Paul Heritage

Portrait: Ratao Diniz

Paul Heritage is a man of many modes. Academic, social and cultural activist, director, writer, teacher, trainer, thinker and policy advisor, lover of both Live Art and Shakespeare, Paul has also for the past 15 years been producer of his own visionary and defining projects, interwoven with his concerns as an academic of applied performance, and that explore how to make change through art as a social practice.

Many of the projects he has produced have taken place in Brazil, a country that he embraced on his first visit in 1991, and which has honoured him for his work there. Knighted in 2004 by President Lula's social democratic government, he was also awarded the Orilaxé Prize for Human Rights in 2006, bestowed by Rio de Janeiro's Grupo Cultural AfroReggae. Now based in the UK again as both Professor of Drama and Performance at Queen Mary's, University of London and as Director of People's Palace Projects, Paul is producing projects that bring his Brazilian experiences back here, to see what these perspectives might offer.

Paul's work over the years has drawn deeply on his personal engagement with the world around him, his sense of what needs to be done and his own place in bringing about change. His actions and interventions as a producer are interwoven with a process of profound reflection on their meaning and impact, explored more fully through his academic existence and voice within policy-making and the shaping of practice.

When I graduated from Manchester with my degree in English and Drama, my first job was at Covent Garden as an Assistant to an Assistant Staff Producer. Although I was appointed a lecturer in Drama at the University of Wales in Swansea, my heart was set on opera. I went to Australia in 1983, and heard talk about a strange virus that was attacking gay men. And they were dying. I returned to my lecturing in Swansea, and for the next four years that virus and Clause 28 dominated my life. By the time of the Government's first AIDS awareness campaign in 1986, I had been arrested five times, become the devil incarnate for the local Welsh press, spent a year performing a play that was banned in Swansea, and performed at the second Terence Higgins Conference in London. It was AIDS/HIV that first got me into prisons. Like so many others, I was running Safer Sex workshops using drama. When I returned to Manchester as a lecturer in 1988, I knew I wanted to carry on the prison work. I set up the Theatre in Prisons and Probation Centre in the early 1990s with James Thompson. It still exists today.

In 1991 I visited Brazil for the first time, lecturing on Shakespearian comedy, accompanying Cheek by Jowl's production of As You Like It. I asked if I could visit prisons, and in Brasilia the colonel in charge challenged me to do what I did in Britain in his gaol. I accepted. I returned to the UK, sold my house, gave up my salaried post at the University, and in 1993 began my first project in a prison in Brazil. As a gay man going into prisons, I have always been an outsider. That sense of difference is what I had always worked from. And now in Brazil as an Englishman, my strangeness allowed me to attempt things, create encounters that others maybe could not.

I learnt quickly that everything I had been doing in Britain made no sense there. Offence-focused programmes trying to achieve individual change in one person were irrelevant. So I shifted to looking for the ways in which arts projects can bring about institutional change. A three-year programme focusing on AIDS in the São Paulo prison system followed, and I found a model to reach the high numbers which might indicate a different level of impact - 43 prisons and over 6,000 prisoners. When we began Staging Human Rights in 2000, it built on this approach, lasting over five years, and reaching 20,000 prisoners and guards in ten different states.

To work at this scale, I needed a structure. When I became a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, I set up People's Palace Projects (PPP) London, and PPP Brazil, taking the name from a building at the heart of the university with a mission statement that Queen Victoriagave it in 1893 and that still resonated for us. PPP has allowed me to raise funds in the UK, internationally and in Brazil, and has given me a framework for delivering the projects.

Staging Human Rights started off in the state of São Paulo. With UK research money and Lottery funds, we worked in 37 prisons, working with Augusto Boal's Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed to train prison educators to implement their own mini-projects, which we guided and supported. Interactive forums looking at human rights within the prisons led over time to a declaration of human rights, devised by the participants at a final event at the Parliament of Latin America in São Paulo. And then the Brazilian Ministry of Justice asked us to extend the project across other states.

In 2003, I started Changing the Scene, again with a combination of UK Lottery and research funding for a three-year programme.The focus was on young people in conflict with the law in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time, this took me into conflict with civic authorities, at a time of electoral change in the city. The young people are held in what are known as secure schools, not prisons, with even less civic oversight and protection for their rights than the adult prisons. There is extreme abuse. One Friday afternoon early in the project, when I was negotiating at a particular institution ready for the workshops we were planning, I asked to see where they kept the vulnerable prisoners. After some pressure, they took me to a place that was literally a dungeon: a hell. For the first time, I crossed a line and said I would not leave until the boys were taken out of that cell. They refused, but I had a mobile phone and called people I knew. Eventually they were moved. At that moment, the personal reason why I do the work was at stake, and I had to act. Yet it was everything I don't believe in - trying to solve the instant of the moment. The abuse undeniably continues, whatever was achieved on that one afternoon.

With the change in state government, the project became extremely unwelcome with the Rio authorities. Skills I'd honed over ten years were no longer working, and I saw that now was a time of conflict. We faced new rules. At times we achieved big changes in particular juvenile prisons, but if you win these small battles too often, someone is going to plot your downfall. We were caught out-of-depth by political waves. It was becoming very confrontational, with artists being strip-searched by police. This was not what I wanted, so with much reluctance after a year or so I moved the project from the juvenile institutions into the communities - favelas - where young people are most at risk of being caught up in the criminal justice system. We learnt from Grupo Cultural Afroreggae - based in the favela of Vigário Geral -how to develop arts projects that could address young people as they left the juvenile justice system and returned to their communities.

In summer 2003, my partner and work colleague Carlos Calchi was murdered; he was shot while
leaving a juvenile prison where he had been running workshops as part of Changing the Scene. Like 96% of murders in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Carlos' was never solved. While I made sure the programmes continued, I stepped back from a personal contact with the prisons. I sought to find a way of making theatre with friends who had been part of my life with Carlos. At the invitation of Maria Padilha, one of Brazil's most innovative artists, I conceived the project Love in Time of War with Grupo Cultural Afroreggae. Without intending to, I was taking myself even closer to the guns.

With a cast made up of some of Brazil's most famous television and cinema stars, we performed Anthony and Cleopatra and Measure for Measure in public spaces across three favelas, and in one of the shopping mall theatres in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in Rio, transporting audiences across from one context to another. AfroReggae not only provided live on-stage percussion for each of the performances, they also negotiated our access. We searched for locations in communities with a lack of public amenities of any kind. We decided to launch the project on one of Rio's most violent frontiers, a no-man's land known as 'the Gaza strip', located between two favelas controlled by rival drug gangs, where gun murders are committed daily by the young men from the drug factions. A ceasefire was negotiated to allow the opening performance to take place on the shooting gallery that was the border between two communities, the first ceasefire in the 20 year-long war that has raged between these gangs. We rehearsed in the evenings, and during the night I negotiated with the traffickers. All of us involved agreed that if ten people came to claim this frontier as a place from which to watch Shakespeare, this would be success. We put out two hundred chairs. Two thousand people turned up. The site, the audience and the actors were overwhelmed. No-one can say what were the impressions and the impact which will survive, but the ceasefire itself lasted 18 days.

Although I had worked for many years with men of violence in prison, I had never been with them in their own communities, on their own terms and amongst the guns in this way. Shakespeare took me to the borders where I tested the strength of theatre - what can and also what cannot be done. When the violence resumed after an 18-day ceasefire, it was with increased intensity.

During 2004, I realised that I wanted to be back in Britain, to bring the things that I had been doing in Brazil here and move them forward, find links to organisations that are doing similar work, and learn from and share some of the incredible strategies that Brazilian artists and organisations have developed.

I took Louise Jeffrey from the Barbican to Brazil. When she saw an AfroReggae performance in a favela, she invited them to London, and asked me to create a performance that would communicate their Brazilian context. In turn, I wanted to connect their work to what is happening in the UK. In addition to the performances, in London, Manchester and Oxford in 2006, Afroreggae ran workshops with young people and led seminars for UK based artists and policy makers.

The response to the visit was very strong, and has led, again at the Barbican's instigation, to a six-year plan for From the Favela to the World, which brings together a wide network of partners. Together we aim to explore how the arts can enable young people to participate in debates about public security. It will take place in Manchester and London, and draw on many of the Brazilian methods and approaches that I have learnt from over the years. I hope we can bring some of the spirit of Love in Time of War to From the Favela to the World, though it won't be me personally doing it in the same way. I'm hoping to set up a different kind of structure where partners can work more independently within the overall structure, identity and methods of the project. This is a different sort of challenge for me.

My work is about art as a social practice, art as an agency in a matrix of agencies that create change. Perhaps art is not so very different: it needs to be understood within a set of social practices from which it has too often become disconnected. Sometimes we mystify art so much, we no longer understand it in this way. Our work can be metaphysical, humanist, metaphorical - but it is also necessary, because it can help and be part of other socio-political and economic changes.

Art is a means of achieving knowledge we don't already have, of ourselves, of each other, how we interact, how separate worlds come together. Through the productive moment together, we know more about the states of our lives and the world. I do it for those moments. Funders and evaluators will ask what happened down the line, but that's harder. Of course I'm trying to change the structures too, but what I'm doing is based in the powerful, intense productive moment.

People take great risks for me in this work. The prison director who dares to risk the changes it will create in their prison, the guard who shows his emotions in a workshop amongst colleagues, a prisoner who says things that make him vulnerable, who, when asked if he will in future practice safe sex because of a drama programme, exclaims that in embracing his cell mates, crying and laughing, he has already made the biggest changes in his life.