The Art of Listening in Prison: Creating audio drama with incarcerated women

Abstract

This chapter reflects on Joy James’ statement about the agency that might come from intimacy, and explores how this intimacy might be achieved in participatory audio drama – or any applied performance work – as an aesthetic process of “listening across difference”. Australia has a long and troubling history of female incarceration, going back to its establishment as a penal colony in 1788. The decision to make an audio drama was inspired by a cultural turn towards listening, with the rise of immersive audio-based performance works and internet podcasts. Making audio drama allowed us to use soundscape intentionally with the group, working with the women to represent and reinterpret the sounds..