DISCIPLINE AND PLEASURE: DANCING INMATES IN CEBU'S PROVINCIAL DETENTION AND REHABILITATION CENTER

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 of their prison populations.

Even a cursory study of the academic literature suggests how much prison theatre is set up as "us" versus "them," where the ones with the problem (them) are acted upon by the ones with the appropriate correctional and therapeutic tools (us). Many first-person accounts make it clear that distance and power relationships are scrupulously observed, especially in those programs designed to elicit a confession or response from the inmate that begins and ends with the singular "I" (Thompson 2004). Thus there is no intersubjective in-between, no genuine exchange between human beings where inmates and non-inmates create a continuous feedback loop sharing the same phenomenological sphere. Even though the principles of discipline and surveillance that Foucault finds central to the contemporary prison are present at CPDRC, I argue that dance here creates an interstitial space, one made possible by the pleasure that the audience experiences while watching the CPDRC prison dancers and the pleasure experienced by the dancers through the act of performing. That is, it is a shared experience of pleasure that bridges the distance between inmates and non-inmates: at CPDRC, the Foucauldian framework "discipline and punish" is replaced with one of "discipline and pleasure."

This article will examine the distinctively Filipino cultural practices that provide a foundation for the prison dance phenomenon, the form and content of the public Saturday dance program, and the political context for the work. I conclude with a phenomenological proposition that I offer as a provisional way of making sense of my own response to this embodied, kinaesthetic practice.3

The Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC)

In 2004, when Gwendolyn Garcia became Governor of the province of Cebu in the centre of the Philippines archipelago, she inherited a deeply troubled regional prison, one housing nearly two thousand inmates in a structure built to contain two hundred, and with an internal culture that was by all accounts rife with corruption, smuggling, and other illegal activities (Seno 2008; Cebú Provincial Government). Following a difficult move to a new facility later that year that threatened to devolve into full-scale rioting, a new disciplinary culture was imposed and many of the employees of the old prison, including the chief warden, were relieved of their duties. According to a video produced by the provincial government, the new CPDRC sought "to pave the way in strengthening a more enlightened and human correctional system that promotes the reformation and renewal of offenders," using a strategy of "responsive rehabilitation, focusing on behavioural change of the inmates as well as cultural change inside the jail" (Cebu Provincial Government).

Gwendolyn's brother Byron, a security consultant, was brought in to implement these new management and disciplinary practices and soon began to experiment with compulsory fitness routines for all inmates that involved marching to music. One of the earliest dance routines, still in the dance repertoire, was Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." Also added early on were the 70s hits "In the Navy" and "YMCA" by the Village People, selected, according to Garcia, so that the more macho inmates "wouldn't be offended by being asked to dance" (BBC 2007). It was Garcia who started posting clips of the inmates online, and by 2007 the videos had become an internet sensation, going viral with an enormously popular version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and featuring in the international media. By early 2008, the video of the inmates performing "Thriller," posted just six months earlier, had received over ten million hits on YouTube, making it one of the site's most popular clips ever (Seno 2008).

The Provincial Government's video asserts that, "while the goal is to keep the body fit, in an effort to keep the mind fit, such may not actually happen if it is not done in a manner deemed pleasurable. Music being the language of the soul, is added to that regimen" (Cebu Provincial Government). The notion that pleasure and discipline must go hand-in-hand is perhaps what is most revolutionary about this approach, though perhaps less surprising if one considers the broader Filipino context where line-formation and street dancing is deeply imbedded in cultural celebrations and in the educational system, starting in primary school.

Dance in a Filipino Cultural Context

It is well documentated that dance was important in the cultures of the Philippines even prior to colonisation by Spain in the sixteenth century: many of the earliest written accounts by explorers and Roman Catholic priests noted the frequency with which they observed dancing and its prominent position in celebrations (Alejandro 2002, 2; Morga, cited in Zafra 1967, 57; Phelan 1959, 73; Villaruz 2006, 13 and 31). John Phelan (1959) convincingly argues that the fiesta system imposed by the Spanish colonisers, which built celebrations around locally-designated patron saints as a means of both religious indoctrination and social and political control, worked so well in the Philippines precisely because throughout the archipelago, and particularly in the Visayan and Tagalog regions, Filipinos had a deeply-engrained impulse toward the performative.

What has come to be known as street dancing has long been a feature of religious festivals throughout the country, a practice encouraged by the awarding of cash prizes to winning groups competing at such events. Dance has become important in reflecting regional and local identities, and the social cohesion created when dance groups come together is a key element in local fiestas throughout the country. Filipino dance scholar Basilio Villaruz asserts that its significance "has to do with how dance cultivates precision and discipline, camaraderie and solidarity, articulation and eloquence" (2006,15), positioning it at the heart of Filipino culture. Building on the work of Filipino scholars (Jocano 2001; Villaruz 2006), I have argued elsewhere (Peterson 2007) that the impulse supporting much traditional performance activity (which invariably showcases dance) expresses the integration of the inner felt state (sa loob) with its external manifestation. Villaruz also speaks to this in his examination of "the Filipino soul in dance," asserting that:

The soul is what is inside, our loob. It can range from empathy or malasakit to our sense of worship or samba. It is only understood when seen in or brought out by the body. So the soul is felt or practiced sa labas [on the outside/ externally]. What's inside-the motive, the passion, or the idea-is projected outside via movement and as expressed through task or dance. (2006, 30)

The Spaniards, he asserts, "knew our choreographic proclivity so even the priests used dance to convert us," concluding that conversion took place not only "through the mind but also through the body" (31). For all of these reasons, dance, particularly in its communal and mass orientation, makes cultural sense in a Filipino prison-particularly in Cebu, the first area of the country to be Christianised, and a region that even today positions itself as "the civilising heart of the Philippines."4

At the civic level, large dancing teams are numerous and well supported by residents, and often by local politicians as well. In popular fiestas such as the Sinulog of Cebu, held every year in honour of the Santo Niño, the rehearsal process starts months before the January event. Neighbourhoods or barangay in and around Cebu City compete in the dance competition, marching through the streets in brilliant, handmade costumes. In 2008 Byron Garcia sought approval for a group of one hundred inmates to participate in the street dancing at Sinulog, the largest and most highly regarded festival in the country. Though his dream of public participation was not realised due to security concerns raised by Mayor Tomas Osmeña (BBC 2007), the fact that such aventure was proposed reflects how deeply engrained this tradition is in the prison population.

Schools throughout the Philippines also play a significant role in inculcating the communitarian values of dance. In many parts of the country, and particularly in the Visayan region of which Cebu is a part, elementary, secondary, and high schools have a long history of positioning dance not just as an extracurricular activity but as a means of expressing the identity of the school. Schools participate in many of the Santo Niño festivals throughout the region, a practice that at the Ati-atihan Festival on the nearby island of Panay dates back to the 1950s. Competitions between groups since the 1970s have often provided winning dance groups with cash prizes, some of which are considerable. Informants working in the performing arts who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s recall the importance of dance from their elementary school days. Nestor Jardin, former President of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, remembers dancing as a six-year-old in what was called a "field demonstration," held in the open area typically found in front of most schools in the Philippines (2010). Alex Cortez, a prominent theatre director and choreographer based in Manila, has similar memories of what is now generally called Field Day, which involved dancing on a designated day, often in the latter part of the school year during the hot, dry season, before the school's principal, assembled teachers, and top bureaucrats from the regional offices of the Department of Education (2010).

Around the time Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, street dancing throughout the country became more organised, emerging as an increasingly prominent cultural phenomenon. First Lady Imelda Marcos took a strong personal interest in the arts, and though her legacy is often seen as that of creating an expensive and arguably unnecessary physical, Manila-centred infrastructure for the arts with a preference for international high culture, she was also influential in bringing amateur groups of regional folk dancers into the national spotlight. Identifying and supporting regional diversity through dance was also a strategy adopted in building a vibrant tourism industry; groups came up to Manila to perform at the Folk Arts Theatre or the Nayong Pilipino, a cultural village showcasing six of the country's regional cultures, with some groups also appearing on national television. Mrs Marcos was also famous for having students "lining up the streets to welcome dignitaries" (Cortez 2010) and indeed the way she mobilised vast numbers of children and adults for these displays of quasi-totalitarian state adulation provides fodder for an entire field of performance that is yet to be fully analysed. Responses from my interviews with older informants at multiple sites throughout the country are virtually all in agreement that during the 1970s street dancing assumed much greater prominence both in their respective regions and also nationally.

This then is the context for the broad type of dancing found in the CPDRC. Virtually all inmates, except for the few over sixty years of age, grew up at a time when organised dancing in groups took place in the context of regional festivals such as Sinulog, their local fiestas in their home town or neighbourhood, or at school. Thus even those inmates with little formal education would have had experience dancing at school. Because organised street dancing is more prevalent in the poorer areas than the wealthier neighbourhoods where people live in relative isolation from one other behind high walls topped with shards of glass, those from the lowest socio-economic levels (which characterise most of the prison population) would have had the greatest access to street dance.

Dancing Inmates

The show on the final Saturday of each month at CPDRC is open to the general public and requires no payment or advance bookings. Prospective audience members arrive at the Provincial Capital Building in Cebu City well in advance to put their name on a list. Buses transport the audience to the prison, driving up into the hills overlooking the city, passing through some of the most expensive and exclusive housing estates in the region along the way. When entering the prison to see the show in May 2010, security seemed amazingly relaxed, with no body pat-downs or searches of personal effects that I observed; prison guards were notable more by their absence than their presence. Audience members are given a choice of seeing the performance from the floor of the prison yard where the dancing takes place, or coming up to the upper levels where a viewing gallery extends around two of the four sides of the open-air yard. Most surprising is that there are no barriers between audience members in the lower area and the inmates themselves; audiences sit or stand at the edges of the performance space, sheltered from the sun by the overhead galleries. Entering the space as a spectator feels very much like moving into a performance space and not a prison.

What I was not prepared to witness was a fully-fledged dance show, especially one that included only a single Michael Jackson number. As of early 2010 the inmates had at least twenty dance routines in their repertoire (Payne 2010), typically adding a new one every month. The May 2010 show consisted of twelve dance numbers with two intermissions featuring inmates "Rocky and Billy," whose verbal jousting in the local dialect of Cebuano was furthered by their clever physical comedy, singing, and guitar playing. The music ranged from the Pointer Sisters' high-energy classic "Jump," to the Korean girl band 2NEl's hit "Fire," a 2009 release that seemed to be playing in every bar and radio station in the Philippines during the six months I spent there. The inmates' popular interpretation of "Thriller" was no longer in the program, but a different Michael Jackson number was reserved for the finale: "They Don't Care About Us" from This Is It, the film documentary about the singer's life released four months after his death in 2009. Jackson's choreographer Travis Payne had been to CPDRC earlier in the year, teaching inmates the steps to a choreographic sequence created specifically for them, adding it to the official DVD version of the film launched at the end of January (ABS-CBN 2010).5 All 1,500 inmates were wearing black t-shirts with the film's logo in white on the front, which also featured Jackson in a wide-brimmed hat striking an iconic pose, arms raised, legs together, and illuminated from behind, reflecting the group's recent association with the film. From the waist down all dancers were in matching prison-orange tracksuit pants and black running shoes.

The music track accompanying the first dance number, the classic 1975 disco hit "Do the Hustle," provided a steady beat to support a martial presentation of the colours-the flags of the Philippines and the Province of Cebu. Moving down and centre toward where most of the audience were seated were the two flag bearers as well as a colour guard consisting of two inmates with fake rifles resting on their shoulders. Marching in formation, the colour guard saluted the audience and peeled off around to the side of the yard as long lines of dancers in formation marched into and across the centre of the performance space. Small orange ribbons tied around the inmates' wrists drew attention to arm movements as they marched, stopped, marched in place, and executed rudimentary but visually striking patterns by clapping to the beat and simply raising their arms in unison to the left, then the right, or lifting both arms over their heads simultaneously. Groups moved past and through one another with military precision, creating an impressive visual spectacle, particularly for those in the upper gallery. While the choreography was very much about the display of discipline and control, there was something both silly and sweet about the juxtaposition of such movement with a light-hearted, bouncy tune like "Do the Hustle," with its meaningless lyrics of "Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo... Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ... Do it. Do the hustle!" In fact, this fusion of discipline and a playful joy characterised the entire performance.

A dozen female inmates joined in the dancing on the third number, "Rico Mamba," a mid-80s hit from the group Breakfast Club. The women danced separately from the men in a forward position nearest the bulk of the audience; but the more energetic choreography and swirling hand movements favoured those dancers who were fitter and more kinaesthetically gifted-an isolated group of fifteen to twenty-five of the best male dancers who took up the middle focal point in the yard. Larger groups of men moved behind them and shifted formations. Those in the featured group, some of whom I spoke with after the performance, were generally younger and it was clear from their post-show comments that they took pleasure and pride from being part of this elite unit. One of their number told me he had been dancing since the program started four years earlier and that they do indeed rehearse up to four hours each day. Because I was not granted permission from the Provincial Governor's office to conduct interviews with the event's organisers or the artistic team, for reasons that shall become apparent in the next section, it was difficult to confirm many of the structural and practical details with respect to training, rehearsal, and relationships with guest choreographers. Indeed, it was more than a little ironic that I had greater access to the inmates than I had to their jailers.

The ways in which gender was performed was one of the most striking features of many of the dances in the program. Four of the featured dances were choreographed to popular hits by well-known female vocalists or girl bands, including Beyoncé's "Single Lady," the Pointer Sisters' "Jump," Kat DeLuna's "Whine Up," Blondie's hit song "The Tide is High," and 2NEl's "Fire," while five songs were written from the female protagonist's point of view and many dealt with failed relationships with worthless, cheating men, as the following excerpts bear out:

Now put your hands up

Up in the club, we just broke up

I'm doing my own little thing

you decided to dip but now you wanna trip

Cuz another brother noticed me

I'm up on him, he up on me

don't pay him any attention

cuz I cried my tears, gave three good years

Ya can't be mad at me

Cuz if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it

If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it

("Single Lad/' by Beyoncé, Elyricsworld 2010a)6

It's not the things you do that tease and wound me bad

But it's the way you do the things you do to me

Fm not the kind of girl who gives up just like that

Oh, no

("The Tide is High," lyrics by John Holt, Justsomelyrics 2010)

The songs reflect content one would not expect to encounter in an almost entirely male prison, given that the vast majority of inmates are awaiting trial or serving time for serious crimes such as murder, rape, or theft- or drug-related offenses, and given that the choreography frequently subverts and sends up patterns of gendered movement. The opening to "Single Lady" is intercut with a voiceover sequence that appears to be lifted from the script of Paul Rudnick's Hollywood movie In and Out; where a closeted high school drama teacher played by Kevin Kline stands before a television set following instructions from a video series entitled "Getting a Grip" in a fruitless attempt to unlearn behaviour coded as gay. As he tries in vain to resist the temptation to dance to the iconic gay disco anthem "I Will Survive" swelling in the background, he is told by a masculine voice, "truly manly men do not dance. This will be your ultimate test. At all costs avoid rhythm, grace and pleasure. Whatever you do, do not dance."7 Similarly, the inmate dancers seek to contain themselves as they are given these instructions, but end up bursting forth in a riot of high-energy choreography that incorporates feminine and stereotypically camp moves such as vigorous hip-swaying, running hands over the torso and thighs, and even playfully slapping their own asses, revelling in the unmanly.

Similarly, the choreography for 2NEl's hit "Fire" featured an attractive trans gender performer in white spandex tights and a skimpy pink, polka-dotted dress who moved provocatively and gyrated in a style that would not have been out of place in a strip club. In fact some of the best-known performers who have taken on key dance roles have been transgendered, gay, or bakla,8 the most prominent being Wenjiel Resane, who played the featured dance role of the "girlfriend" in the Cebu prison version of "Thriller."9

The signature Michael Jackson white glove was reserved for the final number, "They Don't Care about Us." Travis Payne's new choreography combined with the song gave the number a vigorous, strident quality, with a bold assertion of the inmates' subaltern status embedded in the lyrics, while the choreography suggested a narrative of fighting back against the systems of oppression and reclaiming personal dignity. Again, excerpts from the lyrics are worth quoting:

Tell me what has become of my life

I have a wife and two children who love me

I am the victim of police brutality, now

I'm tired of bein' the victim of hate

You're rapin' me of my pride

Tell me what has become of my rights

Am I invisible because you ignore me?

Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now

I'm tired of bein' the victim of shame

All I wanna say is that

They don't really care about us

("They Don't Care About Us" by Michael Jackson, Elyricsworld 2010b)

With its clear references to police brutality, families torn asunder, and the betrayal of the nation's foundational principles, such statements by inmates in an American prison would likely result in the loss of privileges at the very least, or in solitary confinement or transfer to a high security prison at the worst (Pinter 2003, 67). Even in Brazil, where there is a strong tradition of using theatre to raise political consciousness (Heritage 1998b), the prevailing methodology of Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre tends to focus on specific oppressions faced by individuals rather than on encouraging an entire prison population to publicly proclaim their victim status. It also bears noting that the performance of "They Don't Care about Us" evoked the strongest vocal response from the audience on the day I was there, and there seemed little doubt that many watching were deeply sympathetic to both the content of the song and the claiming of power being invoked by the dispossessed.

On my return trip by bus from the CPDRC to the State Capital Building I sat next to a mother with her young son. As we drove through the neighbourhoods of the wealthy, she told me that she wants her son to know that many of the biggest criminals in the country are living in homes similar to the ones our bus was passing by. Taking her son to the prison to see the inmates dance was her way of teaching him that there are many good souls inside the prison and many bad ones on the outside. In a country where warlords in the south massacred forty-three people, including eleven journalists, in a single day in a roadside ambush in the run-up to the 2010 election (Mananghaya 2009), her words ring true. In this context, it was particularly poignant when, in the middle of the final number, a single inmate marched down and centre, and flipped around an enormous hand-held sign revealing the iconic image of Martin Luther King delivering his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, while the opening words of King's speech rang out over the top of the music: "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." In a country where most of the political and economic power is controlled by a hereditary oligarchy, this dream of freedom still seems a long way away. The inmates know that and many of us on the bus back to Cebu City knew it as well.

Political Context

The political dimensions of the dancing inmates of Cebu also require attention, particularly in a country where virtually everything in the public eye is political, where every infrastructural and human services project is trumpeted as being "brought to you by" a particular local or national political leader. Throughout the country neighbourhood bridges, schools, basketball courts, and even benches by the roadside are permanently emblazoned with the name of the politician responsible for bestowing the gift upon local citizens, visually reinforcing a system of patronage politics that has resulted in the institutionalisation of powerful family dynasties who wield political power inter-generationally. The Garcia family of Cebu is one of many such families, though arguably much more public-spirited and progressive in their words and deeds than many of their peers elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, both the CPDRC as a place, as well as its international recognition, as a model for discipline and rehabilitation through the dancing inmates program, is "brought to you" by the Garcia family. This much is certainly clear: if incoming Provincial Governor Gwendolyn Garcia, with her brother Byron, had not intervened to radically alter the culture of the prison when it moved to its new facilities in 2004, it would have probably ended up like many prisons in the Philippines; that is, run by an internal structure of powerbroker inmates preying on the weak in collusion with corrupt and underpaid prison officials who benefit from illegal activities.

It is also clear that the dancing inmates programme would never have started if Byron Garcia had not followed his intuition and used music to break up the tension in the prison population after the move to the new facility. Different but similar stories about the origin of the dancing are in circulation and it seems likely that all originate from Garcia himself, who is not known for his modesty and is inclined toward self-dramatisation. He told Travis Payne that the idea came to him after watching the American movie, The Shawshank Redemption, in which unruly inmates are calmed when hearing an Italian aria. Payne recalls that Garcia told him that, after he played Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" on the PA system, the inmates stopped fighting and started dancing (Payne 2010). In a news report on Australian television Garcia himself told a less colourful story, claiming that the idea of using music and dance came to him one day while watching the inmates march, and he said to himself, "why don't I convert that march into a dance number?" (Lazaredes 2007). From this emerged a dancing and physical fitness programme that was required for all inmates, excepting the elderly and infirm. Professional choreographer Gwendolyn Lador was brought in to compose new routines and, as already mentioned, by 2007 the dancing inmates had become an international sensation after Byron released footage of "Thriller" on YouTube.

The dancing itself also acquired a political dimension following choreographer Payne's 2010 visit, which resulted in the prison's finances being subjected to scrutiny by the Provincial Government. While a nominal fee had been collected by audience members coming to see the monthly Saturday show and other funds had been solicited on behalf of the inmates, it was suggested in the media that proper accounting principles were not followed (Israel 2010). Although Garcia was never accused of having used the money for personal gain,10 it was nevertheless a source of embarrassment during the campaign period leading up to the re-election of his sister Gwendolyn as Provincial Governor. Byron was quickly relieved of his post, and a flurry of articles appeared in the regional and national press alleging improprieties and highlighting the tension between siblings (Israel 2010; Sun Star 2010). There was even a period early in 2010 when it looked as though the dancing would be permanently suspended. By mid-year Byron had started up his own company comprised of former inmates and had already toured prisons throughout the country with the group. Nevertheless, news reports suggest that some tension remains between the siblings (Adlawan 2010), and there is little doubt that the lack of access I was granted to prison officials by the governor's office had much to do with this dynamic.

Throughout the Philippines, successful projects that have brought enormous benefits to local communities are routinely halted during the election period, particularly events featuring performance elements such as local and regional fiestas and Holy Week events presented during the week leading up to Easter. Similarly, large community-based performance events can be completely altered depending on who wins an election. As the shape and scale of events is seen as an act of patronage by a politician, the winner of an election may chose to completely reconfigure an event; in fact, not to do so is to remind the public of the successes and generosity of their predecessors. As successful as the CPDRC program appears to be, in the future its own success and recognition, as well as its particular connection with the Garcia family, may well ensure that it does not live on past the next gubernatorial election.

Discipline, Rehabilitation, Pleasure

To date, the efficacy of the CPDRC program has not been systematically or quantitatively evaluated, though qualitative evidence would suggest that it has had an important positive impact on the lives of inmates both in prison and after their release. Inmates certainly appear to be enjoying dancing, and in the yard after the Saturday show many spoke to me about how important and valuable this experience had been for them. While one can assert that an inmate is hardly going to speak the truth to a stranger while inside prison walls, it should be noted that Filipinos are famously vocal when it comes to political dissent and it seems unlikely-though of course not impossible-that every inmate I spoke to in an open prison yard, and far from the guards, would be towing the same party line. Some released inmates, as previously noted, continue to dance as part of a company that tours nationally under Byron Garcia's leadership, and their participation is presumably of their own free will (as free as that will can be given the grinding poverty that many face upon release). But after experiencing this phenomenon as a spectator, it is hard not to conclude that this activity-dancing as a group-has the potential to change the inmates' day-to-day experience of their imprisonment and therefore affect their lives in a positive way more generally.

Performance work in prison has a long history, perhaps one of the most (in)famous examples being the plays staged by the Marquis de Sade with fellow inmates in the asylum of Charenton in the early nineteenth century. Peter Weiss's 1963 play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, a fanciful recreation of de Sade's prison theatre, suggests that the experience did not result in rehabilitation but rather an incitement to riot against the prison officials. More recently, while doing Boal-inflected workshops in Brazilian prisons in 1995, Paul Heritage was forced to confront the legacy of a 1980 prison project led by well-known director and actress Ruth Escobar-a project that prison authorities blamed for inciting a riot in the Säo Paulo city prison (Heritage 1998a, 2004). Though there are many performance-led projects in prisons throughout the Western world that have not provoked riots, and many with long histories, few would appear to use dance as a way to bring the body and mind together in a manner that instils discipline while also providing pleasure.

In the United States, home to the world's largest incarcerated population, anything that brings pleasure to inmates would be unlikely find significant public support. James Thompson writes of his experience observing the use of theatre in Texas prisons as part of the Texas Youth Commission's rehabilitation program set up under the watch of former Governor George W. Bush as part of a campaign promise to "do something" about "juvenile crime" (Thompson 2004, 64). The psychodramainfiected use of theatre he observed, with its focus on '"holding people to account,' 'making them see the error of their ways,' 'making amends,' 'showing justice being done,' 'confronting them with the consequences of their behaviour,' [and] 'forcing them to understand the affects of their actions on others,"' evoked a strong negative response: "in the same way that a public hanging would churn my stomach, these acts made me avert my eyes in disgust" said Thompson (2004, 72-73). Perhaps the only project in American prisons that appears to respond to the specific cultural encoding of a particular group, and extends that knowledge into the public realm through a disciplined, embodied practice, is the hugely popular prison rodeo by inmates from Louisiana's infamous Angola Prison.11 Though the focus of this event is on the individual's death-defying bravura performance in the ring, this practice is perhaps closer to what is happening at CPDRC than theatre-based projects in which individuals are obliged to come to terms with their crime through an admission of responsibility and guilt, and admit the error of their ways; the latter of which would seem to be more about the performance of punishment than rehabilitation.

The role of exercise and productive activity as a means of instilling discipline in the prison population also has a long history going back as far as the sixteenth century in the Netherlands, where inmates at the famous Rasphuis prison were engaged to rasp Brazilwood to obtain a powder that was later sold. These action-based programs continued to develop through the late eighteenth century by way of prison reforms inspired by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, who set out a plan for a model prison in his essay Panopticon, or the Inspection House (1791). In the CPDRC context, Byron Garcia repeatedly invokes discipline as being the core embodied practice that leads the inmates down a path toward rehabilitation: "the end goal would be to achieve discipline. We have to achieve discipline. Three years ago these inmates were very unruly" (Ortigas 2007). The process of counting out beats itself imposes a kind of discipline, as Garcia observes: "using music, you can involve the body and the mind. The inmates have to count, memorise steps and follow the music" (BBC 2007). Garcia's comments on the function of exercise mirror those of Foucault:

Exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated [...]. Before adopting this strictly disciplinary form, exercise had a long history: it is to be found in military, religious and university practices either as initiation ritual, preparatory ceremony, theatrical rehearsal or examination. (1977,161)

And as we have seen, the martial quality in the group choreography at CPDRC is at times far from subtle. For 1,500 inmates to march, move, and dance in a prison yard-even a large one-requires military-like precision.

The ways in which the inmates are placed under surveillance at CPDRC also aligns with Foucault's observations about the practices that followed from changes to prison architecture in the nineteenth century. Foucault uses Bentham's concept of the panopticon to describe a system of surveillance imbedded in prison architecture designed "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (1977,201). Foucault's description of the panopticon not only reflects the physical characteristics of the new prison, further enhanced today by the techniques of electronic surveillance, but it also applies to the open courtyard and gallery spaces of the CPDRC when it is transformed into a performance space:

This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. ( 1977,207)

Indeed it is the fully transparent nature of space in the CPDRC yard that makes it possible for spectators to see all, while inmates can also see that they are being seen. Without the physical characteristics of the new CPDRC, bodies could not be disciplined, regimented, or seen as they dance before audiences once a month or before surveillance cameras the rest of the year.

Conclusion by Way of a Phenomenlogical Response

For the better part of the last two hundred years, the first and most important of the seven laws governing a "good 'penitential condition,"' according to Foucault, is that "penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individual's behaviour" (1977, 269). Indeed it was the emergence and widespread acceptance of this principle over a very short period of time that transformed state-sanctioned punishment from a street spectacle that displayed the power of the crown through its capacity to inflict terrors on the human body, to a system of incarceration where inmates were placed under surveillance. If transformation is the goal, one can argue that surveillance is still a necessary requirement for that transformation, while the element of spectacle that has returned to the prison in this instance provides the grounds on which pleasure can displace punishment. The extension of the spectacle to an audience outside the walls of the CPDRC is made possible by the internet, a communicative mode that gives us the capacity to view any manner of spectacle from anywhere in the world in our public and private spaces. Indeed, it is the broadcasting of the spectacle to private spaces that has created the live audience that comes every month to witness the dancing inmates.

The phenomenon of the dancing inmates of Cebu would not have been possible without four elements: (1) the vision and gut instincts of Byron Garcia, backed up by a political apparatus that included his sister, the governor; (2) a cultural context where drill team and line dancing is woven into the life of the community, both in its educational system and in its chief celebrations and festivals; (3) a prison that was built in such a way as to accommodate both dancers and audience members in an open-air performance space; and (4) the ability to circulate the dance spectacle to domestic and international audiences through the internet.

Thus the example of the dancers at CPDRC, while inspirational, does not provide a blueprint for duplication in other prison contexts. In the United States and other nations, where being tough on crime means punishment first and foremost, promoting and implementing such a prison-wide activity would be a political impossibility. Further, in any culture where men do not grow up dancing in the streets, in front of parents and teachers at schools for celebrations and special events, or in their homes, dance would mostly likely fail to provide a common embodied bond. If the experience of CPDRC dancers is a successful one-and as I have indicated, there is still an extent to which one may only assume it is in the absence of hard data-then it seems more fitting that models elsewhere should be established based on local practices. Yet it may well be that only dance can have this kind of transformative power, in that it circumvents speech but requires the body and the mind to work together in a disciplined manner.

So again we come back to the primacy of dance and the ways in which it functions in this particular community. It is at the level of the communal bond-the third space created by the performers and audience coming together-where I wish to conclude this analysis by considering a phemonenological proposition. Levinas, writing back to the I-centeredness of knowing and being in the world, a foundational principle in much Continental philosophy and extended during his life by the existentialists, argues in his complex and intricate tome Totality and Infinity that "being is exteriority" (1969, 290). What he terms "being for the Other" is not "the negation of the I," (304) but rather an essential pre-condition for the I to exist. Further, when he extends these propositions into the fields of creation, time, and transcendence, it becomes clear that in this encounter with "being for the Other" we touch upon the transcendent which "is what can not be encompassed" (293). Thus "the Other, in his signification prior to my initiative, resembles God" (ibid.). It is this encounter with the Other that pulls us into an exchange in which we exist only "for the Other" that I would assert happens on a phenomenological level in this exchange between the dancing inmates and spectators, perhaps even more so when this exchange takes place in shared time and space, when it is live and unmediated.

Let me illustrate by returning to the "I" in this live exchange. When the dancers started to move in the prison yard to the seemingly silly tune "Do the Hustle," I had a surprising response: I cried. It felt as though my top chakra was opening and I existed outside of myself, somehow feeling more alive by being outside of time and in a plane where I was with and for the Other.121 am not alone in this response. Choreographer Payne, presumably well-aware of the power dance can have on the spectator, recalls that he and others in his team had the same reaction when they saw the inmates dance live for the first time in 2010. It is certainly possible to see the line dancing and military-like formations as a kind of quasi-totalitarian practice, one whose power comes from a display of strength by the mostly male dancers in a mass spectacle which in turn evokes a kind of uncanniness and heightened emotion on the part of the spectator, as some suggested when I delivered a version of this article to an audience in Amsterdam. I understand that Nazi rallies at Nuremburg may well have had a similar impact on the audience, but I assert that there was an openness in this offering from the inmates that marked it as fundamentally different from totalitarian displays of might. Having witnessed the dancers and having felt the joy they radiate in a shared space where they outnumber the spectators by approximately five to one, I find this reading impossible to assimilate with my own experience. In a Filipino context, as I have suggested earlier, the sense of interiority (sa loob) and exteriority (sa labas) is the foundation for the individual in relation to himself and others; to bring the interior in line with the exterior is a deeply held cultural value. In terms of interpersonal relations in the Philippines, the concept of empathy is not sufficient for one to be a fully-functioning human; instead, the concept of damay is used to designate the willingness to step into the skin of others, to feel their interiority and to take it on as your own. This exchange, I would assert, is an embodied expression of that cultural value in operation; Levinas, whom I invoke here, provides a possible way to extend an understanding of that inner experience to a wider audience of readers and perceivers. In the end, for both dancers and spectators, the exchange is about creating an in-between space outside ourselves, where something real and more authentic may begin to dwell and where personal transformation can be triggered by an embodied practice.

The dancing inmates at CPDRC fuse the older pre-penitential displays of spectacle and control of the prisoner's body in the public sphere described by Foucault, with the penitential practices of surveillance that extend from Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. The dancing inmates are subject to rigid discipline and control, while being viewed in a physical space that is only possible through the apparatus of surveillance. I have argued that, for performers and audience members collectively housed within the open-air prison yard and its galleries, a third embodied space is created through the shared experience of pleasure. Inmates are subject to the firm physical discipline that dance and marching routines impose, though in the sharing of the performance dancers and spectators exist briefly suspended in a state of grace. Perhaps this moment feels so precious, powerful, and poignant because it ends so quickly. As spectators travel back down the hill from CPDRC toward the centre of Cebu City, the prisoners remain behind walls, bars, and under surveillance, subject to a system of discipline that seeks to rehabilitate, through the pillars of modern penitential practice.

Footnote

1 Much of the scholarship on theatre in prisons available in English focuses on projects in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Brazil. Three key edited collections of essays are Thompson (1998), Fahy and King (2003), and Balfour (2004). In the United States, Rhodessa Jones, founder and Director of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, probably has the longest history of any artist making performance in prisons. For accounts of dance work in prison, see Berson (2008) and Houston (2005).

2 The most famous such example is probably the San Francisco Actor's Workshop production of Waiting for Godot staged before inmates in California's infamous San Quentin Prison in 1957. This production led to the creation of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, a company comprised of inmates.

Footnote

3 It is beyond the scope of this paper to be able to map out a broader theory of audience response, particularly in that there are two audiences for the work: the live and diverse audience that sees the work in the prison yard, and the endlessly varied global audiences watching videos of the dancers on YouTube.

Footnote

4 Miss Cebu, Aliwan Rizzini Alexis Gomez, used this oft-repeated mantra to characterise her home province at the Miss Aliwan Pageant in Manila on 23 April 2010.

Footnote

5 The Sony Pictures official version of the video created with inmates from CPDRC and choreographed by Payne is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKtdTJP_GUI&feature=relmfu/. The earlier version featuringjackson as an inmate in an American prison is at http://www.youtube.com/ watchiV=97nAvTVeR6o/. As of May, 2011, the "official" Michael Jackson version had 18.5 million hits while the newer one with the Cebu inmates clocked in at 14.2 million. As there are many YouTube sites with the video, this is probably only a fraction of the number of viewers who have seen these videos worldwide.

Footnote

6 Lyrics are cited via commercial websites for reference by the reader. All lyrics were checked against their respective music videos; the version referenced is the one that most accurately reflects the lyrics in the recorded version of the song.

7 A clip of this scene from the film In and Out can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J idfV5xvdjY &feature=related/.

Footnote

8 Bakla is the Tagalog word frequently translated as meaning gay, though in a Filipino context bakla generally denotes an individual who is internally a woman while externally male, literally "trapped inside a male body" or "the third sex," terms that are used interchangeably with gay in the Philippines. There is considerable cultural space for baklain Filipino culture and this is the case in prison as well. Men who have sex with men but who are not effeminate generally identify as bisexual rather than gay.

9 CNN's Anderson Cooper rather cruelly mocked Resane in a news story that can be found at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGEsT3dCLVQ/.

Footnote

10 Indeed it is highly improbable that Garcia would have used the money for anything other than reinvesting in the inmates, in that he is well off in his own right.

Footnote

IIA documentary of the prison rodeo by Dutch director Willem van Schaaijk can be seen at http:// player.omroep.nl/?aflID=9454570/.

Footnote

12 I have reflected deeply on this emotional response and have concluded that it had little if anything to do with what was being done or the content of the first dance number, but rather that my response was triggered by sharing the same physical and psychic space with 1,500 inmates in a prison yard as they came to life through dance.

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