Beauty Where It Is Intended For There To Be None

Beauty Where It Is Intended For There To Be None.

Yesterday I spent three hours in unit 4 of the Sterling Men’s Correctional Facility.

After coming home last night, when Eric asked me what it was like, all I could think to say was . . .

“Beautiful”.

Not the encircling billows of razor wire above me, not the series of locking electric doors loudly announcing their impenetrability, not the aggressively institutional grey of everything my eyes fell upon.

I was there to see the first performance of an original theater piece, the experience of which began, not inside, but in “the yard”.

So, the beautiful thing, or I guess what I mean to say is the beginning of the beautiful thing was to walk through a corridor of men flanking each side of the walkway into unit 4, who stood exactly 3 feet apart, and held 8x10  pieces of art in colorful contrast to their uniformly drab clothing; each man repeating a unique couplet –

“If you choose to learn from me then we are good. But if you don’t …

“I knew my father never wanted me, so my own kids? My kids mean everything to me….

“There is more to me than just these decisions I’ve made….

“You don't know what it’s like to be beat like that…

The beautiful thing continued as I joined a stream of the prison’s residents as we made our way through the swirling voices of (what I later learned they call) “The Hall of Humanity”until I spotted Dr Ashley Hamilton, a force of God’s nature and the executive director of the Denver University Prison Arts Initiative. When we embraced I tear up – “Ashley. It’s….it’s…”

“I know,” She sparkles “Just wait.”

Inside.

Dr. Hamilton walked me the rest of the way through the HOH and into housing unit 4 which, under her direction had been transformed into a theater – complete with professional lighting and sound equipment, and seating for 100.

I am handed a program and shown my seat between Major Brandon Peil and an incarcerated man named Will.

I’m not good at sitting still. In fact, I had to knit my way through every class in college and graduate school; my busy hands stilling my busy mind. But yesterday as I watched If Light Closed Its Eyes; a verbatim documentary play created from 100 interviews of incarcerated men, correctional officers, district attorneys, survivors/victims of harm, and spiritual leaders, exploring the shared humanity across the criminal justice system, I did not shift in my seat even once.

For two hours I was caught up in masterfully acted narrations of trauma and destruction, anger and forgiveness, rage and love - all punctuated by the movements of 10 modern dancers - large goateed white men with shaved heads, young Black men with perfect braids, a small framed Native man with a long dark ponytail, a blonde young man with a large face tattoo…all gracefully and unapologetically moving their bodies in varied expressions of human experience and emotion. The performers, both actors and dancers, embodied a disarming emotional presence (perhaps in defiance of their designations and setting) for every moment of the piece.

To witness this play was to witness a deep honoring – of these men, of their pain and brilliance, of the stories from 360 degrees of experience of prison and harm, of shared humanity and inquiry and of the audience itself.

It isn’t just watching an original theater piece inside a housing unit of a maximum security prison staged and performed at a professional level by incarcerated men that made the experience so beautifully subversive - it was the content itself.

As a member of the audience I was offered the story of parents whose son was murdered next to the story of someone who had taken a life, next to a correctional officer whose experience working inside a prison made him a concealed carry advocate, next to a fair-minded District Attorney, next to a guy serving time for the attempted murder of 36 year old who was sexually assaulting the guy’s 12 year old sister, next to a former cop now serving time for vehicular homicide, next to the head of prisons for the state of Colorado. Each story allowing for the humanity of the person it belonged to.

This willingness to honor the humanity of people who differ from us, especially ideologically, (rather than defaulting to assumption about what their social locations and designations mean about them), is something our society is woefully lacking right now.

“God is in the love between us.”

One of the characters in If Light Closed Its Eyes (which is to say, one of the people interviewed for the project, portrayed by an actor inside the prison) was a minister who had accompanied Cory, a man convicted of several murders, through his last two weeks of life before being executed. When the minister was asked why he was willing to see the humanity in someone like Cory, he responds “Because if God is love, then God is in the love between us. And if there is not room in the heart of God for Cory, then there is not room in the heart of God for me.”

I felt convicted as I drove the two hours back home last night, convicted of whose humanity I am willing to acknowledge as shared with my own and whose I resist and at what cost to my own soul.

Am I willing, I asked myself, to acknowledge a shared humanity with the guy in the airport last week who had a t-shirt on that made me think, “fuck that guy”. Is my assessment of him based in any real understanding of his heart and his life and his joy and his sorrows - that is to say, his humanity - or is it all based in what I am told on-line what his shirt means about him? (I am slowly working on an essay right now about our shared hatred of one another and what has fueled it and how I feel incapable of knowing how to escape it, but how dehumanizing the dehumanizers is something my soul can’t take anymore…)

So, yes, . . . the 3 hours I spent in the Sterling Prison yesterday . . . beautiful.

Find out more about the extraordinary work of the DU Prison Art Initiative Here.