By Lucila Sigal
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – “The past haunts you and the future never arrives” six actors sing on stage in “The Days Out There”, an Argentine musical that explores the lives of feminine and transgender inmates throughout and after their time in jail.
The play, by 47-year-old author and director Lola Arias, a winner of the distinguished Worldwide Ibsen Award, is heading to Europe on the finish of June. It is a part of a wider challenge with companion movie “Reas” that arose from a workshop Arias gave in a girls’s jail.
It’s acted by the feminine and transgender former inmates themselves, who look again at their time in jail and the challenges of adapting to life outdoors. They have been jailed for crimes together with fraud, theft, drug trafficking and prostitution.
For Arias, prisons might not all the time be the most effective resolution.
“Many times prison is simply a storage space for people who are excluded from society,” she mentioned in an interview.
“That is part of what the film and the play tell in their ways because they question the need for prisons, why prisons exist and how we could imagine a different justice system.”
The director wished to take a look at the bonds of solidarity constructed up in jail, shifting away from conventional male-centered tales of violence in jail.
She mentioned she additionally selected to give attention to girls and transgender inmates due to the distinctive “gender problems” they confronted.
“Trans women who engage in sex work are detained without reason by police and are left in police stations for days. Trans men are also often treated with suspicion,” she mentioned.
The protagonists inform their tales via track and dance, incorporating rock, cumbia and bachata music.
Ignacio Rodríguez, a trans man who was jailed for 9 years, mentioned the challenge had been life-changing, giving him a purpose to construct in direction of the longer term.
“That is what we want to share and transmit: empathy, fellowship, companionship, love, despite all that one may go through,” mentioned Rodríguez, who fashioned a rock band and started finding out regulation in jail.
Yoseli Arias, 28, who was in jail for over 4 years, mentioned in an interview within the theater dressing-room, together with her child close by, that she hoped the play would spur thought of what jail life was actually like.
“It is a story told by ourselves, of our own life and experience and of what we would like the future to look like: just to be treated like ordinary people.”
“The Days Out There” will likely be displaying at two dozen theaters round Europe beginning in Avignon, France.
