Stand Up Speak Out Festival: A Student Perspective
- Thelma Armstrong, BHCP student, uses her hands as a viewfinder
On one campus, students use their hands as viewfinders in order to learn about filming on cameras that remain out of their reach. At the other, students work in labs and studios, able to touch the equipment to film and edit pieces inspired by the work of their distant classmates. They all share one alma mater—Hail Marymount—although one version includes a rap. These are all MMC students, some attending classes in Manhattan and others enrolled in the College’s degree-granting program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women in Bedford Hills, New York.
The Bedford Hills College Program (BHCP) operates within New York State’s only maximum-security women’s prison. This spring, students from the BHCP and the main 71st Street campus participated in an artistic exchange as part of the College’s annual social justice-themed Stand Up Speak Out (SUSO) festival.
Exchange
The revised poems were made into storyboards and all of these Bedford Hills works were sent to 71st Street. Back in Manhattan, playwriting and illustration students began to create original pieces inspired by the poems, while film students executed the storyboards as short films. Before they started filming, filmmaking teams received voice recordings of the Bedford Hills students reading the poetry aloud and talking through their storyboards. For many of the 71st Street students, it was difficult to be so separated from their collaborators, but it also made this brief moment of connection more precious. “Not seeing their faces made hearing their voices louder,” said Theatre Performance major Alex Muscaro ’19.
For Max Berry ’21, one of the 71st Street playwrights, a major impact of watching the BHCP side of the project was appreciating the “genuine enthusiasm…. I so admire that.” Sofia Pipolo ’20, one of the filmmakers and the president of the Bedford Hills Club at MMC, also noted the creativity and humanity in the work received from the BHCP students. “They were so funny,” Pipolo said. “We watched the videos of the women explaining their storyboards…they were laughing at their bad drawings like we all do.”
Pipolo also shared how the Bedford Hills Club has been trying desperately all year to interact with the BHCP students at this level, but security barriers have made it exceedingly difficult. With restrictions on communication and what physical goods can enter and leave the prison, any collaboration between the campuses is difficult. For example, earlier this year a toiletry drive intended to support the incarcerated women was stalled and ultimately cancelled due to a security issue; the items collected were redirected to a nearby women’s shelter instead. Consequently, the success of SUSO felt like a unique achievement.
Connect
Something about the time crunch and the feeling of the responsibility within the atmosphere of the project required the 71st Street students to lean on one another in ways I hadn’t expected. Students at the main campus held one another accountable to the level of work that came from BHCP. For example, the playwrights gathered late one night, lounging on mats on the floor of a studio to share their work and receive feedback. Responding to the words of people they’d never met, who deal with circumstances very different from those in their own lives, led to some challenging conversations about the portrayal of different groups, the impact of aesthetic choices, and the ethics of expression. These types of group considerations and discussions aren’t entirely new for playwrights, but Visual Arts major Cydney Bittner ’21 explained that this style of work was a huge departure for the illustrators. Describing their challenge as the responsibility of “lending my skills to [the BHCP students’] freedom in their ability to do this,” Bittner explained the difficulty of portraying the full range of expression in the poetry without making assumptions about the BHCP writers. While they often work independently or with a single author, during this exchange the illustrators brainstormed together, teasing apart the poetry for central ideas and representative motifs. They pushed one another to emphasize these intentions over individual aesthetics.
Engage
Like most MMC students, I don’t think a lot about MMC’s mission on a daily basis; however, the College’s educational values were clearly demonstrated in this exchange. As two student bodies interacted and we each stretched ourselves artistically and intellectually, we began to develop the awareness of social, political, cultural, and ethical issues that an MMC education aims to cultivate. At MMC we often talk about using art for social change and being activists, but SUSO gave students the opportunity to move from talking about change to experiencing it in practice. In the past, I’ve often thought about how my work might land with an audience, but the focus here shifted to the presence and engagement of the creator. I urged playwrights explore the poetry they received and think about how they could interact with all of the complexities of the work, in addition to being mindful of the context. It was important to me that the purpose not be to make work about incarceration or to work with incarcerated women, but to honor the perspectives and integrity of all collaborators as artists.
At the end of the seminar, as Bedford Hills students were rushing out, there was no time for questions – I’ve realized that lateness and logistical delays are an obstacle common to all MMC students. However, the camera did capture one student who asked, “Will you tell them we said thank you?” Watching that, I wanted to respond to the BHCP students more than ever, if only to return the thanks.