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Athabasca's Going Unmanned : An Ethnodrama about Applied Theatre Research with Incarcerated Youth (2009-2010)
Athabasca's Going Unmanned : An Ethnodrama about Applied Theatre Research with Incarcerated Youth (2009-2010)
Following the three years of applied theatre research with the youth, the play writing process occurred from January 2009 to January 2010. The sources drawn on for creating the ethnodrama included researcher/facilitator field-notes and journals recording and reflecting upon participant observations of the day-to-day lives of the youth within the context of incarceration – notes on what the youth said and the interactions amongst the group members, as well as notes and reflections on the processes of the creative work together; along with all of the artefacts from three years of applied theatre work together including: youth devised drama scripts, transcribed stories, poems, digital photographs, digitally manipulated photos, digital stories, drawings, other visual art/craft works, and video recordings of dramas and other activities. The writing process, with the assistance of a professional dramaturge, professional and youth consultants involved eight drafts of the play script. The play was work-shopped and produced in February 2010 in collaboration with the University of Alberta’s Department of Drama, Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation, involving a professional director, a cast of six professional actors, and a crew of five including a professional stage manager and designer, as well as a fight director and video director.
Plot synopsis: Athabasca’s Going Unmanned, set in a youth offender jail in Alberta, Canada tells the story of three incarcerated youth and the corrections staff who work with them. Focusing on an escape plot hatched by the youth, through video projection and live performance, the play addresses the research questions by examining the needs of the youth and the prospects for offering them programming with transformative potential.
The action begins on Val’s (Caucasian female) first day at her new job as the Program Director at the facility and spans over a two and a half month period. A week prior to Val’s first day, a young man Randy (Métis male) was admitted to the facility, charged with assault, awaiting trial. Other longer term inmates include Wesley (Cree male), in jail for matricide, and Stan (Caucasian male), a repeat offender. Other staff, whom we meet, include Eileen (Cree female), who Val hires to run the Native and Drama programs, and Jim (Caucasian male), another corrections staff member. While the story progresses linearly for the most part, it jumps in time so we see only fragments of action. Interspersed throughout the play, disrupting the plots linearity, are scenes in video – nine in all including a prologue and epilogue – projected on a screen. These video scenes are alternative endings to the play – representations of the characters’ fantasies or fears in relation to a potential escape plan that is the driving force of the play’s action. The escape plan is initiated by the boys – primarily Wesley, but in which all the characters (except Jim) become implicated. Whether the escape plan is real – actually executed, successful or failed, performed or imagined remains ambiguous. In Boal’s forum theatre style, the forward movement of the plot ends at a high point of action without resolution – a moment of crucial decision-making regarding the escape plan, on the parts of the play’s main protagonists, Val and Randy. The alternative endings interspersed throughout are offered as possible outcomes to the potential choices the characters make – again, similar to forum theatre where various strategies are tried out in search of alternative solutions to the problem presented. In this case, audience members are called upon to make sense of the ending for themselves. This deliberate ambiguity draws attention to the multiple performative possibilities and highlights opportunities for doing things.
Media
Edmonton Journal February 19, 2010
Alberta Native News February 2010
Edmonton Examiner February 10, 2010
Express News February 12, 2010
Publications & Presentations
Conrad, D. (2011) Athabasca's going unmanned: An ethnodrama about incarcerated youth. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Preview available: https://www.sensepublishers.com/files/9789460917745PR.pdf
Conrad, D. (2010, February). Athabasca’s Going Unmanned, [Play production]. Centre for Theatre Creation, Department of Drama, University of Alberta. Edmonton, AB.
Conrad, D., McCaw, K. & Gusul, M. (2009). Ethnodramatic playwriting as collaborative work. In W. Gershon (Ed.) Working together in qualitative research: A turn towards the collaborative (pp. 165-184). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Conrad, D. (2012, May). Athabasca’s Going Unmanned: An ethnodrama about applied theatre research with incarcerated youth. Panel: Practice-based Research in Canadian Theatre. Canadian Association for Theatre Research, Waterloo, ON.
Conrad, D. (2011, April). Athabasca’s Going Unmanned: An ethnodrama about applied theatre research with incarcerated youth. AERA, New Orleans, LA.
Conrad, D. (2010, July). Athabasca's Going Unmanned: Applied theatre research with incarcerated youth. International Drama/Theatre & Education Association, Belem, Brazil.
Conrad, D. (2010, May). Ethnodramatic playwriting as collaborative work. CERA Symposium: The collaborative turn: Working together in qualitative research. CSSE, Montreal, QC.
Conrad, D. (2009, July). Performing incarceration: Applied theatre with incarcerated youth. International Drama in Education Research Institute. Sydney, Australia. dramatic reading
Conrad, D. (2008, June). The ethics & aesthetics of performing Incarceration: Dramatizing applied theatre-based research with youth in prison. CSSE, Vancouver, BC. dramatic reading
Stan's Comic from the 2010 production of Athabasca's Going Unmanned. Artist: Mark Jenkins.
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