CCA News
Hamlet on Alcatraz Island
Posted on Tuesday, September 28, 2010, by Jason Engelund
This fall the performance group We Players will present Shakespeare's Hamlet on Alcatraz Island, and recent graduate Anna Whitehead (MFA Social Practice 2010) has been heavily involved in the project. She was awarded a Center Student Grant to work with at-risk youth, people incarcerated, and people on probation to create large-scale puppets and masks that will be used in the play. Hamlet opens Saturday, October 2, and continues through November 21. Audiences will get to see parts of Alcatraz Island that are not regularly open to visitors.
Anna says: "I got connected with We Players through Rhodessa Jones, a performance artist, activist, and founder and artistic director of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. Rhodessa and I had long been in touch about ways I could get involved with the Medea Project, and she knew Ava Roy, director of We Players. Rhodessa thought Ava and I would make a good partnership—which was spot-on, and ironic considering we live literally three blocks from each other but had never met!"
We Players was invited by the National Park Service to create performance art on Alcatraz focusing on themes of isolation, incarceration, justice, and redemption as well as the island's diverse and deep histories. We Players specializes in bringing communities together by creating site-specific performances, transforming public spaces into sites for participatory theater.
Anna trained in puppet theater in Philadelphia (before she came to CCA for her MFA) at Spiral Q Puppet Theater. "Spiral Q is fairly unique in the country as a theater working from a community-arts and activist model. They were founded by Maddy Hart, who learned puppeteering at the historic Bread and Puppet in Vermont and was interested in bringing that artistic sensibility to the AIDS activism he was doing in Philly with ACT UP. At Spiral Q, I did artwork with activists working against AIDS and gentrification as well as ex-incarcerees, public school youth (who, by nature of Philly public schools and urban policy, are usually "at-risk"), and adults in drug recovery. We primarily did puppet pageants and parades together, but I also occasionally taught music, movement, and performance workshops.
"At CCA, I did a lot of puppet and performance work, and that became my primary medium. I did some giant puppetry with folks at New Chicago Barbershop in the Fillmore in SF, and I performed with puppets based on community stories in Sweden as part of a CCA residency at galleri bob there. I wasn't working with folks in corrections while at CCA, but getting a lot of experience doing one-on-one puppet-based community projects."
As her primary inspirations among CCA's faculty, Anna credits John Jota Leanos, Violeta Luna, and Ted Purves. "They are all dedicated to using performance and art for social movement. They aren't necessarily working directly with the same communities I do, but they are using activism to inform their art practice, and in turn using art as a community-based media form."
For more information on We Players' production of Hamlet and to purchase tickets, visit weplayers.org and the We Players Project Blog.