I came into this work – namely education in prison – the way we find many meaningful things: in search of healing.

On September 9, 2017 I survived abduction and predatory sexual assault. I got into a car that I mistakenly believed was my Uber and was not released for 4 hours. My assailant was never caught. I was diagnosed with PTSD and became useless to my own theater company. I was offered extensive movement therapy from friends and colleagues in Serbia, and returned with a feeling that I may be the only survivor in the world who has ever received such care. 

I was compelled to pay this care forward, but found that I was now harboring a new and paralyzing fear of men. I couldn't afford to be held hostage by this experience. My ultimate healing now required drawing closer to this fear. I also knew that no one was tending to the trauma in the bodies of those we have incarcerated.

So in 2018 I began offering movement therapy for trauma rehabilitation at Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center. This work immediately inverted my narrative. These institutions were also a crime. These extraordinary condemned men had the power to restore my faith in my fellow humans. Responsible parties (who are victims too) are traumatizing others out of their own complex traumas. There is no healing for any of us until there is healing for all of us. We needed each other to heal, we needed to see one another, to confess and cry together and to remember that ‘I am because of who we all are’. 

When we banish those who have committed a crime from the world on behalf of the harmed party, we serve no one. Incarceration leaves a new trail of victims in its wake, more traumatized humans suffering between more bad choices (to say nothing of the harm done to the wrongfully incarcerated or the cruelty of long term sentences without PAROLE…) 

What good is justice without the possibility of change?

I personally do not feel safe inside a system that locks people up and throws away the key. Proximity, interdependence and mercy have been my freedom and my oxygen as the world has become more frightening and complex. 

Until all of us are whole, none of us are safe!

After 4 years of doing whatever the men needed, they asked if we could make a performance together - and if I could help introduce them to the world. 

-Melissa