Rhodessa Jones is the co-artistic director of Cultural Odyssey a San Francisco based theatre company. She is also an actress, a teacher, a singer, and a writer.
She is well known for her work with incarcerated women and women living with HIV, as she saw a parallel between the two during her workshops and teaching.
Image from Urban Voices/ The Medea Project
(http://www.urbanvoices.co.za/?p=176)
The Medea Project is an annual production that is still touring to date, with the aim of empowering women whose voices haven’t been heard. White explains, “Rhodessa began [The Medea Project] in 1990 to help incarcerated women by creating original theatre pieces based on the women’s personal histories” (2000, p.145). It has suffered criticism for “making prisoners out to be stars,” but despite this is a popular production up to date. Rhodessa Jones has even won awards for her work with incarcerated women and HIV positive women or those affected by it.
Some of the performances included within the Medea Project are:
- Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women
- Buried Fire
- Dancing with the Clown of Love
The project Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women began with Rhodessa Jones being enlisted to teach aerobics to female inmates at San Francisco County Jail. Her relationship with the prisoners developed as she learned their experiences leading up to their imprisonment and their stories of how and why they were imprisoned. Rhodessa taught them to take responsibility for their actions, empowering them to survive through their experiences and use them to grow and to use theatre as a therapeutic outlet. Rhodessa met a whole variety of ages of women, she recorded their conversations with social workers and held discussion groups encouraging the women to admit what had happened to them and take responsibility to their own actions and admit to the actions of others. She also worked on movement exercises with the inmates through her specialism of physical theatre. Furthermore Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women was written in “their language” their words, in their voices, their dialect, alongside their mannerisms. In fact cast members for the performances within The Medea Project include local artists, actresses, ex-offenders, activists and even female inmates who are allowed out of jail for the duration of the show supervised by guards in the audience. Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women is provocative, brave and uncomfortable to watch, so much so that some audience members left during the show.
Interview about Rhodessa Jone’s performance “Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women.”
Buried Fire is an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling. Again for this project Rhodessa Jones worked with incarcerated women, helping them to “take control of their lives.'” Phillips suggests “Through the Buried Fire project, Jones took the challenging step of creating The Medea Academy, through which women who had been in the Medea Project could continue their work in theatre after their release from jail” (2012, p.1). The performance included “live music, taped sounds, storytelling, dance and singing” and “the completed work was divided in to four parts, with each section also depicting the season creating the year of the “Ugly Duckling’s” life: she is born, chased out in to the world, knocked about, and faces death and rebirth” (2012, p.1). Forming the piece she asked female inmates to write their own versions of the story of The Ugly Duckling and focused in on women who were keen to read their stories, who were thrilled at the chance to be heard. She then took these women through acting training and included them in the performance.
Interview with Rhodessa Jones about “The Medea Project”
Dancing with the Clown of Love explores the issues of living with aids, its stigma and “loving yourself.” The performance was not only part of The Medea Project but worked in collaboration with UCSF’s Women’s HIV Clinic. To this day productions are still touring based on what it is like to be “living with aids in this day and age.” Sabir proposes that the production is, “Multi-layered with healing at its centre, the large cast, some infected, everyone affected, shared stories written over the past two years at the Women’s HIV Program at the University of California San Francisco” (2010, p.1). The piece also discusses safe sex, and how you can have a life after being diagnosed with HIV.
Short excerpt from “Dancing with the Clown of Love”
Image from My Life in the Concrete Jungle (A Medea Project production)
(http://www.sfartscommission.org/CAE/online-media/deep-roots/2013/01/23/deep-roots-09-rhodessa-jones/)
Works Cited
Kalantari, Shuka (2012) Dancing with the Clown of Love: – UCSF Theatre for HIV -Positive Women , Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mw7zZqOCJM (accessed: 28 January).
Phillips, Frances (2012) CFW Lead Artists: Rhodessa Jones, Online: http://www.creativeworkfund.org/modern/bios/rhodessa_jones.html (accessed: 28 January 2013).
RhodesTV (2010) Big Butt Girls, Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_q0zXtHgKo (accessed: 25 January 2013).
TCE Video (2011) The Medea Project: Rhodessa Jones on Incarcerated Women and Art as Healing, Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6qH7g5k_9c (accessed 25 January 2013).
The Medea Project (2012) The Medea Project, Online: http://www.medeaproject.org/index.php (accessed: 28 January 2013).
Sabir, Wanda (2010) Medea Project Presents: ‘Dancing with the Clown of Love,’ Online: http://sfbayview.com/2010/medea-project-presents-%E2%80%98dancing-with-the-clown-of-love%E2%80%99/(accessed: 28 January 2013).
White, Evelyn C. (2000) ‘Rhodessa Jones’ in Jo Bonney (ed.) Extreme Exposure: an Anthology of Solo Performance Texts in the Twentieth Century, New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 145-154.