Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble - QSE's Prison Project

QSE's Prison Project

The Prison Project, started in 2006 under the name Arts in Community Enhancement is Australia's first and only Prison Shakespeare project, and Australia's only ongoing prison theatre program. It ran in Borallon Correctional Centre in 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Borallon Correctional Centre is now closed, and the program is expected to move to the South-East Queensland Correctional Complex in 2012 or 2013.

The Prison Project utilises a combination of Theatre of the Oppressed and Shakespeare performance to engage a group of volunteer prisoners with dramatic form. The project, typically of three months duration, culminates in a performance of Shakespeare's work in the prison for an invited audience of family members, prisoners, correctional staff, and other community members.

Central to the project is the belief that violent and/or anti-social behaviour often comes out of an inability to express negative thoughts and emotions in words. It uses theatre as a medium, since one of theatre's main tools is embodied language. Prisoners who have participated in the project report an increase in verbal communication skills, increase is self-worth, a sense of connection and belonging, a sense of achievement, and an increased sense of self. Prisoners simultaneously report that the Prison Project is the most challenging thing they have ever done and that the workshops and rehearsals were the only place in the prison that they felt they could truly be themselves.

The Prison Project's main objective is different to many of its therapeutic counterparts in Prison Theatre and/or Dramatherapy, which have rehabilitation as a direct goal (see for example the work of Geese Theatre). The most basic aim of QSE's Prison Project is to put on a play. In rehearsing a play for performance the rehabilitative side-effects become manifest: the project develops emotional bravery and self-awareness, social skills and self-confidence, individual dedication as well as the commitment to work as a member of a team.

QSE's Prison Project shares many similarities with Prison Shakespeare projects in the United State of America, the best known of which is Shakespeare Behind Bars, though it was not directly based on any of them. In 2011, the founder of Shakespeare Behind Bars, Curt Tofteland, visited QSE on a Fulbright Fellowship and traded skills with the facilitators of the Prison Project (as well as co-directing QSE's production of The Merchant of Venice.

The spirit and form of QSE's Prison Project owe a great deal to Brent Blair, an applied theatre practitioner and teacher from the University of Southern California, who traveled to Queensland in 2006 to train QSE in Theatre of the Oppressed and led the first week of workshops in Borallon Correctional Centre.