Spotlight on The Medea Project

Spotlight on The Medea Project

I first became aware of The Medea Project almost 20 years ago. An article about the project can be located here which sums up some of the projects work.

Perhaps best known of such efforts is Rhodessa Jones’s “Medea Project” of staging plays based on mythological plots with incarcerated women. As the dramaturg and videographer for one season of Jones’s performances, Sara L. Warner describes the mythological resonances of “The Medea Project.” Warner introduced the incarcerated women to the myth of Inanna of ancient Sumer, now modern Iraq, and watched as the prisoners internalized and recreated Inanna’s losses and loyalties on her harrowing trip to the underworld. The incarcerated women who already felt themselves in hell, however, had difficulties imagining the ways up away from addiction, dependency, poverty, and abuse.

I believe that this project is an example, even though it was unsuccessful, at an attempt to use myth as a healing process. Without the imagination and the pathway to escape your personal hells it’s not possible to do so.