with Ohio State Alumna Amy Dowling
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
2:15PM - 3:15PM EST, 11:15AM-12:15PM PT
All are welcome to these free discussions, but please register to attend>
The imprisoned body is one of the primary sites of carceral control, an elaborate choreography of containment and segregation. Behind prison walls, regimented rituals of eating, cleaning, labor, and leisure curtail individual freedom of movement in the service of “orderly” systems, notating where and how one moves through space and time, shaping relations between objects, spaces, bodies.
In our time together, we will discuss and see the work of the Artistic Ensemble in San Quentin prison that is shaped by questions such as - How do incarcerated artists create work? How do inside and outside artists, working in an inhumane system, develop a creative process that supports humanity? How do outside artists use their platform to support creative work inside facilities that critiques mass imprisonment and its conditions of emergence? How can the subversive role as artists ask more radical questions about the uses of locking people away in the first place? How does transmission occur when stage and audience are separated by a system of mass incarceration that disappears certain bodies?
Amie Dowling creates dance and theater for the stage, for film, and in community settings. For the past 20 years, her work has considered the politics and representation of mass incarceration. Well Contested Sites, a collaboration with Bay Area artists, some of who were previously incarcerated, won the 2013 International Screendance film prize. The next film, Separate Sentence, 2017, explores the generational impact of incarceration. The films, along with their study guides, are used in classrooms as tools to engage in conversations about mass incarceration. She has presented work internationally at such venues as Lincoln Center (NYC), Regards Hybrides (Canada), Cinéma Jean-Eustache (France), Passangen Art Gallery (Sweden), and the Juming Museum (Taiwan). Amie is a member of the Artistic Ensemble at San Quentin Prison and an Associate Professor in the Performing Arts Department at the University of San Francisco.
