SASKATOONEXPRESS - October 15-21, 2018 - Page 1
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Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Volume 17, Issue 41, Week of October 15, 2018
Janessa Johnsrude spends two days a week teaching theatre at a super-maximum security prison in California. (Photo by Peter Merts)
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Saskatonian inspires prisoners through theatre
By Shannon Boklaschuk Saskatonian’s theatre training has taken her to an unexpected place: a maximum-security prison in California. Janessa Johnsrude, who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Saskatchewan in 2008, is the co-founder of Dell’Arte International’s Prison Project. Johnsrude and fellow cofounder Zuzka Sabata are faculty members at Dell’Arte, a school of physical theatre located on California’s North Coast. As part of the Pelican Bay Prison Project, which Johnsrude and Sabata founded in 2016 in partnership with the non-profit William James Association, the pair provide theatre classes to Pelican Bay inmates. While their work inside the prison first started with four minimum-security prisoners, today Johnsrude and Sabata offer classes on all of the general population yards each week. “I teach at Pelican Bay State prison,
which is one of California’s only supermax prisons,” said Johnsrude, noting Pelican Bay still has the Secure Housing Unit — or the SHU, for short — which is essentially another way to describe solitary confinement. “Pelican Bay also has the reputation as ‘the worst of the worst.’ When people refer to it — which is shifting — ‘the worst of the worst’ means a lot of people who get in trouble when they’re in the system end up at Pelican Bay,” she said. Pelican Bay is also known as the site that sparked the largest-ever prison hunger strike in U.S. history in 2013. Because of the abuses in the SHU, about 30,000 prisoners throughout California refused food. The strike eventually led to more than 1,000 inmates being released from the Pelican Bay SHU, but critics still note that the American penal system remains largely unchanged. Before beginning her work at Pelican Bay, Johnsrude had never been inside
a prison. Born and raised in Saskatoon, Johnsrude attended Holy Cross High School before starting her studies at the U of S. She recognizes that her life is dramatically different from her students’ life experiences. However, with more than two years of teaching at Pelican Bay under her belt, Johnsrude has come to know her students as individuals and has learned from them. The way she feels about going to the prison has also changed over time. “It’s bookended for me by this beautiful drive up the California coast, and I feel like a lot of what I talk about in class and a lot of what I teach is rooted in the natural world — and I have this huge advantage of driving this gorgeous trail on the ocean on the way there,” she said. “It’s really interesting because as I drive there I’m running through what I’m going to do in the class; I’m running through my class plans, I’m running through what individual students need. I want to make
sure I have all my paperwork and my ID; it’s nerve-wracking.” Johnsrude said her teaching schedule is exhausting. On Mondays, she drives to Pelican Bay from her home — which is two hours away — and then teaches for six hours in the prison before checking into a motel and working on the administrative aspects of her job. She then teaches at Pelican Bay for another nine hours the next day before driving home. “It’s exhausting and it’s on all different yards of the prison and it’s all different curriculums, because the classes are moving at different paces based on when they started, who’s in what class, what we’re teaching, what level they’re on. That aspect of the job is extremely stressful and it wears you out,” she said. However, during the drives home, Johnsrude is filled with a sense of gratitude to be working with people “in such an intense environment,” she said. (Continued on page 11)