Kaneza Schaal: JACK & [Working Title]

As part of its Gender (in)Justice series of programming, the CAC will present a lecture-demonstration with New York theater artist Kaneza Schaal, visual designer Christopher Myers, and performer Cornell Nate Alston around the creation of their work, JACK &. The piece, which premiered at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center in October 2018 followed by performances at the 2018 BAM Next Wave Festival, considers re-entry into society after prison; focusing not on the time one has served, but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state.

During this discussion, Artists Kaneza Schaal, Christopher Myers and Cornell Alston will share the tools and materials employed to create JACK &. Attendees are invited into the creative, historical, and formal libraries of the production.

In November 2017, the CAC presented Schaal’s earlier work, Go Forth, which was created in association with Alston though he was ultimately unable to be released from prison for the performances. Schaal has worked on two occasions with Xavier University theater students and this presentation will be a collaboration between the CAC and Xavier, both the Performance Studies Lab and the Center for Equity, Justice, and the Human Spirit. Jo Kreiter gave a presentation at Xavier in February 2020, and the CAC will continue to include them in all aspects of Gender (in)Justice.

While the problems and problematics of mass incarceration in the United States have been recognized and acknowledged far and wide, the majority of initiatives both artistic and political have focused on the legislative and judiciary aspects of the problem; including sentencing guidelines, irregularity of prosecutorial conduct, and inconsistent application or access to legal structures. The stories from which these initiatives grow are indeed harrowing and thick with a kind of injustice that mirrors a societal analysis that separates the world into guilty and innocent parties, where the greatest miscarriage of justice is “the conviction or suffering of an innocent person” like some Perry Mason 1950s courtroom television show.

There are, of course, some narratives that blur these distinctions, asking important questions like, “Do larger social structures have a role to play, or some burden to shoulder, in the guilt or innocence of the party and/or their actions.” But still the question of guilt and innocence looms large in our national narratives about incarceration, the weekly crimes played out across our national consciousness.

What then of the more than two million people currently incarcerated in the United States, who may or may not be able to interrogate their predicaments in terms that are friendly to the guilt- innocence dichotomy provided by the SVUs, NCISs, and Murder She Wrote’s? Is there a way to think about the price we as a society pay collectively, for incarcerating or limiting the freedom of over two percent of our population? This question lies less in the guilt or innocence of the parties involved, but rather in the image we have of ourselves or our society. If the United States is a nation made of dreams, what happens to the dreams of these millions of people? What does that debt of dreaming do to us as a country? as individuals?