Project Title:  My Life in the Concrete Jungle
Recipient Organization:  San Francisco Sheriff’s Department
Fiscal Sponsor:  Cultural Odyssey  http://www.culturalodyssey.org/
Lead Artist:  Rhodessa Jones
Genre and Date Awarded:  Performing Arts, 2005
To Be Presented:  September 2006, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, San Francisco

Actress, singer, teacher, and writer Rhodessa Jones is collaborating with incarcerated women, ex-offenders, and other artists to create My Life in the Concrete Jungle, “a magical-realist journey into the heart of the American urban wilderness,” inspired by Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of the Ghost. 

Tutuola’s book is a nightmarish adventure of a young boy who is chased into the bush by African slavers.  While there, he experiences a variety of transformations and adventures, including phantasmagoric encounters with many of the ghosts and spirits found in African mythology as well as the specters of fear, death, homelessness, and disease.  Jones’s collaborative work will explore the parallels between the African myths that populate the bush and urban myths that inhabit American cities. 

The artistic team will include several gifted designers who will bring to it imaginative costumes, lighting effects, oversized puppets, masks, and video projections—creating an atmosphere in which the line between fantasy and reality is blurred.  The production will include live music, performed by guest vocalists and percussionists, who will blend African inspired world music with jazz and contemporary styles.

Building on work developed over 16 years by Jones and The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, a team of artists will enter county jail for months at a time where they will offer intensive workshops that identify, audition, and interview perspective participants for the performance development process. The workshop uses an improvisational structure, incorporating physical exercise, vocalization, and dramatic presentational techniques. 

One of the most important goals of the Medea Project and Sheriff Department’s mutual effort is to prepare inmates for their reentry into the community after their release and several ex-inmates have encountered The Medea Project and made incredible transitions back into their communities.  Jones has ascertained that increasing inmates’ self-awareness is necessary to their breaking the cycle of incarceration and probation, and the performance text for My Life in the Concrete Jungle will be based on the real life experiences of the participating women. 

In a departure from previous projects, participants will include male actors, musicians, spoken word artists and singers and professional dancers.  Jones believes that creating the piece outside of just a women’s forum and approaching the theatrical process like “the real world” can be extremely valuable. Working in a supportive atmosphere with men can be a positive step in the women’s rehabilitation.  Further, female inmates in the production will have to finish their sentences (short time offenders) in order to be in the performance.  This will further the Medea Project’s focus on the released inmate and her successful reintroduction into her community.

Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the performance company Cultural Odyssey and has created groundbreaking theater pieces based on the lives of women she has encountered while conducting classes in San Francisco County Jail.  Jones writes of her artistic vision:

Utilizing the written word and the spoken word, I have coined “Theater for the 21st Century,” which is the place where politics, culture, literature, and storytelling intersects with the personal made public.

The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department administers San Francisco’s six county jails and works to make San Francisco safe. In addition to its traditional law enforcement duties, the Sheriff’s Department has created some of the country’s most successful crime prevention programs, including in-custody substance abuse treatment, anti-violence counseling, and post-release job development.  The Department also consults with victims of crime in creating the curriculum for courses and providing direct services when needed.  The San Francisco’s Sheriff’s Department has partnered with the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women for more than 15 years.  This partnership involves allowing Rhodessa Jones and her team of artists to enter the county jail for months at a time. 

With cooperation and transportation provided by the Sheriff’s Department, the inmates will be able to perform the finished piece at Bay Area theatres, where they can celebrate their successes with family members and the general public.

Rhodessa Jones

Selected Awards

• SF Noir Kuumba Award for Excellence in the Arts, San Francisco, California (February 2005)
• Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, California College of the Arts, Oakland, California (May 2004)
• Individual Artist Fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission (May 2004)
• Goldie Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Bay Guardian (November 2003)
• Non-profit Arts Excellence, San Francisco Business Arts Council (May 2003)

Selected Performances and Residencies

• Artist in Residence, “Urban Voices Festival,” Johannesburg, South Africa. Conducted workshops at Women’s Correctional Centers in Johannesburg and Pretoria.  Performed “Big-Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women” and “In Search of Human Culture” at the Market Theater (July 2005)
• Director and Workshop Facilitator, Torino, Italy, conducted workshops in the Torino Women’s Prison, and included a performance with Italian women inmates.
• Scholar/Activist-in-Residence at Intercollegiate Women’s Studies of the Claremont Colleges (Fall 2005)
• Artist/Scholar in Residence, University of Texas, Dallas (January-February 2005)
• “Primal Intersections,” performance workshop co-taught with Guillermo Galindo (September-December 2004)
• Artist Responding to the War, residency, University of Wisconsin (October 2004)
• “Deep in the Night:  A Performance,” YARI YARI International Women Writers Conference, New York University, New York, New York (October 2004)
• La Mama International Directors’ Symposium, Spoleto, Italy (August 2004)
• King Hedley II, by August Wilson, role of “Ruby,” Lorraine Hansberry Theater, San Francisco, California (January-February 2004)
• Artist/Scholar in Residence, Stanford University, Institute for Diversity in the Arts (January 2004)

Lectures

• Keynote Speaker for the 26th Annual Conference of the National Association for Drama Therapy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (2005)
• “Blessing the Boats,” PICA Performance Festival, Portland, Oregon (October 2004)
• Women Leadership Conference, San Francisco, California (May 2004)
• ACLU Youth Rights Conference, with the Medea Project, University of California, Berkeley, California (March 2004)
• “Mining the Autobiography for the Stage,” Women on Writing Conference, Skyline College, San Bruno, California (March 2004)
• “Theater for the 21st Century,” University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California (March 2004)
• “Creative Performance/Creative Survival,” Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (February 2004)

Directing Credits

• The Things I Lost, performance by The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, University of California, Santa Cruz, California (January 2004)
• OG and the B-Boy, intergenerational musical with spoken word, San Francisco, California (March 2003)
• “Performing Community, with the Medea Project:  Theater for Incarcerated Women,” Rutgers University, New Jersey (March 2003)
• Blessing the Boats, by Sekou Sundiata, Aaron Davis Hall, New York, New York (May 2003)

Published Works

• “Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts,” Featuring Rhodessa Jones Keith Knight and Mat Schwarzman
• Rena Fraden, Imagining Medea:  Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women, forward by Angela Davis, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (December 2001)
• We Just Tellin’ Stories, film collaboration with The Medea Project:  Theater for Incarcerated Women,” with filmmaker Lawrence Andrews, awarded “Best Documentary” by the San Francisco Black Film Festival
• “Rhodessa Jones:  Theater for a New Millennium,” Extreme Exposure:  An Anthology of Solo Performance in the Twentieth Century, Theater Communications Group, New York (1999)
• “Deep in the Night,” a performance in Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 19, Numbers 2/3 (Summer 1998)
• “Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women,” in Colored Contradictions:  An Anthology of Contemporary African American Plays, Harry Elam and Robert Alexander, editors, Penguin Books U.S.A. (1996)