The art of living in prison: A pragmatist aesthetic approach to participatory drama with women prisoners

Across the fields of applied theatre and prison theatre, there appears to be little analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic engagement for participants in prison-based participatory practices. This article presents a pragmatist aesthetic frame that I developed to analyse the experience of a drama programme I ran in a women’s prison. This frame evolved alongside the practice, drawing largely from John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience and a selection of contemporary scholars who, influenced by Dewey, work in the areas of aesthetics, ethics and education – most notably Richard Shusterman (2000, 2008) and David Granger (2006). I also incorporated narrative within this frame as an interpretive and expressive structure for experience, and a key element within my applied theatre practice. I began to conceive aesthetics in terms of an ‘art of living’, identifying a ‘poetics of renewal’ that informed the selfand world-creation of participants in the drama. I share this theoretical framework as a possible way to integrate the instrumental and the aesthetic in applied theatre theory and practice, specifically in a prison context.