CWF LEAD ARTISTS: RHODESSA JONES
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BURIED FIRE

Project Title: Buried Fire
Recipient Organization: Cultural Odyssey
Lead Artist: Rhodessa Jones
Genre and Date Awarded: Performing Arts, May 1995
Premiered: January 10-21, 1996

Cultural Odyssey and lead artist Rhodessa Jones worked in partnership with the San Francisco Health Department, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, and with female inmates and ex-inmates to create and produce Buried Fire, an original, interdisciplinary, theatrical work based on a re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Ugly Duckling.” This work furthered Cultural Odyssey’s efforts to create experimental, socially involved theater that is rooted in the cultural and economic life experiences of African Americans.

The project grew out of Rhodessa Jones’s extensive prior work with San Francisco County Jail #7. In 1986, she had been approached by the California Arts Council to teach aerobics at the San Francisco City Jail for women who were African Americans or Latinas. In artistic response, she and Cultural Odyssey created and toured, Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women, a series of monologues based on interviews with incarcerated women, which garnered the BESSIE Award after an extended run in New York City. Jones went on to create The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women in San Francisco County Jail #7—continuing to work with incarcerated women to create original performances. While developing a form of theater that blurred distinctions between life and art, Jones sought to support inmates’ efforts to take control of their lives.

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 theater after their release from jail. As such, it was designed to help facilitate inmate reintegration into society through theater, art, and social support. The work’s creation and development took place over five months at the Center for African and African American Art and Culture in San Francisco’s Western Addition. Buried Fire, premiered in January 1996 at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco.

Buried Fire was constructed around stories of personal discovery and survival from the incarcerated women’s perspective. The completed work was divided into four parts, with each section also depicting the season creating the year of the “Ugly Duckling’s” life: She is born, chased out into the world, knocked about, and faces death and rebirth.

The cast of 30 included local artists, ex-offenders, actresses, and female inmates. The finished piece incorporated live music, taped sounds, storytelling, stilt walking, dance, and singing.

Buried Fire tacked a cluster of ambitious goals. It sought to help former inmates explore issues that keep them trapped in the revolving door of the penal system. It also provided the ex-offenders with employment and a variety of arts-related skills while educating them in a wide range of health issues. It sought to build a support system for the women that would help them re-integrate into society. And, it drew attention to the disturbing, accelerated population growth of women in American jails.

Rhodessa Jones wrote:

My work is always based on the social, political reality of our society. My work is an act of survival. I use artistic expression to tell the truth with no apologies…reaching the heart of what art should do—inform, ennoble, and humanize us all.”

Founded in 1979, Cultural Odyssey’s mission is to stretch the aesthetic boundaries of American art by creating and presenting original, experimental performance works that are firmly rooted in African American music, dance, and theatrical traditions. It annually premieres at least two original works by the co-artistic directors Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones, tours the company’s repertoire to venues throughout the world, produces an annual performance art festival, and conducts community-based residency programs that use theater to enhance the self-esteem of incarcerated women and at-risk African American youth.

LEAD ARTIST

Rhodessa Jones

Rhodessa Jones is a performing artist/activist, teacher, writer, and director. She is co-artistic director of Cultural Odyssey and Founder/Artistic Director of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.

RESUME HIGHLIGHTS

Awards and Honors

  • Honorary Doctorate, California College of the Arts, Oakland, California (2004)
  • Visiting Artist in Residence, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University (2004)
  • GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Bay Guardian (2003)
  • Award for Non-profit Excellence, San Francisco Business Arts Council (2003)
  • Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater, “given to support and honor those artists and companies who use their stages and talent to make humane social, political, moral, philosophical, and aesthetic statements” (2002)
  • Community Leadership Award, San Francisco Foundation, honoring development of The Medea Project (2000)
  • Individual Artist Fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission (2000)
  • Bay Area Critics Circle Special Award for work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women (2000)
  • Working Woman of the Year Award, Working Women Festival, San Francisco, California (2000)
  • Artist-in-Residence, Women of the World Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark (1999)
  • Resident teacher, New World Theater, Amherst, Massachusetts (1999)
  • Teacher-in-Residence, LaMama, Umbria, an artistic retreat in Italy sponsored by LaMamaETC of New York (1999)
  • Visiting Artist in Residence, University of California, Berkeley (1999)
  • AUDELCO Board of Directors Award “for 20 years of dedication in creating, producing, and presenting original performance art” (1999)
  • Rockefeller Foundation grant to produce new work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women (1998)
  • Scholar in Residence, Getty Research Institute (winter 1997-98)
  • Isadora Duncan Award for “Blue Stories: Black Erotica about Letting Go” (1997)
  • “Women Making History Award,” The Commission on the Status of Women of the City and County of San Francisco (1996)
  • Commission to create a new work, “Deep in the Night,” a meditation on aging, The New England Foundation for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Commission (1996)
  • Invitation to participate in an international youth festival, Quartieri The Hood El Barrio: The New Language of Marginalized Youth, Rome, Italy (1995)
  • Work with Harris County Juvenile Probation Center and Diverseworks Performance Gallery in Houston, Texas (1995)
  • Artistic Residency, Yale School of Drama (1995)
  • Director, theater workshop, Lowell Prison for Women, Florida (1993)
  • Artist-in-Residence, New College of California, San Francisco, California (1993)
  • California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence, conducting theater classes and workshops at community centers and at the San Francisco County Jail (1987-1993)

Published Works

  • Imagining Medea, by Rena Fraden, forward by Angela Davis, a book detailing the working process of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women
  • We Just Tellin’ Stories, film collaboration on the process of The Medea Project, collaboration with Lawrence Andrews (funded in part by The Creative Work Fund) (2001)
  • “Deep in the Night,” in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 19, Numbers 2/3, Summer 1998 (performance script)
  • “Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women,” in Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Plays, Harry Elam and Robert Alexander, editors, Penguin Books, USA (1996)