Art project exposes injustice within the criminal justice system

Arts & Entertainment

TECHNICIAN

PAGE 8 • MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2018

Art project exposes injustice within the criminal justice system

Sarah Gallo

Assistant Arts & Entertainment Editor

Sherrill Roland was watching a movie at home with his mother when his phone rang. While not typically answering calls from unknown numbers, Roland answered the phone because it had a Washington, D.C., area code. He had a few friends there. Unbeknownst to Roland at the time, it was a phone call that lit the fire of a two-and-a-half year fight for justice, the truth and, ultimately, freedom.

Roland, who recently graduated from UNCGreensboro’s School of Art with a master’s degree, granted students the opportunity to hear how he turned a wrongful conviction into a powerful art and social justice project on Thursday evening in Talley Student Union.

“Firsthand, I would like to say that my story isn’t rare, but sharing it is,” Roland said. “And I don’t think anybody who’s been through this has seeked a way of dealing with it like I did as therapy as well. Just know that I am representative of many more who are right now incarcerated for something they didn’t do.”

Roland was originally convicted of four felonies – which was later lessened to four misdemeanors – that he didn’t commit. He noted that he does not disclose what the convictions were for, as he didn’t commit them and disclosing that information feels like another loss of control, which is something he has only recently started to get back.

As an artist, Roland found much healing in conducting The Jumpsuit Project, a social experiment of sorts in which he wears an orange jumpsuit around campus at UNC-G in order to break stigma, and get people talking about the wrongful incarceration and oppression within the criminal justice system. Sarah Williamson, the president of the Sociology Graduate Student Association, talked on why it is important to talk about injustice.

“Being aware of injustices, whether that’s in the criminal justice system or inequality in pay, is something we want to think about and be aware of,” Williamson said.

The Jumpsuit Project was born from a long journey toward acceptance, which Roland laid out on Thursday evening.

After receiving an initial call from law enforcement informing him that there was a warrant out for his arrest, Roland was shocked. He thought, “this can’t be right.”

The officer told him he had to come to Washington as soon as possible to turn himself in. If he didn’t, he would live day-to-day worrying about whether or not he would be taken into custody anytime his I.D. or driver’s license was scanned.

Roland was just about to attend his first day of graduate school at UNC-G.

He arrived in Washington in the middle of the night to turn himself in for a crime he knew he didn’t commit. After arriving, the process was not what he expected in the slightest.

“I thought I was able to keep most of my clothes on, but they stripped everything,” Roland said. “I got fingerprinted, [and] I got handcuffed and was put in the interrogation room – this was all at 4 o’clock in the morning. I just got off a flight – this was confusing to me. Everything happened [so fast], and I got put in a cell with no mats or cushions and waited until they collected everybody in that precinct.”

The day after appearing before the judge, Roland had to catch a flight back to North Carolina. He had to make it to classes the next day. Left without his belt, shoestrings, wallet or cellphone, all Roland had in his possession was a $20 bill his public defender gave him which was just enough for a cab to the airport.

After the first hearing, the court had nine months to reach an indictment in which, he explained, “a jury could decide my fate.”

After those nine months, Roland’s felony charges were lowered to four misdemeanors – and his fight for justice was just beginning. It was the fall semester of his second year of grad school, and at the time Roland had a class

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Arts & Entertainment

TECHNICIAN

PAGE 9 • MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2018

Panoramic Dance Project represents a united, dancing Wolfpack

Aaron Sanchez Guerra

Staff Writer

As dancers kick, shuffle, spin and run off the stage in unison, the Panoramic Dance Project focuses on teamwork and takes on a unique and accurate interpretation of the Wolfpack.

In their performance on Thursday night, 13 dancers stood militantly under disembodied blue lights in what looked like blue denim shirts. Suddenly, as the lighting switched to red and blue, their shirts appeared red and blue, too. Standing behind a lone dancer up front in the colorful darkness, they looked like a kind of jury in a celestial, abstract courtroom of dance.

An NC State academic dance company, the Panoramic Dance Project’s name contains ambiguity that allows for different possibilities of what it could entail. According to its definition as panoramic, it offers audiences a wide, sweeping view of all the aspects of the performance; its craft, emotion and its story.

The performance resembled a dream more than anything else, containing a soft range of lights under which dancers moved with intense speed and force. The dancers achieved this feat silently, creating a pleasant range of moods and tones that left a quiet and receptive audience impressed.

Morgan Broadnax, a first-year studying communication, was among many students to experience the performance, which is a part of Arts NC State and was held at Stewart Theatre again on Friday night.

“I honestly didn’t know what to expect based on the title, but it was a lot to take in,” Broadnax said. “They made this performance their own, and did some things that seemed random to me, but it worked, it fit.”

The Panoramic Dance Project boasts diversity of many kinds, which should be no surprise coming from an NC State dance company. The

DANCE continued page 10

HANNAH SHEA/TECHNICIAN Students in Panoramic Dance Project perform “Intro to Self” at Stewart Theatre on Friday. The Panoramic Dance Project is an NC State academic dance company that performs a wide variety of dance genres on and off campus.

JUMPSUIT

continued from page 8 of students to teach. So, when he found out he had to go back to court mid-semester, he had to get creative – he told his class he was taking a vacation for his 28th birthday.

“Nobody asked questions, nobody knew this entire time [...] not even close members of my family knew that I was dealing with this,” Roland said.

He lost in court. Looking back, Roland said he realizes he never had a fair shot – as an African-American man appearing before a judge, who had already seen multiple cases that day, the cards were stacked against him from the start.

“Human error is real,” Roland said. “Just because you’re on the judge stand doesn’t mean you’re perfect. You are also capable of making a mistake, reading it wrong. And at the rate they read African-Americans wrong in Washington, D.C., I had no idea that I was facing more than my opponent.”

Originally sentenced to jail for 10 months, Roland was released from Central Detention Facility after two weeks for exceptional behavior. Roland said that in jail he wasn’t looked at as a person. He, like the other inmates, was viewed as “just a number.”

In order to get through the long hours of the day while in jail, Roland took to reading Andrea Davis’ “Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment,” a book he had to read in secret, in addition to the Bible. He was searching for answers and, at the time, was losing hope.

After Roland’s name was cleared and all charges were dropped, Roland was searching for a way to heal, trust and move forward in his life. For Roland, who went back to UNC-G to finish his master’s in art, this meant walking around campus in an orange jumpsuit – a project meant to get people talking about the criminal justice system and wrongful incarceration.

The Jumpsuit Project first had to get approved by UNC-G, resulting in an intensive background check and restrictions Roland had to follow when wearing the jumpsuit – one of which said he was only allowed to walk straight to his destination when wearing the jumpsuit on campus.

“Whenever I was in that jumpsuit on campus I had restrictions as if I was locked up in Washington, D.C.,” Roland said. “So, my studio space on the top floor of the art building was my cell. The art building was my block. Anytime I was in my cell or my block I was allowed to wear orange shorts or my jumpsuit. Anytime I left my block I had to go straight to my destination.”

Williamson noted why students should take social justice issues of all kinds seriously.

“It’s something a lot of us don’t think about on a day to day basis, because it doesn’t directly affect us – but it’s something intricately woven into our lives,” Roland said.

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Arts & Entertainment

TECHNICIAN

PAGE 10 • MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2018

Faculty, alumni, professional artists lead community in art expression across mediums

Bryan Cambra

Correspondent

D.H. Hill’s Fishbowl Forum has grown in popularity with students due to its large, adjustable workspaces, easy access to the Creamery and open view of Hillsborough Street and the evening sky. With this in mind, it seemed natural for it to be the location of choice for an art and writing workshop.

“Art United: Fostering Equity and Inclusivity through Writing and Art” was a poetry and illustration workshop that took place on Thursday. The event was organized by Belle Boggs, an English professor, and led by poets Tyree Daye and Leila Chatti — both of whom are NC State alumni — and Kristen Radtke, a graphic memoirist and editor for Sarabande Books and TriQuarterly Magazine.

Prior to its debut, Boggs said that she has been motivated to put together a workshop focusing on poetry and graphic art for over a year.

“Around that time, we had a lot of issues arising on campus with campus culture and aggressions,” Boggs said. “I began to think about the usefulness of a workshop like this to make a space for students to express themselves and communicate to other students about what their experiences were on campus.”

Several English Master of Fine Arts students were sought out by Boggs to help facilitate the event. One of them, Threa Almontaser, talked about her pivotal role in the workshop’s conception.

“[Boggs] asked if I would be willing to write a letter added to the proposal explaining my experience at State as an undergrad when it came to open culture, especially after the Chapel Hill shootings and the Trump election,” Almontaser said. “I feel like the students at State got a little more amplified — the stares and the remarks I was getting — so I wrote about my experience inside and outside the classroom on campus.”

The workshop started with some introductions from Chatti, Daye and Radtke where they showed the audience some of their craft; Chatti and Daye read poems from their most recent collections — Tunsiya Amrikiya and River Hymns, respectively — and Radtke shared a few pages from her graphic memoir “Imagine Wanting Only This.”

After they finished, they had the participants follow suit. The attendees were split into two groups depending on whether they wished to draw or write poetry.

Once the participants found their stations, the group leaders asked icebreaker questions, which served to both ease everyone’s nerves and jumpstart their imaginations before the crafting sessions began.

To kick off the poetry session, Daye led with a modified version of a lecture from his Beginner Poetry class, which focused on the balance between imagery and emotional narratives within writing. This was followed by a prompt involving randomly selected words and a phrase for the participants to construct a poem from.

Chatti led the second half of the workshop with a lecture focusing on balancing the generic and specific details used in narrative poems, especially in relation to the writers’ personal experiences. Her exercise focused on having the participants unashamedly explore their identities as they perceive them and conveying them in their writing in a way that can be visualized, if not understood.

Each person wrote a poem for both prompts. Meanwhile, Radtke’s group worked on graphic memoirs that captured pieces of their lives and personalities using variations of illustration and photography.

Once the crafting sessions completed, everyone reconvened and were given more time to work on their drafts. The poets in training were even encouraged to seek out participants from outside of their group to collaborate with, intending to have them inspire each other. Several students produced entirely new drafts during this time that complimented their teammates’ work.

The attendees spent the final half hour of the workshop volunteering to share the drafts they completed in front of everyone. The participants’ satisfaction with the workshop was completely visible by the end; each project, including those made by people unfamiliar with their chosen medium, was met with raised eyebrows and well-deserved applause, especially from Boggs and the group leaders.

Once the volunteers finished, Boggs, Daye, Chatti and Radtke gave everyone closing remarks with knowing smiles on their faces. For three hours they, along with the facilitators, allowed these people to feel at home in an environment that can often feel foreign or even hostile. While the light faded from the evening sky by the workshop’s end, it never left the eyes of the attendees.

The participants sent the work they completed to Boggs after Art United’s conclusion. All of it will be featured at a follow-up gallery at Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Lab on April 10 at 7 p.m.

COURTESY OF NC STATE COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DANCE

continued from page 9

performance contained a beautiful union of ethnicities and cultures, but also of different artistic interests and personalities.

Adrian Haywood, a first-year studying business administration, praised his fellow dancers for their rich characteristics.

“It’s such a versatile group,” Haywood said. “We have Afro-Cuban influences, we have Latinx dancing influences, we have tap dancing, singing, guitars. We have a wide array of different talents, different races and different backgrounds.”

He described the experience of having to put himself out there to a crowd that witnesses his intimate movements and expressions, a side of him that not many people he knows gets to see.

“At first, it was really difficult but the further you go into the year, the more easy it gets, and the more connected you feel to the piece and the people that you dance with,” Haywood said. “It honestly becomes very therapeutic after a while, and it gives you this sense of liberty and lets you explore different parts of you that you never knew about.”

The show began with a solo performance by Brooke Yannayon, a fourth-year studying communication, featuring the intersection and harmony of tap dancing, singing and spoken word poetry, with varying rhythms from different genres being demonstrated.

The performance was marked by different genres of music unified by the seemingly endless acrobatic and unpredictable dancing done by the group. Two groups would be performing different dances, while some would run away and others would dive in from offstage, literally, to join a group in perfect rhythm and motion.

In place of an intermission, the performance had two solpo acts from Katie Quinn, a thirdyear majoring in international studies, who sang and played the guitar, demonstrating remarkable mastery of instrument and voice outside of dancing.

The routine absence and appearance of stage lights would present a new selection of the 13 dancers, a new tale being told by the interpretative dancing that was a melodious blend of modern and hip-hop among other influences unknown to the nondancing layperson.

Daniela Patiño-Zabaleta, a second-year studying business administration, believes that being part of the Panoramic Dance Project informs her 10-plus years of dancing rather than the other way around. Her Colombian background has given to proficiency in the majority of Latin dancing, but her dancing in this group is different.

“Thanks to the director, Ms. Francine Ott, I have been able to explore dancing at a different level,” Patiño Zabaleta said. “And when I say this, I mean I stopped focusing less on movement and motions and following steps, and instead I started exploring emotion.”

Patiño Zabaleta highlighted how Ott, a dance lecturer and the dance director of the Panoramic Dance Project, has a background in mental health counseling and takes the time to know each dancer personally so that she may go above and beyond in inquiring about their personal lives and health.

“With Panoramic, and specifically with Ms. Francine Ott, I have been able to explore my human experience through dance,” Patiño Zabaleta said. “So it’s not just about how pretty it looks, or how the steps follow, but also the emotions that are behind the choreography.”