March 26, 2008

When theater director, Sushama Deshpande first invited us to work with the sex workers from the VAMP* collective in Sangli we were filled with great excitement and anticipation. At Imaginaction we focus on working with marginalized communities using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. Thus, this was a unique opportunity that we immediately welcomed. It was of great joy for us to find ourselves in a group of women and men who exceeded any expectations we had and challenged many of our preconceived notions about the lives of people working in the sex business. We conducted a three day workshop where we used traditional Theatre of the Oppressed techniques such as Rainbow of Desire and warm up games as well as new techniques that have been recently developed by our Creative Director and workshop facilitator Hector Aristizabal. Hector combines T.O techniques with others influenced by his background in psychotherapy.

The following are some of our observations from the three day workshop in Sangli:

The group was completely open to exploring new theatrical ways to communicate and articulate their own individual stories which are a reflection of the larger community.

This openness was also manifested in the group’s willingness to use the techniques to express hopes, communal struggles, and challenges.

It was evident that a lot of work had been done in this community and with this particular group of people. It was manifested in the group’s comfort in expressing their voices and speaking of their experiences. For example, in many of the images they talked openly about their struggle with HIV/AIDS and domestic violence.

The people we worked with were comfortable with whom they are. They were willing to explore their internal contradictions and discuss their daily difficulties.

The images created during the workshops were incredibly descriptive of scenes from many oppressions they face such as police oppression, illness and the struggles between tradition and the way they live their lives.

There were impressive images of alternative solutions to community challenges. The images that the group created in three days were creative and more advanced than most of the groups we work with in the United States.

It was a great pleasure to work with the women in Sangli not only because they were beautiful and giving but also because our experience with them emphasized yet again the power of theatre and the arts to transform. It is clear that their work in theatre has inspired them to share their stories with dignity as well as explore and imagine, as a community, in nonjudgmental yet critical ways, alternatives and solutions that are not imposed but organic and stemming from the genuine desire and commitment to look at ones life and community.

Finally, we would like to thank Sushama Deshpande and the whole staff at SANGRAM* especially Meena Seshu who allowed us to be part of the great work they are doing. It was a life impacting experience.

In solidarity,

Hector Aristizabal

Vivien Sansour

www.imaginaction.org

VAMP*

For details on their play

SANGRAM*

Launched in Sangli, India in 1992, SANGRAM (Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha) reaches out to women in prostitution in 6 districts in Maharashtra and Karnataka’s border areas. Condom distribution is a central activity of this peer education organisation, whose goals include creating awareness about HIV/AIDS and methods of prevention, altering behavioural patterns, and enforcing preventive action.

For more information

On October 31′08 our Olive Tree Circus Puppettistas were attacked with other Internationals while participating in a non-violent demonstration in Bili’n.

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Internationals in Palestina

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Dear Friends,
To read about the circus visit Deema Dabis, Our amazing fire
dancer.writer, blog. She knows how to capture a moment and she does an
amazing job taking you through her words on the journey with us to
Palestine. Her blog can be accessed from our website under News or
through the link below.

Deema Dabis blog

When Kids Get Locked Up - Duc Ta’s Story by Diane Lefer

Sometimes I forget not everyone’s been to prison. So if you want to come along with me to visit my friend Duc Ta, first you’ll need to get a visiting form approved-a process that may take months. Then you’ll need a new wardrobe. A visitor can’t wear denim or dark green or a t-shirt with writing on it or footwear without back straps or an underwire bra or a shirt that exposes any skin if you reach your arms way above your head and stretch real hard. You can carry a purse or pocketbook made of clear plastic or, if you don’t want to invest in one, a Ziplock bag will do. In it, you place $30 in singles or change to buy lunch from the vending machines, your picture ID, your car key (no clicker), and an unopened packet of tissues in a see-through wrapper. You can’t carry a gift, newspaper, paper, pencil, and if you’re going to need tampax, bring quarters for the vending machine inside and hope it’s not broken or empty. You’ll also need to learn a new vocabulary. OK, let’s go.

A lot of you probably already know about Duc’s case, as he was featured in Juvies, Leslie Neale’s eye-opening documentary about the juvenile in/justice system that tries minors as adults. (Check it out at www.juvies.net)

A quick refresher: In 1999, when he was sixteen, Duc drove the wrong kids home from school-gang members who lived in his neighborhood. A gun was fired out the window. No one was hit. No one injured. Duc was arrested, tried as an adult, represented by an indifferent public defender, and sentenced 35 years-life.

I thought an “enhancement” made something more attractive, but in Duc’s case it meant the mandatory imposition of additional years for his presumed gang membership. Though he’d grown up in poverty and in a gang-infested neighborhood, Duc had always resisted and refused to join any gang. He got another “enhancement” - more years because of the presence of the gun. What I later learned when I got to know him better, the court heard he used to ditch school but didn’t hear he spent that time not getting in trouble in the streets but rather wandering the galleries at LACMA and the Norton Simon. The court heard from a “gang expert” who knew him, but didn’t hear she had met him not as a banger but as a child who’d suffered severe abuse from his father.

Nine years have passed since the trial. Duc has never seen the documentary. His life within the prison system didn’t end when the camera stopped rolling.

The first time I went to Corcoran State Prison to see him, I got up before dawn for the 180-mile drive up 99, the gulag highway, where almost every town has a prison. So I drove three hours-grateful that I own a car–hoping I would not arrive to find everyone on lockdown and visiting privileges canceled. The guard at the gate told me I was in the wrong place. “You want the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility.” Strange. Duc doesn’t drink or uses drugs but it turned out the “Substance Abuse Treatment Facility” is actually a “level 4-180 yard,”-maximum-security prison for California’s most violent felons. That made even less sense than Duc being in for substance abuse. The inmates there are “cell-fed,” because it’s too dangerous to let them in the same room for meals. To prevent prisoners from signaling one another, all the windows have been painted black and not a single ray of natural light enters.

I asked, “What are you doing here?” It turns out Duc actually requested a transfer to Corcoran in order to get out of Tehachapi, also maximum security, because of the pervasive racism. As one of the few Asians, he was a constant target of racial violence from inmates while guards harassed him for having white visitors. He spent a year in the Security Housing Unit for his “own protection,” where he was kept in solitary confinement and protected–from books. During those twelve months, a friend on the outside helped keep Duc’s mind and soul alive by photocopying whole novels and mailing them to him, pages at a time, in envelopes thin enough that they wouldn’t be confiscated. During his years in prison, Duc has been beaten and stabbed and has witnessed countless acts of brutality, but he says, “If I survived the SHU, I can survive anything.”

Though the California Department of Corrections is now the CDCR, with the “R” standing for “rehabilitation,” there are no programs to assist prisoners like Duc with higher education. For years, the authorities even blocked his attempts to take the high school equivalency exam. Friends on the outside raised money to pay his tuition for a college correspondence course-an opportunity most prisoners don’t have.

Here’s another “R” word: “restitution.” At Corcoran, I found Duc was working double shifts at his prison job, at 18 cents an hour to raise the $4,000 he owes. I used to think “restitution” meant compensation paid to a victim. There was no victim in the incident which led to Duc’s arrest but the State automatically takes 55% of his earnings to pay back the cost of prosecuting him.

Since Duc was featured in Juvies, people have rallied round him. Mark Geragos took his case pro bono and got the “enhancements” thrown out. More than two years ago, Duc’s sentence was reduced and he was ordered to be transferred out of maximum security, but two years later, he was still there. As the sentence remains indeterminate, the State can still keep him for life. Statistics show that youths who are tried as adults tend to get harsher sentences than real adults for comparable crimes. Duc has already served more time than some adults who’ve actually killed people.

Of course, his friends all waited and hoped he’d make parole. A small problem arose: Duc was told he had to complete an anger management class before going before the Parole Board-a date that keeps getting postponed–but at Corcoran, only inmates on psychiatric meds are allowed into the class.

Duc’s supporters finally managed to get him transferred out of max so that he could fulfill the anger management requirement. He was moved to Pleasant Valley State Prison, famous because the disease Valley Fever is endemic in the institution. Almost all inmates contract it after which they either develop immunity or suffer permanent organ damage.

Hector and I have only been to Pleasant Valley once as the prison has been on almost continuous lockdown-no visits permitted. Duc was happy, though, when we saw him. He had a new prison job, counseling other inmates, doing gang intervention and substance abuse counseling. He loved the work but he was being advised to quit. Now he’s told he must complete vocational training before the Parole Board date. The Associates degree he earned behind bars doesn’t count. His skill with computers doesn’t count. The fact that Mark Geragos talked about hiring him as a paralegal doesn’t count. And the counseling-which he would like to make a career-doesn’t count. At Pleasant Valley, he’s been advised to enroll instead in the approved vocational program that would train him for a lucrative career in…floral arranging.

That’s the world Duc lives in. And he’s one of the lucky ones, with champions on the outside and his own intelligence and strong spirit. If he gets out soon, I’m sure he’ll do well, but how much longer will he be able to keep his personality and integrity intact?

A few hours after I posted a version of this essay at LAProgressive.org, the phone rang with the news that Duc had contracted Valley Fever, a case severe enough to require lung surgery. He’s been transferred to a hospital in Bakersfield where he’ll be undergoing treatment - drugs with potentially severe side effects - for the next month or two. Today is October 22, 2008. If you want to send Duc a get well card in the hospital this fall, you can write him at Michael Duc Ta, #T05249, c/o Mercy Hospital, 2215 Truxton Avenue, Bakersfield, CA 99301; Attn: Guardian Unit, 5 West, Lt. Ellis.

And any Californian who can write a letter of support and express interest in hiring Duc should get in touch with us at imaginaction.org re your valuable support in writing once he gets a date with the Parole Board.

A Conversation with Hector Aristizábal
About Torture and Transformation
Diane Lefer
The Sun Magazine

Hector Aristizábal was born in Medellín, Colombia, a city plagued by violence from the drug trade and from the country’s decades-long civil war. His poverty-stricken neighborhood was a prime recruiting ground for what he calls the nation’s “four armies”: the Colombian military, the guerrillas, the right-wing paramilitaries, and the cocaine mafia. He recalls, “I buried most of the kids with whom I played soccer.” He assumed his own life would be short, too, but then he escaped into books and theater and “won the lottery”: a scholarship to Antioquia University.

In 1982 Aristizábal was working as an actor-director and studying for his master’s degree in psychology when the family home was raided by soldiers. Under the Estatuto de Seguridad - Colombia’s version of Homeland Security - citizens were encouraged to report any suspected subversive or terrorist activity by their neighbors. A priest had turned in Aristizábal’s younger brother after overhearing the boy talk politics. When soldiers found “subversive” literature in the home, both Aristizábal and his brother were taken into custody.

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Interview by ALICE OLLSTEIN, The Oberlin Review

Actor and activist Hector Aristizabal had to leave his home country of Colombia in 1989 after enduring torture under the military regime. He has since worked in Los Angeles and around the world using a technique developed in Brazil in the 1960s called “Theater of the Oppressed,” in which workshop participants can express their views on different social issues by forming images and scenes with their bodies. This past weekend, Aristizabal came to Oberlin to hold workshops at both the high school and College that explored the tension between the College and town, educated about globalization and celebrated the power of youth.

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by Janice Kennedy, The Ottawa Citizen

Twenty-five years after he landed in a Colombian torture ‘chamber,’ Hector Aristizabal has devoted his life to ending torture

On a bare stage, armed with a few small props, Hector Aristizabal lures people into the darkest horror of his life.

His one-man show is called Nightwind, a true story of imprisonment and torture, and he tours it around the world wherever people are engaged in discussions of the brutality human beings inflict on one another.

A Colombian now living in California, Mr. Aristizabal, 47, was in Ottawa last weekend to perform Nightwind at the Quaker Initiative to End Torture conference.

“We go to bed at night knowing that, in our name and with our money, people are being tortured.” With the burden of his own experience, he says, that is an unbearable thought.

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Dana Parsons, Los Angeles Times

Torture is a juicy little lunchroom or talk radio subject. Should it be used? How would you react? How much could you take?

But lunch ends and people go back to work. The radio host moves on to another topic. People get on with their lives.

Except, that is, people like Hector Aristizabal, who brought his one-man dramatic performance and 25 years of memories to a Cal State Fullerton philosophy symposium on torture the other day.

It was not a comedy.

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by Joe Piasecki, Pasadena Weekly

For Hector Aristizábal, the stage is a place of terror and rebirth.

In 1982, soldiers took him and his brother, Juan Fernando, from their home in a war-torn Colombian village on suspicion of involvement with anti-government Marxist rebels. For a week they suffered physical and psychological pain — electric shock to the genitals, beatings, near-drowning in a bucket of dirty water, even a mock execution with bullets whizzing past their heads — difficult enough for anyone to describe, let alone experience, though it’s been the fate of thousands.

But re-living his torture has been the only way Aristizábal, now a psychotherapist and part-time actor living in Pasadena, has been able to deal with it. And acting out the trauma in front of an audience, he says, is as much a tool for healing as it is an opportunity for activism.

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The Hindu

‘Theatre of oppression’ uses games and exercises to create images of a situation of oppression for the target audience.

Hector Aristizabal — Photo: N. Balaji

Theatre can be used to heal, to teach and to bring about change. So, Hector Aristizabal, a Colombian who now lives in California, is in India to take his shows hopefully to Gujarat among other places. He talks to R. Sujatha of his experiences and aspirations.

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