Natalie Robichaud ’14Ron Jenkins '64, professor of theater, recently wrote an op-ed for The Jakarta Post about Run, a small Indonesian island. Run was “involved in a war between maritime empires” due to the presence of nutmeg on the island. While “the historic memory of Run’s inhabitants is vague, their pride… in the importance of their island’s past is vivid.” The residents of the small island no longer make a living with the spice trade and must have other jobs to provide for their families, but nutmeg is still a large part of the culture. “The small pale yellow nutmeg fruit still…
Lauren RubensteinIn an op-ed published Oct. 18 in The Jakarta Post, Ronald Jenkins, professor of theater, writes about a disturbing new documentary in which “gangsters” responsible for mass murders in Indonesia from 1965-66 reenact their crimes as they remember them. "This enables audiences to witness the deaths, not as they happened, but as they are remembered by the killers," he writes. The documentary, "The Act of Killing" by Joshua Oppenheimer, “reveals the links between the human capacity for self-delusion and cinema’s ability to reedit the past into comforting fantasy," writes Jenkins.
The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education featured a story this month on Professor of Theater Ron Jenkins' Dante Project, "a program he created that attempts to use theater as a catalyst for positive change in prisons throughout the world." According to the article, the program, which has been facilitated in places as far flung as Italy and Indonesia, encourages incarcerated men and women to "write about points of connection between their own life stories and the experiences of the characters" in classics like Dante's Inferno. These writings are then used to create a script that is performed…
Olivia DrakeRon Jenkins, professor of theater, is featured in the Feb. 24 issue of The Boston Globe for teaching a class at York Correctional Facility. Jenkins and his Wesleyan students teach the "Activism and Outreach Through Theater" course to inmates. While behind bars at York, students take workshops with Jenkins, learning plays by Shakespeare and Dante. According to the article, Jenkins has focused his career on theater as a catalyst for social change. That has meant working in Italy with Nobel laureate Dario Fo (whose play “Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas’’ Jenkins directed at the American Repertory Theater in 2001)…
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, was interviewed about his prison theater project for a Radio Australia program on June 24. The broadcast was aired on their pacific network in Australia, Indonesia, Cambodia and East Timor. A transcript of the interview is below: Theatre program with a difference in Bali, Indonesia The Kerobokanprison has become synonymous with the trials and convictions of Australian drug traffickers Schapelle Corby, and members of the Bali 9. But now a professor of theatre from the United States is running a theater program as part of efforts to change the atmosphere of the jail. Presenter Nasya…
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, was featured in the June 9 edition of The Jakarta Post in an article titled "From Hell to Heaven at Kerobokan Prison." In January, Jenkins started running a theater project at the Kerobokan Correctional Institution in Bali, where he taught 20 men and women inmates about acting. After six months of practice, the group performed Dante's Divine Comedy," a story about taking a personal journey through hell and purgatory to heaven. "It is a story that anyone who has experienced hard times can understand,” Jenkins explains in the article. “But people in prison unfortunately have…
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, was featured in the Dec. 24 edition of the New York Times for his efforts teaching incarcerated men Dante’s “Inferno.” In the Dante Project, Jenkins leads a series of workshops that, through reading, analyzing, adapting and performing, explores the connections between Dante’s 14th-century epic poem and the lives of incarcerated men and women. Jenkins, who has taught in Wesleyan’s theater department for 11 years, introduced prison outreach into the curriculum in 2007, bringing Wesleyan students to the York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Niantic, to work with inmates on literary classics. In 2009 and 2010, they…
This issue, we ask “5 Questions” to Ron Jenkins, professor of theater. Jenkins is an expert in Balinese theater, international traditions of comic performance, and directing and translating the plays of Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo. He was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center by the Rockefeller Foundation next spring. He is a former Guggenheim fellow whose research in Bali over the past 30 years has been supported by fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Fulbright Fund. Q: Professor Jenkins, you’ve been teaching theater at Wesleyan for 11 years,…
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, with a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy during his sabbatical next spring. Between March and April 2011, Jenkins will be working on a book about prison theater projects that he's been directing at correctional facilities including his most recent work at a prison in Indonesia. Jenkins has been collaborating with incarcerated individuals on staging their adaptations of classic texts by Shakespeare and Dante and other authors. These projects have grown out of work done with Wesleyan students in Connecticut correctional facilities. The specific texts include Shakespeare's Tempest, Dante's Inferno and the Mahabhrata. "The personalized…
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, is the author of the 330-page book, Rua Bineda in Bali: Counterfeit Justice in the Trial of Nyoman Gunarsa, published by the Indonesian University of the Arts, 2010. The book focuses on how a Balinese painter, puppet-master and a Brahmin priest perceive a landmark court case involving art forgery and identity theft. Read more about this book in a “5 Questions With . . .” profile at https://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2010/09/02/5-questions-with-professor-of-theater-ron-jenkins/.
Corrina KerrThe debut of Unexpected: Voices of Incarcerated Women, a new play directed by Professor of Theater Ron Jenkins, was shown to full crowds in the Center for the Arts Hall on Feb. 25 and 26. In Unexpected, stories written by women formerly and presently incarcerated at the York Correctional Institute in Niantic, Conn., were performed by the former prisoners and Wesleyan students who have collaborated with them in Jenkins' service learning course. Jenkins has been leading a theater outreach class at York since 2008, which predates the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan, founded in 2009. However, through the Center…
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, was featured in the June 23 issue of ODE Magazine in an article titled "Laughter can set people free." Jenkins argues that laughter is a survival tactic for people under siege. “For ages, comedy has been used as a liberating tool for people, especially in oppressive regimes, to confront, ridicule and criticize the powerful," Jenkins says in the article. Jenkins recalls how he began his study of laughter: "When I was in pre-medical school, I was trying to help a child with autism who never made eye contact and who never spoke, [except to] repeat…