A sunbaked yard: enter inmate, left

Theatre is helping Brazil's prison population to change... or escape for a while. Paul Heritage writes.

The Brazilian composer Tom Jobim, who made the world swoon to the passing of that girl from Ipanema, once wrote that Brazil is not for beginners. Nothing could prepare the first-time visitor for the proximity of the pleasures and the pain, the social deprivation and the vitality of the culture, the devastating effects of modernisation and the enduring magnificence of natural beauty. Only in its contradictions and impossibilities can Brazil begin to make sense. To think of making theatre in Brazilian prisons might seem like just such a contradiction.

Since 1993, I have been running theatre projects in various prisons in Bras!lia, Sio Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The work has been supported by Queen Mary, University of London, and is part of a research project on theatre and social development in the School of English and Drama.

Much has changed since I first entered a high-security prison in Bras!lia in 1993. The guards claimed there was no space for me to work inside, and I was shown to the exercise yard. I spent the first weeks exposed to the airless heat and questioning gaze of the entire prison population as I encouraged the first group of 20 men to transform their world through theatrical images built on the baked red earth of their prison. From that initial project in Bras!lia, which eventually led to the building of a theatre studio inside the prison, I moved on to Sio Paulo. In collaboration with James Thompson from Manchester University, I have worked over the past four years with Funap (a Brazilian agency for education and work in prisons) to create ways in which theatre could be used to address the HIV/Aids problems faced by inmates.

Funded by the British Council, the project has this year been implemented in 43 prisons in the state of Sio Paulo, and drama games and exercises have become part of the language in which HIV/Aids is talked about. Theatre is being sustained and developed by the men and women who live and work there, and is no longer dependent on a visiting English academic.

This year, our new project, titled Staging Human Rights, will be implemented for more than 20,000 prisoners and staff in Sio Paulo state and is being funded by money from the United Kingdom's National Lottery Charities Board. Using theatrical methodologies developed by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, the programme aims to raise questions about human rights at every level and help the inmates and staff to identify and articulate their basic rights.

Five-day workshops explore aspects of human rights that are relevant both to inmates and to those who work in the prisons. According to recent statistics from Amnesty International, the state of Sio Paulo holds more than 25 per cent of the Brazilian prison population in 12 per cent of the prisons. This maintains a system where overcrowding and under-resourcing place prisoners in a situation of high risk. The daily lives of the prison population are little touched by new human rights policies, and these marginalised peoples - already set aside from society because of poverty, race and lack of education - can use theatre not only to describe the world they know, but also the world they want to bring about. This is a programme that seeks transformation of all kinds and helps participants to find a way of achieving it.

A prison is a world where survival is tested to its limits. What we offer is a survival technique; through theatre, prisoners can begin to find a new way of engaging with themselves, each other and their world. The biggest barrier we have faced during the years of the project is the re-making of a relationship between society and prisoners. Each project tries to find ways for those within the prison system to participate in dialogues with civic society about the purpose and function of incarceration. As in Britain, it is this debate that is going to be at the heart of any programme of change. Such experiences help to generate new perceptions about cultural and institutional differences, and perhaps are as much about us at Queen Mary as about the world of the prison.

On each of my visits to the projects last year, it was as difficult as ever to match the individual experiences of the participants with the conditions in which they are working together. The power of a simple theatre game to transform the dehumanised spaces and relationships of a prison never fails to move and excite me.

The successes are, of course, important. But so too are the failures. For every successful workshop that is run, there is one that did not happen because a guard would not open a door, or because a fight in the yard meant that all activities were stopped for a week. However, where the projects have taken place, we look to create a situation that might make some of the necessary individual and institutional changes more possible.

As I write this, I remember the most impossible encounters that have happened at every stage along the way. If I remember what the theatre has been able to achieve, then I must also remember the young man who wrote the poem on which we based the first play I produced in a Brazilian prison. Two months later he died of meningitis in the prison because none of the public hospitals would take him. His name was Moises, and the title of the poem he wrote still serves as a reminder of the question that must stand behind all our work in prisons: Porque, o Brasil? (Why, Brazil?) It is in the questions and not the answers that these projects seek to make their interventions. And the chance that these questions can be asked in encounters that might otherwise be impossible.

Paul Heritage is reader in performance at Queen Mary, University of London.