Home/Academic Programs/I Think of You: Illuminating Mass Incarceration from the Inside Out
I Think of You: Illuminating Mass Incarceration from the Inside Out
I Think of You was created in collaboration with students from Lewis & Clark College and Columbia River Correctional Institution. It was developed in the History: Crime and Punishment in the United States, an Inside-Out course taught by Dr. Reiko Hillyer.
Performed by Roo Welsh, Gerrin Mitchell, Connor Pascale, Isabel McTighe, Evelyn Wohlbier, Negasi Brown
Designed by Jenny Ampersand, Miranda Hardy and Mark Valadez
I Think of You was created in collaboration with students from Lewis & Clark College and Columbia River Correctional Institution. It was developed in the History: Crime and Punishment in the United States, an Inside-Out course taught by Dr. Reiko Hillyer.
“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.”–Bryan Stevenson’s Grandmother, Just Mercy
Thanks to generous support from the Oregon Community Foundation, the play will be performed by professional actors at Portland Center Stage this summer. Performances will be accompanied by community programming, panels, and workshops. All events are open to the public.
//This performance piece is a project of Spring 2023’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange class, a course on the history of crime and punishment in the United States that integrates incarcerated students with Lewis & Clark undergraduates. Thanks to a Creative Heights grant from the Oregon Community Foundation, Rebecca Lingafelter of the Theater Department and Sterling Cunio of Willamette University’s Transformative Justice Initiative were able to join Reiko Hillyer of the History Department in leading the creation of this piece as our final effort to engage with the course material and sharing this work with a larger audience. It is derived from the students’ own writing, woven with voices from the past, to communicate a brief history of mass incarceration, its impact on our neighbors, and our experience of sharing and learning together.//
Schedule of Events
August 25-27, 2023 Ellyn Bye Studio Portland Center Stage
Tickets are FREE. Your voice is welcome. Please join us!
This workshop will employ theatre, improvisation, writing and conversation to open up the possibilities of imagining a world without prisons. The workshop is suitable for anyone interested in exploring these themes, and you do not need to have any prior performance experience to join. We hope that you will have seen the production, but it is not required for the workshop.
Bobby Bermea is the co-artistic director of The Beirut Wedding World Theatre Project, a member of Sojourn Theatre, and a long-standing member of Actors Equity Association. Bermea is a writer, director and award-winning actor and has appeared in theatres literally from New York, NY to Honolulu, HI.
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Led by Professor Reiko Hillyer
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This workshop will introduce participants to the Inside/Out class model. The workshop will include 15 formerly incarcerated participants and 15 other participants and will engage students in exercises and themes from Professor Hillyer’s Inside/Out Class.
Reiko Hillyer is a social and cultural historian of the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, with specialties in the American South, African American history, the history of public memory, the built environment, and mass incarceration. Her proudest accomplishment is bringing the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to Lewis & Clark. Her course, “Crime and Punishment in US History” is taught at Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) in North Portland to an integrated group of Lewis & Clark and incarcerated students.
Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program
Inside-Out is an educational program with an innovative pedagogical approach tailored to facilitate dialogue across differences. It originated under the leadership of Lori Pompa of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a means of bringing together campus-based college students with incarcerated students for a semester-long course held in a prison, jail, or other correctional setting. [ADD LC LINK + TEMPLE LINK]
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