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Largely absent from disciplinary regimes in the West since the eighteenth century, when prisons replaced gruesome public displays of retributive justice, spectacle has returned, reaching domestic and international audiences who witness the famed "dancing inmates" of Cebu. The argument Foucault sets out in Discipline and Punish, that the "disappearance of public executions marks [...] the decline of the spectacle" along with "a slackening of the hold on the body" (1977, 10), is turned on its head by this highly disciplined dance spectacle where pleasure rather than punishment assumes a key role in the rehabilitation process. In the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC), located in hills overlooking the second-largest city in the Philippines, inmates daily rehearse dance sequences to be performed before hundreds of spectators from around the country and overseas. These spectators fill the galleries on the final Saturday of every month to witness a full-length dance concert featuring approximately 1,500 dancers in the prison yard. Inmates rehearse up to four hours a day, and the discipline evident in the public spectacle is breath takingly impressive. Through the global distribution of the work on YouTube, the dancers have found an ever-expanding viewership since 2007, when videos of the performances started appearing online.
Although dance programmes in prisons are a relative rarity, what is termed theatrein-pñson or prison theatre is commonly found in many Western countries, notably the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brazil.1 Academic literature distinguishes between the staging of existing theatrical productions in a prison,2 and original or workshop-driven work where inmates assume a central role as creative collaborators and performers. Because most accounts of prison theatre are written by and from the perspective of the external practitioner who is eager to demonstrate why and how their experiments were successful, much of the literature betrays a troubling bias, making it difficult to assess the value of these projects as therapeutic or rehabilitative tools (Clark 2004; Hagstrom 2010; Moller 2003). I will argue that much of the theatre work taking place in prisons today, particularly in the United Kingdom, United States, and Brazil, provides inmates with little of lasting value because of its failure to imprint on the body through a process that respects and reflects the culturally-specific disciplined, bodily practices...