival (Grand Valley, MI); Independent Shakespeare Company of LA (Los Angeles, CA); Kentucky Shakespeare Festival (Louisville, KY); Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park (Oklahoma City, OK – in association with Oklahoma City Museum of Art); Shakespeare Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA – in association with the William James Association); and he has taught the SBB process internationally, in Switzerland, at the International School of Lausanne and the College du Leman in Geneva.

Curt is a founding member, a keynote presenter, and the Curator of Program Content for the inaugural Shakespeare in Prison Network Conference hosted by the University of Notre Dame in November, 2013 and repeated in January, 2016, the Old Globe Theatre in March, 2018, in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Notre Dame Virtual Conference in 2020-21. In 2022, Curt was honored for his life-long contributions to the field of Arts in Corrections by having a perpetual SiPN International Award for an outstanding returned citizen named The Curt L. Tofteland Award.

He was a proficiency teacher at the Arts in Corrections: Reframing the Landscape of Justice in San Jose (June, 2019) and Building Bridges to the Future in Los Angeles (June, 2017) and a featured presenter the Marking Time: A Prison Arts and Activism Conference at Rutgers University (October, 2014). He is a founding member of the Justice Arts Coalition.

Curt is an often invited keynote speaker and panelist at national and international theatre conference including: 2022 Bell Shakespeare National Teacher Conference (Sydney, New South Wales, AUS); 2018 Theatre and Drama in Prison. Prison in Theatre and Drama (Warsaw Poland); 2018 British Shakespeare Association Conference (Belfast, Northern Ireland), and 2018 Shakespeare in America – Southern Oregon University/Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR); 2017 401 years after Shakespeare: Shifting Paradigms from the Shakespearean Human to the Post-Human Conference (Heritage College, Kolkata, India); 2017 Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference (Detroit, Michigan); 2017 Theatre Communications Group Conference (Portland, OR); 2017 Shakespeare Theatre Conference (Stratford, ONT).

Curt has been the keynote speaker at the Prison Performing Arts Fundraiser, St; Louis, MO; Albert S. Johnston, Jr. Memorial Shakespeare Lecturer at University of North Alabama; Tzedek Lecture at University of Oregon; Jepson Leadership Forum at University of Richmond; Distinguished Lecture at University of Wisconsin-Waukesha; Gates-Ferry Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at Centenary College; Personal Effectiveness and Employability Through the Arts (PEETA) International Symposium, Rotterdam, Netherlands; the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) Joint International Symposium with Columbia College, Chicago, IL; National Arts Club in New York City; Utah Shakespearean Festival’s Wooden O Symposium; Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law panel discussion about the First Amendment in Prison: Marking the 50th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail; and the Shakespeare Connection Conference at the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival.

Curt has delivered four TEDx Talks. In 2016, at TEDx Muskegon (Muskegon, MI) on the subject of living in the rub between light and darkness; in 2013, at TEDx Berkeley, on the subject of building circles-of-trust; in 2012, at TEDx Macatawa (Holland, MI) on the subject of revenge and mercy; and in 2010, at TEDx East (New York City), on the subject of shame. Additionally, Curt was a speaker at the 2012 IDEA Festival in Louisville, KY; at the Vibe Wire Youth, Inc. FastBREAK Breakfast Speaker Series in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Curt is the recipient of three distinctive fellowships, two from the Fulbright Foundation and one from the Petra Foundation, for his work as a prison arts practitioner using Shakespeare in corrections. Curt’s 2011 Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship took him to Australia to share his SBB experience as a co-facilitator with Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s prison program at the Borallon Correctional Centre in Queensland. Curt’s 2015 Fulbright Alumni Initiative Grant took him back to Australia to direct plays written by prisoners from the Voices Inside program, produced by Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, and performed for prisoners in the Southern Queensland Correction Centre in Gatton and Wolston Correctional Centre in Wacol.

In 2015, Curt was named a Creative Fellow at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The Fellowship took him on a two week tour of New Zealand visiting Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington, where he toured prisons, gave public addresses, served on prison arts practitioner panels, and taught master classes. Curt created a circle of trust now called Redemption Performing Arts at the Northern Region Correctional Facility.

Curt is the Executive Producer of Prospero’s Prison, a film by Tom Magill, an award-winning Northern Ireland filmmaker and founder of Educational Shakespeare Company.

Curt is a published poet and essayist who writes about the transformative power of art, theatre, and the works of William Shakespeare. He has six published essays – “We Know What We Are, We Know Not What We May Be: The Circle of Trust” in New Directions in Dramatury, California Shakespeare Theater webpage; “My Better Angels Versus My Lesser Demons” in Paso de Gato: Revista Mexicana de Teatro; “I was Built for Runnin’ but I Dream of Flyin’ in The Possibilities of Creativity, University Auckland Press 2016; “The Keeper of the Keys: Building a Successful Relationship with the Warden” in Performing New Lives: Reflections on Prison Theatre, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2010; “As Performed: By Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, KY, 2003” in The Tempest, Chicago: Sourcebooks Shakespeare 2008; and an essay, published in the 2012 edition of the Shakespeare Survey, that is co-written with SBB/KY founding member Hal Cobb – “Prospero Behind Bars”. He was a columnist for Prison Life. Curt’s essay – “Shakespeare Goes to Prison: Holding the Transformative Mirror up to Nature: Responsibility, Forgiveness, and Redemption” won the University of Wyoming 2010 National Amy and Eric Burger Essays on Theatre Competition. Additionally, Curt continues to write his own book, Behind the Bard-Wire: Reflection, Responsibility, Redemption, & Forgiveness . . . The Transformational Power of Art, Theatre, and Shakespeare.

From 1989 to 2008, he was the Producing Artistic Director of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. During his twenty year tenure, Curt produced fifty Shakespeare productions, directed twenty-five Shakespeare productions, and acted in eight Shakespeare Productions. As a professional director and an Equity actor, he has 200+ professional productions to his credit. Additionally, he has presented 400+ performances of his one man show Shakespeare’s Clownes: A Foole’s Guide to Shakespeare.

Curt is a founding member and past president of the Shakespeare Theatre Association, an international service organization for theaters which produce the works of William Shakespeare. In 2016, he received the Sidney Berger Award from STA.

Curt has professionally guest directed at Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble (Brisbane, Queensland AUS), Chesapeake Shakespeare (Baltimore, MD), Illinois Shakespeare Festival (Bloomington/Normal, IL), Theatre at Monmouth (Monmouth, ME), American Shakespeare Center – Blackfriars Playhouse (Stanton, VA), Actors Shakespeare Project (Boston, MA), Oklahoma Shakespeare (Oklahoma City, OK), Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival (Allendale, MI), Foothills Theatre Company (Worcester, MA), Hope Summer Repertory Theatre (Holland, MI), Kalamazoo Civic Theatre (Kalamazoo, MI), Fort Harrod Drama Productions (Harrodsburg, KY), Actors Theatre of Louisville (Louisville, KY), Stage One (Louisville, KY), Bunbury Theatre (Louisville, KY), Farmington Lunch Time Theatre (Louisville, KY), Kentucky Contemporary Theatre (Louisville, KY), and New Composer Residency (Louisville, KY).

In 1989, Curt designed, wrote, and hosted the award-winning creative thinking series, Imagine That for Kentucky Educational Television.

Curt is the recipient of a number of prestigious honors and awards, including a Doctor of Humanities from Oakland University, Doctor of Humane Letters from Bellarmine University, an Al Smith Fellowship in playwriting from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Sidney Berger Award from the Shakespeare Theatre Association, the Fleur-de-lis Award from the Louisville Forum, the Mildred A. Dougherty Award from the Greater Louisville English Council, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota.

The 4th International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference (SiPC4)

Why Shakespeare Now?
Building on three previous conferences (2013, 2016, and 2018), SiPC4 gathered theatre arts practitioners, researchers, and scholars who were engaged with or interested in programs for incarcerated (and post-incarcerated) populations. From November 2020 through April 2021, SiPC4 stimulated discussion through speakers, performances, and workshop sessions offering case studies and best practices within the prisons arts movement. 

Opening Ceremony/The Future is Now: A Social Justice Roadmap
Barry Edelstein (The Old Globe Theatre‘s Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director) and Freedome Bradley-Ballentine (Director of Arts Engagement and Associate Artistic Director) have “embarked on a series of reforms to intensify and accelerate necessary change at all levels” of their institution. In codifying anti-racist practices and principals into their organizational processes, they’ve begun to answer the call for “long overdue change” made by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) theatremakers. The conversation and audience Q&A was moderated by Karen Ann Daniels (The Public Theater‘s Director of Mobile Unit and Co-Producer of the Shakespeare in Prisons Conference). 

I Am Worthy of Yes: Art as a Healing Mechanism in Community 
Beginning with a guided meditation to ground community during an unprecedented time, Mama Nia Wilson of SpiritHouse Inc. offers conference participants a moment to center themselves. The session continues with a discussion between Praycious Wilson-Gay and Mama Nia around the work of SpiritHouse Inc. and their choreopoem community intervention and ritual performance Collective Sun: Reshape the Mo(u)rning. They also discuss community care and what it looks like to use art as a healing mechanism in community. The session finishes with a video about SpiritHouse Inc. and the impact of their work in the Durham, NC community.

Ashley Lucas: Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration
Session 1: An Interview About Prison Theatre Culture
Scholar Karen Hamer interviews Ashley Lucas about her new book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Methuen Drama, 2020). By discussing a range of performance practices tied to incarceration, this book examines the ways in which arts practitioners and imprisoned people use theatre as a means to build communities, attain professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope.

Ashley Lucas: Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration
Session 2: Experiences from Around the World
When conducting research for her book, Ashley Lucas traveled throughout ten different countries to observe as many theatre companies inside of prisons as she could. The formerly incarcerated actors on this panel represent three prison theatre programs in the United States and one in Australia. They discuss what being a part of a prison theatre company has meant to them during and after their time in prison.

Ashley Lucas: Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration
Session 3: Directors Reflect on Their Challenges
Ashley Lucas draws upon her research to speak with the key minds behind prison theatre programs across the world. The directors on this panel represent prison theatre companies in Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil. They discuss the challenges of making theatre in prisons before and during the global pandemic.

The Actors’ Gang and Avenal State Prison: A Collaborative Approach to Arts in Corrections
Three leaders and pioneers of the Actors’ Gang Prison Project Alumni Network – Richard Loya, John Dich, and Major Bunton – will be sharing a conversation with the visionary warden of Avenal State Prison, Rosemary Ndoh, and her nontraditional team. Richard, John, and Major will discuss their first-hand experience of establishing a class at Avenal State Prison and what it has meant to return as teaching artists.

Live Q&A: Cry Havoc with Stephan Wolfert/DE-CRUIT
Army veteran Stephan Wolfert left a career in the military for one onstage, and went on to create “Cry Havoc,” an extraordinary solo piece that explores the difficulties that our veterans and their families face. Here, Stephan takes questions from the SiPC4 audience on both his work as an actor and his program DE-CRUIT, designed to reintegrate military Veterans using Shakespeare and science.

Antiracism in Practice: Broken Windows Policing
Members of SiPC4 explore differential policing in communities of color, including the implications of the “broken windows” policy theory, the enduring legacy of the 1994 crime bill (most notable as the origin of the term “superpredators”), and what it might mean when we say “defund the police.”

The Body Keeps the Score – Brain, Mind and Body in Healing Trauma
Join us for an in-depth discussion with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist, researcher, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on post-traumatic stress and its treatment and healing, featuring Curt L. Tofteland (founder of Shakespeare Behind Bars and co-founder of the Shakespeare in Prison Network) and Stephan Wolfert (founder of DE-CRUIT).

Live Q&A: The Body Keeps the Score – Brain, Mind and Body in Healing Trauma
This in-depth Q&A with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk features Curt L. Tofteland, Stephan Wolfert, and members of the 4th International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference.

On Antiracism: Dr. Sylvan Baker 
In a wide-ranging monologue on the interconnectedness of racial oppression and institutions, Dr. Sylvan Baker explores how global phenomenon, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising triggered by the murders of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, don’t just reveal structural racism, but act as a clarion call for Antiracist practices in all socially engaged arts contexts.