Aesthetics of Truth-Telling: Intercultural Applied Theatre Praxis in an Australian Women’s Prison

Abstract

Our Ancestors, Our History, Our Lost Culture was a devised theatre performance that I developed with women inside Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre (BWCC) Australia in 2017. The performance was based on a memoir from the Stolen Generations: the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from tribal homelands and separated from family in Australia throughout the early nineteenth century up until the 1970s. The intergenerational trauma of these forced removals continues, as do the wider structural inequalities brought about by the colonial project, including the crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration. Indigenous leaders refer to this as the “torment of powerlessness” (Referendum Council, 2017) and believe that there must first be a process of truth-telling before healing and reconciliation can occur. An example of Applied Theatre as Research (ATAR), the purpose of the project was to investigate how a group of incarcerated women would engage aesthetically in representing a story from the Stolen Generations; and how applied theatre in this contemporary carceral context might be used as a mode of truth-telling. This paper describes how the project reflected an aesthetics of truth-telling, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous women came together to interpret and represent the complexities of this troubling history, and to gain a deeper understanding of its place in contemporary Australian culture.