CLAIMING THE JUSTICE NARRATIVE

The Claiming the Justice Narrative media and advocacy project seeks to support recent incursions in the felony court space by furthering alternatives to incarceration policy shifts.

Led by member organizations Recess, The Confined Arts, and The Phoenix Players Theatre Group, the Arts, Justice & Safety Coalition is launching Claiming the Justice Narrative. This project, the first collaborative arts exchange among members of the Arts, Justice, and Safety Coalition, will generate a stage performance, collateral video documentation and research data for present and future coalition advocacy efforts. This project demonstrates the efficacy of the arts as a tool for transformation and envisioning alternatives with those most impacted by the carceral system. This production will bring together the expertise and lived experiences of artists, system-impacted individuals, scholars, researchers, and activists. ​

TIMELINE AND PHASES

We have created a three-phase process: recruitment, workshop, and production. 
  1. Recruitment Phase - Identify key organizations and participants from those organizations to take part in the collaborative process.
  2. Workshop Phase - Took the form of a circle of sharing between organizations and participants to create a hybrid, intergenerational, cross regional community. To encourage orientation towards the development of material for a final product, the workshop phase will also include a variety of sharing opportunities, including but not limited to open mics and coffee houses to share works-in-progress over the course of the summer.
  3. Production Phase - We have collaborated with the Broadway Advocacy Coalition to develop an engagement strategy for the debut of the artistic performance in the presence of our targeted audience.
We are working with an intergenerational cohort of artists and advocate who have been directly-impacted by the criminal legal system. We have complete the Workshop Phase, in which we provided eight total workshops, hosted by four different organizations (Recess, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, Dances for Solidarity, and Pheonix Players Theatre Group) towards the development of material for a final multimedia theatrical event for the Spring of 2022. In this series of 8 workshops, participants shared in a cross-generational dialogue, which centered healing and the undoing of narratives surrounding the ‘criminal’. Exploring various artistic mediums, the group collectively conveyed truer, more complex, personal stories that portray their humanity. 

How has your story been mistold?

The material developed within these small-group workshops will build performance craft and unearth ideas for a theatrical presentation in spring 2022.

Email inquiries to: claimingthejusticenarrative@gmail.com