Agnes Wilcox & Prison Performing Arts

Through Prison Performing Arts, Staging Old Masters director Agnes Wilcox has spent seventeen years enriching the lives of incarcerated Missouri adults and children through the arts, theatre training and literacy skills.

In 2002, Prison Performing Arts garnered national attention when it was featured on This American Life (hear the original episode, “Act V,” here). To this day, TAL host Ira Glass remains a friend of Prison Performing Arts, appearing this year at St. Louis’s Pageant Theatre as a benefit for PPA.

You can read a St. Louis Magazine interview with Agnes here. Learn more about Prison Performing Arts projects, or visit here to make a donation.

The Arts in Prison

The arts can be a life-changing instrument for an incarcerated person, and can serve as a gateway to learning, self-discipline, self-exploration, commitment and teamwork. The beloved teacher, poet, and prison-arts champion Judith Tannenbaum maintains a blog about prison arts, educational issues, and more. Read it here, along with dozens of poems by Judith’s students at San Quentin maximum security. Judith is also the author of the acclaimed and moving memoir Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching at San Quentin.  Read “A Case For the Arts,” a succinct and moving justification for the presence—and transformational power—of the arts in prison, here. Learn more about prison arts, and see art by incarcerated men and women, at the website of the Prison Arts Coalition.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Director Agnes Wilcox bases her teaching style for Staging Old Masters around the work of legendary Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal. At 78, Boal is a living legend, traveling the world teaching community-created theatre as a catalyst for personal and social transformation: a theatre which blurs lines between performer and spectator (“spect-actors”) and empowers audiences to live as agents in the drama of their own lives. Boal was arrested by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, but now holds an honored place in Brazilian public life and was nominated for a 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Visit the website of the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed (based in LA), and read Augusto Boal’s own explanation of what his method means to him.

Employment Connection

Staging Old Masters is co-presented by Employment Connection, an organization with a thirty-year history of assisting individuals with limited opportunities to self-sufficiency through employment. The actors of Staging Old Masters have all received job-skills training, job placement, and individual case management through Employment Connection. In 2007, Employment Connection assisted over 2,500 clients in their efforts to find work. Interested employers can learn more here.

Ideal (Dis-)Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer

The theatrical pieces in Staging Old Masters were inspired by the Old Master artworks within the Pulitzer’s current exhibition.  To learn more about these works and read curatorial discussion about the exhibition, visit the web catalogue here.