Performing Black Feminist Abolition

This chapter undertakes a theoretical analysis of applied theatre using an abolitionist framework to understand how performance practice can struggle within and against carceral institutions to articulate a vision of a world without police and prisons. By focusing on the Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG), a theatre company founded by incarcerated people in a men's maximum-security prison in New York, the author raises questions about the abolitionist potentials of prison theatre. The transformative and utopian political demands articulated by applied theatre artists stem from the history of Black feminist thought that comprises abolition, and applied theatre can claim political power by hewing to this intellectual and activist tradition.