Jailhouse Lessons Lead to Performance Artwork

What does an aerobics instructor do when she can’t get anyone in her class to exercise?

If the class takes place in a San Francisco jail, and you’re theater artist Rhodessa Jones, co-founder and co-artistic director of the San Francisco-based Cultural Odyssey, you find out what your class does want to do. Her classes in the San Francisco city and county jails wanted, with some encouragement, to share their stories.

What Jones learned from her pupils became the basis of “Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women,” a new solo work that will have its San Diego debut as a co-production of Sushi Performance Gallery and the African American Museum of Fine Art at Sushi tonight through Saturday.

Jones, 42, said she caught on “pretty quickly,” back in 1987, “that aerobics was not going to work” with the women prisoners.

So, while she did her routine--alone--with the women just watching, she would do a monologue about why she was there.

“Once the word got out that there was this very strange gym teacher, more people came. Some people would try to do the exercises, but most people just listened. I broke a few rules by encouraging them to talk about their own lives and not pass judgment. The thing that started to dawn on me was that most of the women had these incredible minds. It was through a flip of fate that they were there.”

And one of the most surprising reasons that they were there, Jones found out, was love.

“Boys are supposed to be chasing rainbows, and we are supposed to be looking for love. And, if love is in the wrong places, they end up in drug addiction or prostitution. If you fall in love with a certain kind of man, a woman is just prey. The man can usually read people, and these women end up in these strange webs, and then they’re left on their own. There were some amazing dramas.”

And yet the women did not see themselves as victims. Jones said she came up with the name for the piece because of the proud way the women, most of whom had what she described as “big butts,” would “use those butts as a way of warding off possible attacks. I saw one woman being transferred, and she was like an alley cat, really hard. I said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ and she said, ‘Don’t you worry about me.’ ”

But, for all their bravado, such women were still vulnerable.

“One of my best students had killed two different people. She had a chemical imbalance and would drink and flip out. She was killed herself a few weeks after she got out.”

That death, in part, inspired the piece.

“I had to celebrate their lives because people have to know that there are living, breathing people incarcerated,” she said.

Jones debuted the piece for the Women in Theatre Festival in Boston in April, 1990 and later performed it in San Francisco. But her most appreciative audience so far may have been a group of male prisoners on work furlough.

“The men loved those characters. They recognized those women,” she said.

She ascribes her success in capturing the women’s characters to how closely she related to them--her increasing sense of how fragile the line was that divided her from them.

Before she was encouraged by her brother, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, to become an artist, she had an illegitimate daughter at age 16. She worked as a nude dancer, an experience that she later transformed into “The Legend of Lily Overstreet.” Now she is working on a sequel to “Big Butt Girls” called “Living on the Outside.”

“As a woman, I didn’t feel that different from them. When I took up art as a way of life and to pay my rent, it became this life-affirming process about learning and growing. Everybody has a bumpy road. Being in the jails and looking at black women there, I thought how lucky I am that I am out here. This has been a journey for me and a real high point in my life as an artist.”