Michael Morgan (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Our paper focuses on the Trojan Women Project, a program, now in its second year, that brings together UC undergraduate students and female incarcerated students from the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility to re-write Euripides’ Trojan Women using digital storytelling. As part of the project, the students, free and imprisoned, interpret the play as artist-activists and collaborate to create a video that re-tells the tragedy as a story of recovery after the destruction of Troy.
In recent years, Euripides’ Trojan Women has served as a framework for discussing issues of displacement and violence against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, as in Yasmin Fedda’s Queens of Syria. Trojan Women is a tragedy due to an unrelenting number of catastrophes without any redemption or justice at the conclusion of the play to balance the staggering losses. Yet, because the masterwork is steeped in pathos, human suffering, and struggle, it may furnish context for incarcerated women who have experienced personal, social, and political victimization. The project seeks to engage the students with the text in an alternative that offers a way up and out: participants leverage the tragic heroines’ stories as catalysts for reconstructing their lives as an empowered talk-back to the oppression Euripides’ characters encounter.
By bringing undergraduate students and incarcerated students together, the project aims to decenter Classics through activism and create an arts intervention between universities and female residential correction facilities. Moreover, while most university/prison arts alliances establish a collaboration with male prisoners, the project opens up a collaborative arts space between the academy and female prisoners.
The first part of our paper looks at the creation of the program as a new initiative in addition to The Odyssey Project, a theater process between incarcerated youth and undergraduate students. The second part of our paper centers on the students’ re-telling of the tragedy and their creative work. The paper will conclude with a discussion of some important ethical questions underlying the project, such as how the participants can take on the viewpoints of Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen without this identification leading them to a reinforcement of their victimization.