Art as Transformation: Music and Drama for Incarcerated Youth

Please join White Snake Projects and Human Rights Lab for this interactive Zoom forum, where we will explore art as a means of transformation for persons who have experienced or are experiencing incarceration. The event will include guided activities and a discussion about art making and community through music, drama, and creative writing while imprisoned.

This is the first event in a three-part series. We encourage you to register for Art and Imagination Inside Prisons (4/6) and Freedom-Making in an Age of Mass Incarceration (4/13) as well.

This series is a prelude to Death By Life, a virtual opera presented by White Snake Projects, which explores the intersection of systemic racism and mass incarceration.


Presenting Partners:

Fifth House Ensemble harnesses the collaborative spirit of chamber music to reach beyond the traditionally-perceived limits of classical music. Fifth House is in residence at sites serving at-risk youth and adults in the Chicago area.

Oakdale Community Choir provides choral singing experiences for men in the general population of the Iowa Medical and Classification Center (Oakdale Prison) and for outside singers in the community who have an interest in learning more about issues in the prison system locally, throughout Iowa, and across the nation.

Storycatchers Theatre works with youth in the juvenile justice system, helping them tell their stories through musical theatre. By moving beyond their histories, the youth transform their own lives, communities, and people like you who are ready to listen.

Dr. Kính T. Vu is an assistant professor of Music at Boston University. His current research centers on exploring connections between music education and involuntary or forced human displacement


ABOUT: Human Rights Lab of the Pozen Center, University of Chicago

https://humanrights.uchicago.edu/lab

The Human Rights Lab actively engages University of Chicago students and community members in solutions to human rights problems, advancing new questions around human rights theory and practice through the lens of deep research, experiential learning, and critical community-building.

In its first five years, under the leadership of Director of Human Rights Practice Alice Kim, the Lab is addressing the intersecting human rights crises of racialized policing and mass incarceration in the United States.


ABOUT: White Snake Projects, activist opera theater company

https://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/about/

We are White Snake Projects, an activist opera company founded and led by an immigrant woman of color. After three years of exploring our identity, we have a vision and a game plan.

We’ve put this vision into action by integrating social activism with original opera, partnering with other activists to cross-promote important social issues and opera, and redefining how opera is made by involving young people from our community.

White Snake Projects is supported by a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts CARES Act Fund
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