This roundtable discussion took place on Zoom on June 6, 2024, and grew out of the learning that I have experienced through the collective work of the voices assembled here: through various gatherings and actions, often at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference, this group of scholar-artist-activists has pushed our field to directly engage with the concerns of abolition and decarceration. Their Zine, included in this issue's Online Section, offers theatre, dance, and performance studies direct actions as well as philosophical inspiration for decarcerating our campuses, classrooms, and studios, and relations with one another and our own minds. I encourage readers to consult the Zine in their research, teaching, and community engagement efforts toward abolition. This roundtable is a way for those conversations to continue and to respond to ongoing crises and current world affairs.
—Ariel Nereson, Theatre Journal coeditor
Misty Saribal (MS): Our first question is, how can performance studies contribute to what contemporary abolition elders are calling for, which is the abolition of campus police and any ties to the prison industrial complex? I'm thinking about Davarian Baldwin when he talks about how higher ed campuses should be ground zero for police abolition, in part, he argues, because some campuses have the newest police departments, and some of them still do not [have police departments].1 However, we're presently seeing, with the campus Palestinian BDS solidarity demonstrations and encampments, the unfinished but necessary Cops Off Campus movement, which is a great group that I have been involved with. And when I see [list(s) like] Eight Actions to Grow Abolition,2 I always want to add to the list—make friends with people in the arts and theatre departments! We have great props, we know how to stage protests, direct chants, perform and communicate in live, spectacular, and impactful ways.
I want to start with an example of how performance and theatre contribute meaningfully to these abolition movements in material ways, to ponder how our skills might help with campus abolition movements. To get to my example, we did a disorientation tour on Louisiana State University's campus before the pandemic, and we happened to just randomly find in the prop closet a giant black wooden coffin that said, "RIP Education." And I decided everyone on the tour should carry this giant coffin around while we viewed areas of the campus connected with slavery, military, sexism, heterosexism, racism, ableism, and capitalist exploitation. The resulting spectacle and disruption to the campus status quo was something that I'm pretty sure wouldn't have happened if the disorientation tour had been led by the American studies, philosophy, or biology departments. So you could take that in many different ways, but I want to open that because sometimes within "traditional organizing," there is a bias toward antitheatrical methods, and that's a damn shame.
Ariel Nereson (AN): The language you were using to share this with us makes me think of antitheatrical prejudice, but also the current traffic of "performative," and what that means as something that indicates a lack of genuine investment in something, which is the opposite, of course, of what a lot of campus organizing is trying to indicate. And I know that Meredith Conti has written about the critique of high school students responding to gun violence, and being called crisis actors, so I think that language is so important, and that we know how to use it.3 I appreciate your bringing that forward.
Leticia Ridley (LR): I think that if we look at the legacy of protest specifically in the United States, I think of something like the Black Panther Party and how they wore a specific costume to the protest, that the gun was a prop and also a tool, but sort of thinking about how the language of theatre has always been integrating with protests in these movements and about how we can usher that [integration] forward. I think for me one of the biggest overlaps I see with community organizing and theatre is this idea of collaboration, and working and pulling skills from a lot of different people to put forth this larger movement toward a larger goal that I think is really valuable. And in this particular moment when we're thinking about defund the police, I think about how we can utilize that [energy] not only in protest but in other perhaps smaller avenues and ways in our classrooms, in our departments, in our clubs perhaps, and think about how policing functions. I know when we were creating the Zine, one of the big things that came out of that was this idea of recognizing that policing functions outside of just people who are employed as police or a state actor. We have sort of ingrained becoming our own police.
MS: I like what you're saying there, and I just wanted to highlight that sometimes, but not always, theatre builds cohesive ensembles that are ready to go do some stuff together. And those skills can be transferred right away to, yes, different sorts of organizing tactics and, like you're saying, that ability to then coordinate big projects. It's project management in a lot of ways.
LLR: And I'll also add that Julius Fleming's book Black Patience recently came out, and in the introduction, he talks about the Free Southern Theater and this performance that they put on of Waiting for Godot where in the middle of intermission, Fannie Lou Hamer stands up and says to the crowd of Black folks, "we can't wait for freedom, we can't be waiting like these characters onstage, right?"4 So if we're thinking about the multiple levels at which theatre and performance can operate to even create discourse and conversations, or the matter of just using the intermission as a sort of soapbox by someone like Fannie Lou Hamer, I think is critically important. That history is also something to consider when we're thinking about the connections of defund the police and abolition and the place of theatre and performance within those calls.
Lindsay Livingston (LL): We've been talking more about what we might call spectacle, or thinking about audiences and what people are seeing and responding to. But I think too about the classroom space, and I feel at my institution that we in theatre have a lot more freedom in terms of how we structure and think about our classes than those in a lot of the disciplinary spaces that are on campus. I had a class that just was going very, very badly. It was "Performance for Social Change," and the students could not for the life of them agree, which was a requirement of the class. They had to decide collaboratively what they were going to become activists about and how to implement that. And I had to completely change the class, but because I was able to do that, we ended up telling stories about encounters with cops to try to get them [the students] to have some sort of shared experience—well, let's talk about this. Who actually likes being pulled over, even if you're the rich white kid (and we have a lot of those)? And of course, no one likes that. It frightens everyone to a certain extent, and just having the space to allow them to talk freely with each other and to be able to change the curriculum in that moment [was powerful]. And I used Cornerstone's Story Circles for like two weeks to just get them to start talking about the different spaces that they were policing themselves [in]. So I think in our classrooms, we also have sort of nonspectacular spaces that give them space to talk and think about these things that they genuinely don't have almost anywhere else on campus.
Nicholas Fesette (NF): Misty, you referenced the campus protests, the solidarity encampments that have been going on around the country and the world, and at my institution, Emory's very famously was destroyed by the police in three hours.5 Within three hours of students' establishing the encampment on the quad, state and city police came and destroyed the tents. I return to that context for a couple reasons. One is, those encampments and protests continued even after the police cracked down, and the protests were explicitly connecting the #StopCopCity movement here in Atlanta, the movement to prevent the construction of a so-called public safety training facility, which is just like a little city where militarized police can play around with their toys and practice brutalizing people. This campus protest was quite explicitly connecting #StopCopCity and the genocide in Gaza. What your question makes me think of in relation to this is, I was very gratified and proud that a former theatre student who was in my classes as a freshman, but also who played Creon in a production of Medea that I did years ago, they were at the forefront of these campus protests at Emory. And they were using performance experience in another way. It was like seeing an actor develop over time. I remember them as a freshman being sort of nervous playing this despot, and now, they're a senior and they are powerful and they are mobilizing the use of their body and their voice in ways that evidence what you're pointing to, I think.
MS: I just want to chime in here, anytime I have an opportunity, I like to remind people that Ruth Wilson Gilmore studied theatre as an undergraduate at Yale!6
LL: I'll throw in that the student who is organizing Gaza solidarity protests on our campus is also a theatre student, and you know an enormous amount of that training has come into the work that they've been doing. Obviously, there's not always a correlation of theatre training as activist training, but I think we can clearly see how transferable a lot of those skills are. For example, my improv students—because we had spent so long getting used to failing and not caring what people think about you and just trying again and getting up again—all of a sudden, I saw them joining a lot more campus protests and activist spaces in the aftermath of that. I don't have a clear correlation that A led to B, but I have to believe that it's [theatre training] at least creating an atmosphere where these things are more possible.
Megan E. Geigner (MEG): I'm prefacing my comments today by saying I don't teach in a theatre department, like a growing number of people with PhDs in theatre. I teach in another department within the institution, so I don't have access to the theatre students in the way that I did when I was a theatre professor. My institution, Northwestern University, was one of the few campuses where police did not end the protests and the demonstrations for Gaza this spring. There was a student coalition that was meeting with the central powers of the university repeatedly throughout the demonstration, and the coalition told the university the night before they were going to begin protests. The administration set new rules overnight, which was kind of shady, and then they threatened the protestors with those rules. The students just kept meeting with them, and the ultimate decision was, "You can leave this giant tent on the meadow that's in front of the library." That is always the space that's used [for gathering] because it faces the streets, and the library is a beautiful backdrop. This site is in postcards and everything [promotional] of the university. So that's where they set up, and I thought, these students are so smart to stage this here. They're thinking about the spectacle of this and how they can bring the community in. And the agreement was that the protestors could leave the tent and the large Palestinian flag and all the homemade signs on the fence facing the community of Evanston. They just couldn't have more than so many people populating the meadow at any time, and I thought to myself, this is a group of people who understand spectacle, who understand what props and set can do, even when there are no actors populating the space. And I also know that some of the students in the coalition were theatre majors. I wondered if that set of meetings was almost like production meetings. Because they were deciding what could be left on that stage, the effect of that [choice], there were different group stakeholders, right? Just like a production meeting where you're saying, "well, I want this," and then someone says, "yeah, we can't do that, so what else can we do?" That sort of knowing about negotiation from working in a collaborative art, I imagine, informed those conversations.
AN <in chat>: And I think this conversation reflects certain pedagogies of theatre training—unfortunately, there also continue to be theatre pedagogies that prepare students for conformity, complicity, and to be willingly surveilled.
aaron moore ellis (AME): Just wanted to pick up on something that Ariel said in the chat—that this conversation also reflects a specific sort of pedagogy of theatre training that might open students up to staging protests. There are citational lineages to that connection in theory as well as practice, and thinking about, for example, the Greensboro sit-ins and the training that people underwent in order to figure out how to embody that positionality, do those actions, and carry them off successfully with their goals in mind. But that also, there are other theatre pedagogies that, as Ariel put in the chat, prepare students for conformity, complicity, and to be willing to be surveilled. And so when I think about what our field or our work offers to larger movements, I think there's also an importance to focus on what abolitionist ideas and practice have to offer our field itself. Because to be honest, my experiences with spectacularizing protest and theatre departments at colleges and universities is more an oppositional history, where a couple of students may want to organize or join those sorts of actions, but that administrations and professors are in opposition to that. Even a self-described radical professor at one of my institutions forbade theatre students to skip class to go to a spectacularly theatrical protest action organized by students and opposing the appointment of the incoming president of our university, who had formerly been the head of the Florida Republican Party.
Misty, when you bring up that death-to-education coffin, that reminds me of this specific action that I co-organized with other folx. I was a theatre PhD student, and we had one other person who was studying stage management as an undergraduate, and the rest of the people were not "theatre people." Together, we wrote, produced, and staged a beautiful yet haunting funeral procession; and most of us who staged it, costumed it, and performed it, were from other departments. They were from English. Somebody was from mathematics, people from all over the university. What's striking to me is how little our theatre departments offer to the movement when we could be so powerful.
I've been very involved in organizing cultural resistance marches and rallies and using performance idioms, like actual theatre in the streets, taking streets with song, and with dance and teaching choreography, too. There are theatremakers who are part of that process, but there are no theatre departments that are homes of support for our art builds, for costuming, accessories, etc. There could be folks who are on the inside getting at those supplies, but mostly, in my experience, it's self-organized. It seems to me that people are working to establish parallel structures to those institutions, because those institutions are not built to support students, professors, or community members who are trying to mobilize for basic human life and human dignity.
And so we have a real problem and conundrum in the sense that what we have to offer could be so valuable and empowering, but that the institutions that hold the keys to those materials, and that hold the keys to our own promotions, and hold the keys to our own salaries, are not interested in that. Even professors who, when we look at a syllabus we might think, "oh this person would be on our side," when it comes time to students skipping class to attend an action, that was off limits.7 And theatre student participation in a campus-wide protest was seen as a site and an opportunity for punishment. One theatre professor promised that students who attended the protest performance would get an unexcused absence, and that they would even receive grade deductions. So when I hear about all the promise and potential of our departments, I'm also thinking about what are the obstacles in our institutions?
Courtney Erin Colligan (CEC): We've seen a renewed or perhaps broadened focus on violent policing and the practice's relationship with the university with the campus encampments and protests of this past year. By the end of the spring semester, I witnessed how students began making the connections that all systems of oppression are linked—from the US prison system to the genocides in Gaza and Congo. For example, students are seeing how the training of US police forces by IDF soldiers impacts both the treatment of these current protests and how and why the US government continues to support Netanyahu's government financially and militarily. The classroom may be one of the few spaces left that can encourage the nuanced discussion of the histories, terminologies, and policies that we must consider when discussing Israel's continued occupation. I think the performance classroom demands us to encounter what's being communicated when we see the wearing of a keffiyeh or "Free Gaza" sprayed on a sidewalk, or in questioning how and why the definitions of "intifada" differ in interpretation. We are moving through our days at a ten on the disbelief scale—the violent images and videos of genocide haunt our days, whether consciously or subconsciously. As such, when we see a symbol, say, the Palestinian flag in solidarity with the Irish flag, or JVP's logo, or "From the River to the Sea," I think we are immediately "activated," both emotionally and psychologically. And it's in performance studies classrooms and our work in general that affords us the lenses to dissect how to read these symbols and communicate with them. I think this is extraordinarily important because we're constantly encountering ripe misinformation, from our own universities to the White House. And it's easy to sink into a despair that we cannot combat because "people will believe what they want to believe." But if I've witnessed anything in the past year, it's that people are also open to learning to say, "I didn't know that." They're starting to reframe their thought processes to go from the reflexive binary thinking (or even more likely, the regurgitation of ideas found from headlines or Twitter/X) to a more open approach that there is a lot to unlearn, learn, and relearn about how our institutions function and who they function for, and the interdisciplinarity of performance studies helps us work through this.8
AN: I'm going to shift us into a question that aaron is leading us into a little bit, which is about ideological and practical resonances across theatre training and activist training. How are we doing when it comes to the action item of defunding police,9 or removing police, from our campus events? I will say my own experiences with this have been challenging. And in some ways, I think that's probably by design. There are no other options provided by the university that would help communities keep one another safe other than to utilize campus police or public safety, or whatever the terminology is that the institution uses. What are the alternatives to this? What are the other ways we can keep each other safe, then, by complying with these sorts of directives to automatically call campus security? It does seem that there is perhaps a [End Page E-6] missing link here in terms of a campus service that could respond to event needs that is not carceral in some way.
AME: I have heard of student organizations requesting no police presence, but there's a policy, at least at my former institutions, where if a certain number of students gather at a public space on campus, then the university is required to provide security. Decarceral work in the university setting is not disconnected from decarceral work outside of the university setting. And therefore, decarceral workers and organizations off campus are, I think, natural resources to strategize around questions like this. I'm thinking of the Tampa Bay Area Dream Defenders, who launched a whole campaign around decarcerating public schools in St. Petersburg, Florida.10 This was about the public safety officers, what they carried with them, how they presented themselves, how students were treated, metal detectors, you know, it was trying to interrupt the school to prison pipeline. And that's not a university setting, but that's not the only thing that is different than what we normally do at a university: they organized a full-on campaign to find out who these decision-makers are, and to leverage whatever means they could in order to try to push for a change in policy.
Advocating decarceral change also means offering a kind of alternative, or creating these alternative structures for keeping ourselves safe. These campus occupations have taken clues from larger scale demonstrations, and they have safety teams, they have de-escalation teams, they have medics—that's been a trend that I've seen, making police presence unnecessary by providing security and safety protocols and personnel.
I was just at the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) annual conference, this year in St. Petersburg, and there was a lot of fear around going to Florida because of recent legislation: anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Black, antieducation, and more. Some of us PTO board members and conference co-organizers planned and facilitated a pre-conference for trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folx from the PTO and Tampa Bay Area communities. We found local folx who already provide safety for the Pasco County Pride Parade, where they don't want to have police, so they built their own safety infrastructure.
I think it is important to notice dovetailing and interconnecting aims and drives among organizations that are not campus-specific. Resource-scaling, skill sharing and training, learning from local community across the boundaries of institutions can help connect us where the status quo keeps us separated and disempowered.
MS: I think aaron is making a great point here about direct action versus asking for permission and how one assesses whether to take those risks, how a theatre production can be a performance that reveals the true nature of campus security, and how we might protest in collaboration with off-campus groups.
Donatella Galella (DG): Last weekend we had our commencement ceremony for PhDs and MFAs. I was not there, but there was an increased presence of armed campus cops and there were fewer student speakers. Some admin went to the faculty when they were lined up and were like, "the cops are here to protect you," and one faculty member responded, "no, we are." And then Faculty for Justice in Palestine wrote a letter saying we shouldn't have cops at these events, like, what are you doing?11 The cops are actually there to intimidate us, not to provide any material safety. How do we preempt police escalation on our campuses instead of spending so much time responding after the fact?
I wanted to bring up a little anecdote about how my kid goes to preschool on campus, and there is a lot of copaganda through things like regular community helper weeks in which cops are regularly framed as community helpers. I've contacted the head of the preschool to show tons of studies on how the police do tremendous harm, and it's so frustrating that, as a scholar, I can present data, and it's just dismissed out of hand because it feels like the cops keep us safe. Vibes trump research. I asked, at the very least, when the cops come to the preschool, can they not be armed? And even that would not be accepted. So I remember one of the days when I knew they were coming, they came and gave out candy and sticker badges to the kids—trying to win over children into trusting them. I took my kid out that morning and got her a COVID shot, which made her safer than the cops' being at the school that day. I also imagine it's hard for a 3- or a 4-year-old to be learning from your teachers, and your friends who are playing cop games and pretending to shoot each other, and kids who want to be cops when they grow up.
So my child's getting all those messages, while at home, I'm trying to explain that sometimes cops hurt people, and guns are really scary and harmful. I shared with her a story about how once my car was broken into, and we called the cops to help us, and they didn't even get out of their car to come investigate or anything and obviously they didn't retrieve the stolen item. That really struck her, so she has internalized that. But these are mixed messages. So a couple of weeks ago, there was another community helper week. When the teachers asked, "oh, what are some examples?" One kid said, "cops," and my child expressed that, "no, no, they aren't." She told the teachers about the time when they didn't help me. Then the next day, they have a place called home center where they have costumes that they get to put on every week as part of their pretend play, so they had costumes of different community helpers like firefighters and doctors and veterinarians. She objected to the cop costume because there was a weapon on it. And her teacher actually listened to her and removed it from the center. I was just so proud of her for speaking up because there was no one else on her side, and I'm glad that the teacher listened to her reasoning about it despite the objections of some of the other kids.
So I'm mindful that these are little things, and we also have to start the education young because otherwise there's a presumed belief that the police automatically protect us, despite all the evidence.
MS: I love what you just said, Dona, and it ties into the education and the disruption. Education as disruption, dialogue as disruption. Because if we aren't rehearsing those conversations … a lot of people are saying, "oh, you're politicizing, or sexualizing kids," but actually, the reverse is happening all the time. So we have to counter that narrative and the trauma that police visits cause to students whose parents or other family members are incarcerated. Any time the police came to my elementary school, I thought, "Oh, they're here to arrest me," and I would be traumatized. I think that that's only an inkling of what students who have immigration status issues or otherwise experience. So good on your kid and you for rehearsing a different dialogue.
AN: There's also at least at my institution a kind of compounding of this effect. I was the name reader at graduate commencement this year, and there was an increased police presence because of recent events that had happened on the campus around solidarity with Palestine. The graduation was in our center for the arts, which is a producing roadhouse as well as being where our department produces its season. And whenever you have an event there, there's security bag checkers, like when you go to a major theatre or an athletic event, so that was also part of the experience. And for me, I was like, okay, so we need to start from the assumption that unless we shift as a department to say we don't want this, this is just what is provided to us as a service, right? The institution would say that this is a service that they're providing to us rather than a way of demonstrating hierarchy and dominance.
MEG: Yes, and I would add onto that, too, that a lot of campuses in the performing art center boom of the early 2000s built this architecturally into the structure of the campus, and the campus that I'm immediately thinking of is University of Maryland. University of Maryland, which Leticia can also speak to, has the Performing Arts Center, which is huge and hosts hundreds of events—producing from the theatre department, but also acting as a roadhouse with a performance series for the community—and then across the street is a giant parking deck, because across the street from that is the football stadium and all the athletics fields. And when you come in to go to your performance or sporting event, there is a police squad car parked at the bottom of the drive with its flashers on, so that the minute that you attend any kind of performance, the first introduction you get when you turn into campus space is a squad car with lights flashing. The explanation of the reason that the campus was built that way was so that the rest of the campus was protected from the people that come to events. I thought, what a weird way to structure your campus, to facilitate it for law enforcement and for parking fees. It's built into the architecture of the campus there, and I imagine it is not the only place.
MS: How might we enact anticapitalist values within our production seasons, recognizing that while we endure capitalism, theatre is real work and we need to compensate folks? What are models for funding seasons, justly distributing labor and assets, that might productively align with anticapitalist principles of abolitionism?
And I love what you just said, Megan, about campus parking. I have a video essay published in Liminalities about the intersections of campus parking and carcerality and prisons and police repressing protests on campus, but also financializing public land further and privatizing it.12 The university has taken the pandemic as an opportunity to further entrench campuses as spaces where you have to pay to go to anything on campus and present your ID when you show up. So how are we then putting on shows that sometimes charge? And that involves a lot of labor. But also, as a field, we are marginalized financially, except for a few token persons here and there. How do we walk that walk, and how do we produce performances that are anticapitalist or that have a critique of capitalism? And then just to add another meta-layer going back to the start of our discussion, how do we at the same time not fall into the other ditch of antitheatrical phobias where we lose the joy completely and can't make theatre unless it is confronting the depths of oppression in society and fighting the theatre itself? How do we keep the best of theatre, have fun, and bring joy while also taking on some of these concerns?
LL: A lot of our conversation thus far has emphasized how much of the influence that we do have is not over administration or even sort of departmental administration, but instead is with and through students, even our own children for some of us. These are the spaces that we can make a difference and help students learn how to advocate for themselves. Again, Bowdoin is a really weird place, and it's hard to extrapolate any sort of scale to anything that happens here for anywhere else. But a very promising thing happened last year, which is that we brought in a guest director to direct A Raisin in the Sun.
We are a PWI. We are traditionally super white, and it's only been within the last ten or fifteen years that the university has made a conscious effort to change that. But it has not changed faculty [racial demographics] yet in a meaningful way. It has changed the student population. So these students got in there [to the production] and they were like, "hold on. Why are we only getting half a credit for this?" And they self-advocated and came to us saying, "no, no, no, this is way too much work. We need to get paid for this. We are offering a service to the campus. You think this is so valuable that you hired an outside director, and you are putting our Black bodies onstage for all these white students to watch and we deserve some compensation." And they literally ended up getting paid and changing for the future students that everybody gets a full credit for being in a show at this point. And it was because through their work with like faculty in our department and in our Africana studies department that they were able to self-advocate in a way that was actually meaningful and could effect change.
We as faculty had long advocated for this change and the administration was like, "no, you're doing silly little plays. This is not a class." But when the students were able to present it in this different way, then all of a sudden, it was meaningful and useful. So, again, that is anecdotal, but I think that this idea of helping students recognize their value in these collaborative spaces and reinforcing the value that they do have [matters]. Administrators want students to think that they have very little power, and it turns out that they have an enormous amount of power. When they can come together, the administration does actually know that the school will not function without students. So, to me, that's a really fruitful place.
LLR: I'll just add, this is a very difficult conversation because as one of my colleagues said, "there's no getting outside of capitalism." We're all entrenched within it and we can work to try to find alternatives to break that system of capitalism, but it's so ingrained in everything that we do. Some of my frustration sometimes when I'm talking to other faculty members comes from the lack of awareness that we all are operating in a very capitalist structure. We're critiquing all these other places for how they're in a capitalist structure, without recognition that the university is deeply capitalist as well. That's not to say that the work that you're doing is not important, but we also need to look at ourselves.
I think one practical way—and I have not looked at anybody's budget for a production or anything like that—but I can pretty confidently say, I don't think any of our institutions are putting on shows to make money. So my sense is, we could start with questioning the function of even putting a price on the ticket. Is it because if we put a price on something, then we can name it as being worthy to be seen? Or is it something else? And if it's something else, then why does money need to be attached to a ticket per se? And how would that invite other folks who may have never gone to a show or seen theatre the opportunity to see a show by exchanging a service? How can we provide other opportunities to engage with the artform that don't rely on charging a price of admission? I think that's a very practical step that we can start having a conversation about.
NF: What I was thinking about is exactly what you were just talking about, Leticia: the ideology of capitalism, but also that universities are basically hedge funds where a lot of teachers work. This idea is a meme at this point. Universities are hedge funds with tremendously valuable real estate holdings. And so how does one do work within that? Where I teach is this little campus that's part of Emory that is intensely small, and my department is me. And so I do see the budget. I'm in charge and I have access to funds because I'm part of this corporation. What I try to do is fund radical work, either that I'm doing or that students are doing. And back to Misty's question about radical fun work—this Dustin Chinn play I did in the fall, which was a comedy, a satire, of the "great replacement theory" called Snowflakes, or Rare White People—fun and radical. So that's one way I funnel money into things that I'm doing, but I also bring local radicals to campus. And this is back to aaron's point from the previous question, which is that the campus police are already working with local police. And state police. And federal police. The university is already connecting with these law enforcement fraternities that extend far beyond the university. So I think the way to build power is to try to funnel that money. I brought the ATL Radical Art Collective to campus a few weeks ago and they taught students how to make stencils out of paper bags.13 You hide the spray can in the paper bag and put the paper bag on the ground and then spray your radical message on the sidewalk of the school—it's called a "bag and tag." It was funny because they were like, "we're not saying you should do this," but they had X-ACTO knives and they had around forty students make bag and tags. Funding events like this is an immediate, very quick, relatively easy thing that anyone who has access to any kind of money can do.
LL: To build on this point, I'll say, yet again, Bowdoin is weird. People don't have to pay for our shows. Students don't have to pay, the public doesn't have to pay, every single show at Bowdoin is free. But every single show at Bowdoin is free because some very wealthy person set that aside in an endowment, and it is absolutely tied up in capital. And to see how that spiderwebs together, one of the demands that our SJP chapter [Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine] made was literally just to disclose the investments that Bowdoin incorporated in. And our president wrote a completely bananas email that was like, "be very careful once you start investigating these things, all of that free stuff that you enjoy might not be available anymore." It was threatening the way the capital is used to serve students on campus, and there are very useful [End Page E-11] ways that that capital is used to serve students on campus. But it was amazing to me how quickly that became a cudgel.
MEG: In this world of creating cudgels in educational spaces, I do feel like participating in any kind of ungrading, or labor-based grading, or getting away from grade letters being punitive experiences for students especially as campuses become more diverse in their undergraduate populations, is a way to disrupt capitalism. The reason that I switched to almost exclusively ungrading, or contract grading, in my class is because what I noticed after a few years is that all my grades were penalizing students for their lack of preparation coming to the institution. And that is a capitalist situation, right? So I was punishing students who had gone to underfunded public schools. I was punishing students who didn't have parents who could tell them about how to write college papers. I was punishing students who didn't have tutors available through high school, rather than offering all students an equal field to work on their own skills in their own time through iteration. And I would also argue that iteration is the backbone of theatre and performance. We are versed in helping people think about iteration and how it's not about creating this sort of purchasable perfect product, but it is about engaging and growing through a process, and I always see that as a disruption to the capitalist exchange of tuition for grades.
DG: I appreciate these acknowledgments of how we're all embroiled in capitalism. One thing we haven't talked about is our season planning. I fantasize about one day directing The Cradle Will Rock [by Marc Blitzstein]—locking up the theatre on purpose and then breaking in and having people collectively sing "The Cradle Will Rock" at the end. A lot of the show takes place in a jail, with the fancy people being mad that they're unjustly locked up and taken for the bad agitators. At the end, I imagine that we march to the chancellor's house and demand free tuition, which we used to have in the UC system. So, I wonder, can we intervene through our programming onstage, but also organize some sort of attendant action so it really is theatre for social change.
MS: I love what you were saying, Donatella, about how we can prioritize performance content that is abolitionist and connect performance to local direct actions and movements. And I just want to add on to the ungrading. I went to a panel recently about abolitionist pedagogy, including ungrading and being flexible on deadlines. While that's important, it does feel like a kind of performance, because at the end of the semester, grades are due when the semester ends. Period. Furthermore, what I want to see talked about is, how does abolition mandate fun and joy in the classroom? Embodiment, collectivism, and play directly counter the university's project. Theatre can subvert higher education's curricular project bent on disembodying learning.
AME: I'm thinking about fun in the classroom and what obstacles there are to embracing abolition while also having this idea of taking care; because part of care and healing is joy, and play is so important to that. How do we maintain that balance of, yes, we can talk about the depth of complicity of our own institution and our systems, and therefore our own selves, and also look to cultivate moments of joy? I think it's so important to be doing that from the bottom up.
Speaking truth to power means speaking truth to our own institutional complicity in the occupation of Palestine, for example, which has been going on for so long. In theatre programs, we have already been working on the joy bit, and we've already been working on the depths of humanity bit, but without acknowledging our ongoing institutional, and therefore collective, theatre-world complicity in structural violence endemic to our institutions. It becomes a lot harder, and even more urgent, for us to think about how to integrate practices of joy, practices of play, with this kind of self-critical focus.
And I venture to say that a major obstacle to that, at least in my experience, is that I was not trained to do that for myself as a student, as a researcher, or as an instructor. And I don't think it's the case that my professors and my mentors were trained in all of that, and that they just decided not to share that with me; I think it's a systemic problem that's generationally compounded.
We might consider how much money is being taken up in the maintenance of carceral equipment and increasingly militarized systems on our campuses versus how much we're worrying about what ticket sales are going to be if we present a site-specific, experimental, anticapitalist piece instead of Rent, for example? And I just want to circle back to reemphasize campaigning. Because without deep, long-term, sustained work to identify obstacles to decarcerating our university, and without working across departments and also with organizations, organizers, and communities off campus, then we miss an opportunity to deepen what we could do with our productions and our pedagogy. With these collaborations, a production or a class project could really influence some kind of lasting change on our campuses and in our communities.
LL: We actually had an interesting experience just recently where instead of doing a formal dance concert, which we have always done on the big proscenium stage, we did what we called the Show and Groove, which was like a bunch of classes came together, the design classes created it, it was held in the gym, and there were dances on the floor throughout where they would move the audience out of the way. After the hip-hop class danced, everyone was invited to participate in a cipher. So you had students and little kids and activists and all of this. But there were a handful of students who hated it because they wanted the formal experience of dancing on the stage. And in our postmortem, one of the things that we realized was that we needed a lot more of this cross-community engagement that aaron was talking about. That we needed some of the activists from camp or from the community to come and to talk to the students about what this may mean to the community. Essentially, it gives them a little bit of responsibility: campus is not a closed world where you get to just have these kinds of isolated experiences; we are part of a web. And here's why it matters for you to use some of your capital in this space, to expand that web.
AN: Calls to defund the police on our campuses have frequently resulted in reform rather than abolition. Have you observed backlash to calls for abolition that in their efforts to reform policing actually invest even more in policing? What kinds of relationships are supportive in combating that backlash? And I'm thinking of literal policing—it's important to keep that a central component of this kind of discussion—but also institutional and departmental responses to calls to abolish the cop in our head, that kind of internal policing that we're doing to ourselves, to each other, to our students, how that cop in the head shows up on syllabi, in production, even perhaps in audience directives, whatever is being played in your pre-show.
MEG: I'm going take a sideways approach to answering this question, because there are some things that I would like to appear in this transcript that haven't come up yet.
I work almost every day with incarcerated people, and I want to make sure that when we're talking about abolition and the police state in the US, the people whose lives are perhaps most affected by this are also in the conversation. One of the things that this question makes me think about is, what is the obligation of the institution? The institution that is embroiled in capitalism, the institution that is a hedge fund, the institution that is part of the carceral system—what is that institution's obligation to incarcerated people? How do people work in a structure that is set up from a university to work with incarcerated people? I am deeply involved with a prison education program, and there are a lot of people who feel that we shouldn't be doing that, from an abolitionist standpoint—some abolitionists feel that we are feeding into the carceral system by working with, in our case, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) and ceding to their demands about how we interact with our students and how we do our classes and how we allow students to have relationships with one another.
And I think it's a difficult question. And it's difficult to work with undergraduate students who have an abolitionist politics but who also want to work in the prison education program, because in many ways they are at odds with each other. The way I have worked this out in my own mind is that education is a human right, and we are working around all of the elimination of human rights in the carceral system to provide people with an education, despite all the barriers that the Department of Corrections is constantly putting in our way.
When I think about abolition writ large, for a long time I thought about it from a stance of the many instances of wrongful conviction. We know that there's an enormous demographic of people who are locked away in the US who did not commit crimes. And I also thought about it from the standpoint of the lack of dignity in our carceral system. Spending time with incarcerated people has made me rethink this completely. To think about what is the point of punishment at all? Any sort of punishment? Punishment in the classroom for not coming to class, punishment in production for not coming to class, punishment in production for coming late to rehearsal or not knowing your lines, punishment by telling someone that they have to serve some outrageously long sentence—[all of this] isn't actually productive for anyone. Isn't getting us anywhere as a group of humans who are interested in pursuing life. In many ways, punishment is the opposite of pursuing life. When I think about abolition, I think about it for the folks who are incarcerated first and foremost, to make sure that we are not participating in a system that is removing human rights and human dignity from an enormous group of people.
LLR: Thank you, Megan, for taking it there. I shared with most of the people on this call, if you were at ASTR in New Orleans, that my father is incarcerated and has been incarcerated for most of my life. So carcerality, the police, has always been a fact of life. It has been so ingrained in me that I'm being policed and surveilled all the time that I have adopted these practices to sort of subvert surveillance from the police. And even in my best professor drag and a button up and some nice slacks, I cannot skirt the way that the police see my body. I'm very much aware of how I present even with all the credentials in the world.
In my Theatre Journal article, I talk a bit about my father calling me at that ASTR conference, and I hadn't talked to him for years.14 He asked, "what does theatre have to do with abolition?" I struggled to answer him. What does this matter to someone who's incarcerated, who's behind bars? And I think the question is not easy to answer, but I go to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's notion of the undercommons as a place where you can think about the work of abolition and our relationship to the police.15 We not only make the places where we are—institutions or the conference circuit or where we go that has nothing to do with our profession—safer for each other, but also think about what are the very small incremental changes that can push us into other realities beside the present one that we are currently in.
CEC: I appreciate the care and nuance Leticia and Meg brought to this question and want to reiterate the complexities of institutions feeding off one another—particularly the university and the prison. I think a lot about this with my research and work with incarcerated artists. Working within the university offers a type of "credential" that allows for creative and provocative programming to be "signed off on" by the prison—and this can be incredibly tricky, as Meg noted. This summer, a literacy group I work with got the green light to receive books for their classes. Before this opportunity, the group was only allowed short stories and essays. The first book selected by the writers was Animal Farm (next will be I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). I chuckled at the irony of these works making it through programming, until I thought about the new program manager who fiercely believes in the literacy group's mission. Essentially, because this individual said, "these are valuable books," we were able to send in those texts. So, with that, I don't think it's so much the institution that's "allowing" subversive material but an individual within the system working with the belief that these works and recovery groups matter. Yet we can see how fragile that is—with a different person in charge, the reading list could be vastly different—like one from Allegheny County Jail in 2020 that contained primarily white-centric classical canon.16 Echoing Leticia's and Meg's points, education is the way through—creativity and imagination are the ways through—and there's a reason we see imagination play out as a vital tactic in abolition politics. And since the system will not be dismantled overnight, I think using these wins of an approved book, an artistic group, or a helpful prison program manager can pay off.
DG: I had suggested this question to Ariel because there's this giant misconception that defunding the police actually happened on a national scale [after summer 2020]. And it did not. So here at the University of California, Riverside, we had a Cops Off Campus group. We did a car parade, chalking the walk, free coffee events, some of us published letters to the editor in the Los Angeles Times, and the student newspaper called for defunding the cops on campus.17 Despite all that, the solution from the University of California system has been a series of task forces and a town hall that have led to further entrenchments of the police. Now they are housed in this new thing called the Health, Well-being, and Safety initiative. This is the place that has basic needs like helping students who are struggling with housing and food; this is the place that houses the care advocates who help survivors of sexual assault. So the police are now being framed as akin to these actually helpful resources. In addition, there's been increased funding for the cops and there's also been a new segment of the cops that we call "polo police." They're unarmed, often students who wear polos, and the idea is that the problem is costuming. The problem was perceptions of the police, not the reality of the harm that they do. So this is a nicer, gentler police force. There's been a total rebranding and again more resources for the cops at UCR. That's just been so frustrating, and I don't think that our campus is an exception.
NF: Protest has been effectively outlawed at Emory for more than a year. This is probably the case for many universities. A year ago—before the solidarity encampments—there was a #StopCopCity protest where Emory called in state police.18 And there have been protests before then where the first thing they do is call state or city police and break up the protest immediately. At faculty meetings, it's quite frustrating for folks like me, like us, if we raise questions or critiques of police or, as Donatella was saying, bring research to the table. What often happens (or what's happened in my experience) is that then we have to listen to a lecture from a random cop that takes up the whole meeting.
The thing that I want to draw from this experience, which I'm sure many of us have had, is that it's very frustrating to talk to administrators and colleagues and then be faced with a situation where academic critique and dialogue become an impasse, a direct impediment to radical transformation. Or where a radical question or desire for transforming the world is met with, "well, we're academics, so we have to talk about it for two years and this has to go through four or five committees before people's lives can be saved." I mean, it's terribly frustrating and calls back to what Misty said earlier about the value of direct action. At some point, I am going to stop raising questions at faculty meetings because I don't want to listen to another cop monologue. And instead do other sorts of agitation, such as bringing radical artists to campus, making radical art on campus, participating in protests along with students, doing other sorts of direct actions in various ways. Because the standard, traditional machinery of our profession is ill-equipped to transform itself.
LLR: I'll also just add quickly about a moment recently at my current institution, and I'm in a different context now from the United States, so I'm still learning the differences of the social political environment in which I am now existing. At my current institution, there is a history and a legacy of student protests, and the university leans on that legacy as a banner of their liberalism. But when the encampment was facing a lot of critique from the administration, administrators were telling faculty members specifically, "we're in negotiations, we're not going to have police presence." Then when graduation ceremonies were beginning to happen, there was a push to get the police to dismantle the encampment. And it was the police who said, "we cannot do that," and the university of course started to backtrack. Again, I don't know the inner workings of what particularly made them not try to break it up, perhaps it was just optics. But I think what was interesting is that the students that are organizing the encampment, and also the faculty members that are liaisons for the encampment, created social media, a Twitter/X page, to combat the misinformation that the university was trying to put out and to annotate what was going in the mainstream news. Something we all need to keep in mind is that there is real, material consequences that supporting these causes can lead to.
MEG: I think that's super real too, because I had a similar thing—if I get arrested at this encampment, then I can't do my work with incarcerated people; IDOC can ban me. They can ban me for whatever they want to. This is hard because I don't want to risk the work that I'm doing with these students over here to support these students over there.
MS: I've been involved in prison programs and written about how educators can navigate the importance of providing education to all people and sharing campus resources for people who are incarcerated while also being critical of the way that the university co-opts outreach. At the same time, I directed a show about students' oncampus experiences of shame regarding past incarcerations, or those of family members, because we often act like no one on campus has experienced prison. The experience of incarceration is pervasive in the US. When we silence and other that experience, as though the problem is only elsewhere, we are contributing to the "carceral logic" of the university,19 which likes to see itself as a savior, separate from prisons and oppression.
AN: I think there is of course a lot more to discuss and say. I think the work that you all have been doing in the Zine but also in your conference events, and the way that those grow out of your own practices in your communities and at your institutions, is necessary and hopefully galvanizing. I think sometimes our professional organizations sidestep these issues a little bit because our disciplines are already vulnerable in so many ways. And it seems like we want to attend to those kinds of precarity rather than the ways in which we might be complicit in the oppression of others. So thank you so much for this conversation and the work that you have done and continue to do personally and as a collective.
Footnotes
1. Davarian L. Baldwin, "Why We Should Abolish the Campus Police," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-we-should-abolish-campus-police. See also Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).
2. Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators Network, "How to Grow Abolition on Your Campus: 8 Actions," Critical Resistance, 2020, https://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Grow_abolition_on_campus_2020_F-copy-1.pdf.
3. Meredith Conti, "Look to the Crisis Actors," Theatre Journal 70, no. 4 (2018): 439-41.
4. Julius B. Fleming, Jr., Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
5. See Hannah Riley, "At Emory University, Cops Are Using a Sledgehammer to Swat a Fly," The Nation, May 1, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/at-emory-university-cops-are-usinga-sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut.
6. Gilmore is also a self-professed "drama school doctoral-program dropout." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "What Is to Be Done?" in Abolition Geography: Essays toward Abolition, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2022), 26.
7. On this point, Misty recommends Yasmin Nair, "Who Loves Teaching? Free Speech and the Myth of the Academy as a Place to Love and Be the Left," Arab Studies Quarterly 33, nos. 3-4 (2011): 204-16.
8. Courtney joined our conversation off Zoom, via email.
9. This action item appears in the Abolition Zine.
10. Dream Defenders, http://dreamdefenders.org; Bay Area Dream Defenders (BADD SquaDD), https://www.instagram.com/bayareadreamdefenders.
11. FJP (Faculty for Justice in Palestine) Letter Condemning Police Intrusion on Graduate Commencement, June 5, 2024, https://bit.ly/3VvVBYs.
12. Misty Saribal, "The Commons: Carceral Castle Logics in Campus Parking," Liminalities 18, no. 4 (2022), http://liminalities.net/18-4/commons.html.
13. See @atlradicalart, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/atlradicalart.
14. Leticia L. Ridley, "A Grammar of Abolition: Black Theatrical Geographies," Theatre Journal 76, no. 3 (2024): 359-72.
15. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Study and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
16. Courtney E. Colligan, "'Surely Some Revelation is at Hand': Allegheny County Jail's Book Ban and the Road to Abolition," ALC Court Watch, November 30, 2020, https://alccourtwatch.org/acjbookban.
17. Ken Ehrlich and Donatella Galella, "Letters to the Editor: UC Doesn't Need Police 'Reform,' It Needs Cops off Its Campuses," Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-07/uc-doesnt-need-police-reform-it-needs-cops-off-its-campuses; Editorial Board, "Reform or Defunding—Either Way Change within the UCPD Is Long Overdue," The Highlander, July 1, 2020, https://www.highlandernews.org/75058/reform-or-defunding-either-way-change-within-theucpd-is-long-overdue.
18. Nicholas Fesette, "Abolitionist Laughter: The Joint Movement to #StopCopCity," Theatre Journal 76, no. 3 (2024): 303–22.
19. Carol Zou, "Against the Carceral Logic of the University," PUBLIC: Arts, Design, Humanities 5, no. 2 (2019), https://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/against-the-carceral-logic-of-the-university.