The Odyssey Project: A Martial Arts Journey Toward Recovery and Liberation

Introduction: The Pleasure of the Play

On August 2, 2012, an ensemble consisting of six University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) undergraduates and seven boys on probation (ages 13–18) from Los Prietos Boys Camp (LPBC)¹ united on Center Stage Theater in downtown Santa Barbara in order to perform the odyssey that they had worked collectively to develop, using Homer’s epic poem as a template.² If only temporarily, they inscribed their identities into the world by articulating their failures and triumphs as seen in front of the audience of family, probation officers, classmates, city officials, and peers from the probation center who had come to serve as witnesses and jury (Fig. 1). For six weeks, the cast had been guided by their director, Professor Michael Morgan,³ through a rehearsal process that included writing exercises, dance, mask-making, voice work, visual art, and martial arts for four hours a day, four to five days a week on the campus of UCSB. This essay explores how performance disciplines like martial arts can be used to form transformative spaces and communities as an alternative to penality and youth incarceration. The analysis demonstrates how The Odyssey Project (TOP) drew on martial arts principles, in particular those found in aikido,⁴ as a way to narrate moments of conflict and celebration by harnessing, focusing, and choreographing the kinetic energy of LPBC and UCSB members into constructive moments of encounter throughout the rehearsal period and the final performance. Seemingly disconnected communities of prisoners and students were simultaneously embroiled in processes of rehabilitation and education. As a theatre and martial arts practitioner and a doctoral student in theatre studies writing about performance disciplines like martial arts, jazz, and dance, TOP provided me with an opportunity to meld scholarship and practice by creating the martial arts choreography for the final confrontation between Odysseus and the Suitors.

I became involved with TOP in the spring of 2011 when Morgan first approached me with his idea of building a theatre project that would partner the university with a Santa Barbara community organization. Subsequently, my work with TOP became an exploration into the ways in which performance practices (martial arts, dance, graffiti, and hip-hop poetry) can work in conjunction to be a cathartic and therapeutic tool to awaken agency and subjectivity in young people. Many youths in the prison system are imprisoned not just by the penal institutions, but also by the institutions’ disciplinary practices. Yet, disciplinary practices also occur in a different form and with a different valence in the state university. Programs such as TOP, Unusual Suspects in Los Angeles, and Rhodessa Jones’s Cultural Odyssey⁵ offer models for how to make interventions with populations who have had contact with the criminal justice system, and these models also demonstrate that a radical reconsideration of how we conceptualize pedagogy through performance can fundamentally alter what are perceived as legitimate forms of knowledge-production and identity-formation. However, I would argue that TOP is unique, in that it attempts to restore a sense of the commons by actively bringing marginalized, in this case criminalized, youth into a public university, while simultaneously redirecting the state’s attention away from a mode of discipline and punish⁶ to a mode of perform and liberate.⁷

Fig 1.

The Ensemble of The Odyssey Project (TOP), dressed in their self-constructed half-face masks.

(Photo by the author.)

Yet, it must also be acknowledged that the collaboration between UCSB and LPBC produced and revealed power dynamics that were not free of tension. There were moments in which the necessity of rehearsal time and focus came into conflict with the desire to enforce rules and regulations by probationary staff. UCSB was initially concerned with the image of the university and the presence of incarcerated individuals on campus. I questioned whether our impact would matter or if we were simply replicating empty rhetoric around art and social justice. Others suggested that because Homer’s Odyssey is a key text in the canon of European literature, we were...