50 Years of Prison Theatre and 50 Questions for Constructing a Prison Arts Archive

2024 marks fifty years since the foundation of Stirabout, the first British theatre company formed specifically to take performances and workshops into prisons. It also marks the establishment of the Rideout Archive at the Bristol Theatre Collection.

The Staging Justice project seeks to contribute to, and develop strategies for, the emergent historiographies of arts in criminal justice. In service to this aim, I have written 50 questions for constructing a prison arts archive.

1. Does this count as a criminal record?
2. What would the keywords search be?
3. How do you begin to catalogue artistic practice created in such a hostile landscape?
4. What material remains closed for 100 years? Will there still be prisons then?
5. What does it mean to archive a population who is managed through record keeping?
6. What does documentation look like in a context where people are surveilled all the time?
7. Does time work differently in archives about prison?
8. Who/What is being archived?
9. Where does the archive live?
10. What material is there to document a look? A feeling? A sound? A smell?
11. Can you feel joy in this work?
12. Do we have to show the hard parts too?
13. Where are all the performances that no one ever saw?
14. Is it sometimes best that performance disappears in prison? Does this allow it to be more radical, vulnerable, funny?
15. Why is it important?
16. Do you have the material but you just can’t share it?
17. What will the public think? Who are the public anyway?
18. How does the prison paperwork, all the paperwork, demonstrate artistry?
19. Who decides on how the archive is shaped?
20. What does care look like when archiving material surrounding incarceration?
21. What does it mean for prison arts to be made in a boundaries space and then held in a boundaries archive?
22. How might the archive mirror the prison?
23. What other ways, beyond the archive, might prison arts offer to tell its own histories?
24. Who is this work for?
25. What is the story of this Collection?  
26. Do we learn anything?
27. How do artists document the artwork without exposing the incarcerated person?
28. What’s missing?
29. What remains?
30. What are the ethics of archiving the work of incarcerated artists?
31. What if I recognise you?
32. How big are the boxes?
33. Where are all the theatre reviews? Why don’t we review theatre in prison?
34. How do we capture the participants perspective on the material when we’re often not allowed or able to keep in touch with the participants?
35. If we don’t have permission to include your artwork, do we render you invisible by excluding you from the archive?
36. Are there ghosts in this archive?
37. What’s changed over the years? What if nothings changed?
38. What is the role of storytelling and oral histories in prison arts archives?
39. How do we honour the artists?
40. Who is allowed in to see it?
41. Is an archive the right place for this work? Why not the gallery? Or the stage? Or the cinema?
42. Do the permissions we have cover this?
43. Whose next to you on the shelf? Who will find you by happy accident?
44. What about the right to be forgotten? Does that extend to the art work?
45. What does this past mean in our present?
46. Can a prison archive ever be liberatory?
47. How might creating a historiography of arts and justice practice resist the contemporary deterioration of (cultural) life in prisons?
48. Is the artistry of relationality reflected in the archive?
49. Do the same rules apply?
50. What questions does this raise?