Banged up: Palmasola - A Prison Village
On a piece of Swiss documentary theatre about Bolivia's 'most notorious' prison.
I’m still in Belgrade, recovering from BITEF which finished last Friday. Awards were handed out. Rakija was drunk. Over the course of 10 days, we watched 10 performances from Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Bolivia, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, some of which I’ll be discussing over future weeks.
You know the drill: Café Europa is free to read and I’d like it to stay that way, but it takes time to research and write. If you find it valuable and would like to help support my writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or share it with others who might like it. That’s also enormously helpful.
“Line up!” A man bellows at us through a loud-hailer. Rattling a baton against the fence, he orders the audience to queue up and present their papers.
We’re gathered outside Ciglana, an industrial area in Belgrade turned club/party space. There are metal sculptures dotted around the scrubby ground including a car entirely covered in beer cans. A pack of street dogs supply a canine chorus, barking vigorously in the night air. The man continues to yell as we shuffle forwards to have our wrists stamped with blue ink (a mark that will prove stubbornly shower-resistant the next day).
Palmasola – A Prison Village, is the work of Christoph Frick a director from Basel in Switzerland and his company KLARA Theaterproduktionen. It is based on their research into what is regularly described in the press as “the world's most notorious prison”, Palmasola in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
Built in the 1980s, the prison is currently inhabited by over 6,000 men and women, of whom only 25% have been officially convicted of any crime. One of the reasons for its notoriety is that it essentially operates as a rampantly capitalist micro-society in which inmates are left to their own devices and everything is transactional. Inmates have to pay for everything, from a bed to a private cell. Want your wife to visit you? You’ll have to pay. At the same time, it’s possible to buy almost anything too. Prisoners can set up their own businesses. There are restaurants for those who want to avoid the prison food. There are internet cafes. But if you can’t or won’t pay, you’re pretty much fucked. (You can read more on how all this works here).
Frick and his company are the first artists ever to gain access to Palmasola. They spent a long time filming inside the prison, talking to the inmates (or at least the ones willing to talk to them) and gaining their trust. The resulting show consists of a series of vignettes formed from the stories they heard there.
As we gather round the entrance, actor Nicola Fritzen addresses us from a rust-covered, graffiti-streaked staircase. He plays a Swiss guy called Klaus whose fledgling career as a drug mule went awry when customs officials smelt dope on his clothes and discovered that he had several condoms full of cocaine swimming around in his gut. Following a scene in which he mimes crapping out a series of coke-filled condoms, he finds himself tossed into Palmasola, crammed into a small room with other men, with nowhere to sleep, nowhere to sit. As a gringo, he’s immediately singled out and hit up for money.
The rest of the acting company consists of performers who Frick met through an acting workshop in Bolivia: Omar Callisaya Callisaya, who grew up on the streets of Santa Cruz, Mario Tadeo Urzagaste, a probation officer, and Jorge Antonio Arias Cortez who had first-hand experience of Palmasola, having been imprisoned there for armed robbery - some of Cortez’ own experiences inform the performance.
The bulk of the show takes place inside one of Ciglana’s huge concrete chambers. There are various platforms and alcoves which the performers make use of and a huge disco ball, made out of more beer cans, suspended from the ceiling. The performance is boisterous and confrontational, sweaty and intense. Klaus spends a lot of the early scenes being shouted at, extorted and intimidated by the other inmates until he grows more prison-savvy. The actors square up to one another and bellow in each other’s faces. The potential for violence remains ever present, and occasionally it erupts.
The prison’s various sectors and systems are gradually explained to us. Along with Klaus, we learn the rules. The audience stand in the centre of the floor and the subtitles - most of the performance is in Spanish - are projected at four points around the room. To follow the action, the audience are obliged to regularly rearrange themselves and move around the space. Sometimes the actors move among us, waving fistfuls of Bolivian currency, handing out copies of Bolivia’s penal code, or donning boxing gloves and sparring with one another. As they tussle together, they throw up clouds of dust into the air (and into our faces).
The show also introduces us to some of the other inmates, from the imposing prison top-dog, the big boss who controls things and lives in relative luxury, dressing in designer suits for his court appearances, to the man aching for his mother to visit and bring him his favourite food. (To do so she has to queue outside overnight and obviously, as with everything, money must change hands). In this way, the show builds a picture of this closed world, its rules and hierarchies.
For a large part of the show, the frequently shirtless Fritzen is the focus of the piece. Like Orange is the New Black and HBO’s majestically chaotic Oz, (a show which really leaned into the prison as micro-society idea), a white guy/girl is the audience’s ‘in’ to the world of the prison. There are reasons for this. Frick was only able to gain access to the prison at all because there was a Swiss inmate inside, and some of the material comes from him. At the same time, this narrative device centres the white guy’s story, which has the potential to reinforce the idea that his struggle to adapt to this new brutal way of life will be somehow harder, that he has further to fall.
The actors are adept at getting up-close with the audience without actually barging into them. They regularly make eye contact and fully exploit the sense of proximity. Watching the show is a somewhat stressful experience as you’re never quite sure where you’re supposed to be standing or looking. This is deliberate. The show wants to put the audience on edge, to keep them on their toes, to create a sense of hyper-vigilance, but for me a least, this was more frustrating than exhalating, more alienating than immersive. I ended up stuck behind three unnecessarily tall Serbian men during one extended scene in which the actors demonstrated various torture methods favoured inside Palmasola. There were also big question marks for me about access – the floor is often uneven under foot, and I’ve no idea how you’d negotiate it if you had any kind of mobility issue. The company says they use non-conventional spaces in part to connect with audiences who might not otherwise be interested in theatre, but it felt exclusionary in other ways.
For the last part of the show we move into an even larger second space, with an almost lunar dirt floor surrounded by a raised perimeter on which the audience stand, our positions switched so that we are now looking down at the actors. Having set fire to an oil drum in spectacular fashion, sending flames shooting in the air, they take us through the day in 2018 when seven prisoners were killed and numerous people wounded during a massive police operation to unseat the prison godfather. Fritzen is no longer the protagonist here, and the mode of storytelling feels more balanced, however while the space looks super-cool, the fact that the subtitles were partially concealed behind a series of concrete pillars, made it hard to follow what was going on. As the cast take us through a detailed timeline of the day, the lead-up to the violence and the aftermath, they are often fighting a losing battle with their surroundings when it comes to clarity.
In the final moments we are presented with video footage shot inside the prison. This is projected on the wall, allowing us a glimpse into the actual Palmasola. In theory this should make for an interesting shift between re-enactment and the real deal, or at least between one mode of documentation and another. But, again, the space slightly undermines this - it’s just not all that easy to see. In the end, one of the most memorable moments was one of the show’s gentlest: the inmates all talking about what they missed most about the outside world, talking about their families, their parents, and their kids, with many voicing their hope their mothers would still be alive when they were released.
I realise I’ve expended quite a lot of words kvetching about the space rather than the performance, which might seem unfair, but it really hampered the way the audience were able to engage with the material in this second section. However, it’s worth noting that the piece is performed in different non-traditional spaces wherever it tours, many of which are presumably a better fit. In Tarragona, for example it was performed inside a former penitentiary.
One of the company’s rationales behind the making of the show is that five of the top 10 cities for global coke consumption are in Switzerland, that the two countries are connected by the river of cocaine that flows between them.
In this interview Frick further outlines the reasons behind his interest in the prison and at one point questions whether embarking on such a potentially risky project might be the result of a midlife crisis. His initial idea was to focus on the children who were living in the prison complex, but after the 2018 police raid, they were removed. He went ahead with the project anyway and a preview version of the show was performed in Bolivia in 2019, ahead of the premiere in Basel. After a pandemic-enforced break, they performed it in Santa Cruz in 2021 and it has played various venues in Europe and Latin America since then.
The production raises many questions about power dynamics and international collaboration. Is this kind of theatre colonialist and voyeuristic? That was certainly the feeling of some people who saw it. Or is the assumption that a project like this must be inherently exploitative itself a colonialist assumption, a line of thinking that denies the creative agency of the Bolivian artists involved in its making? At times it did feel like I was watching the theatrical equivalent of a Vice article. However, in addition to Frick, there are two dramaturgs credited, Carolin Hochleichter and the journalist Jhonatan Torrez, one Swiss, one Bolivian (this piece from the Bolivian press talks to Torrez about the show and the process of its making) and the company are clearly alert to these issues and potential imbalances. Since the show premiered, Frick together with the actors Cortez and Fritzen have gone on to make Dos Vidas/Two Lives, a show which interrogates global inequality through the lens of their own relationship. How does their different backgrounds and biographies shape their friendship?
While I appreciated the slightly gonzo approach of the project and the commitment and palpable camaraderie of the performances, I often found the highly literal, visceral, and testosterone-saturated mode of performance off-putting, (And did I mention the dust? There was a lot of fucking dust). At the same time, I’ve read more about Bolivian prisons in the last few days than I ever would have done had I not seen it.
It actually made me even more keen to see Lola Arias’ Los días afuera / The Days Out There, which features women and trans people with experience of the Argentine prison system. Arias has opted to eschew the more conventionally representational and instead turned their stories into something which is billed as part musical, part game-show (as described in this Nachtkritik review). It would be fascinating to compare the two pieces.
At an after-show roundtable, the actors described how differently this show lands when they perform it in Bolivia than in Europe. In Bolivia, they said, almost everyone knows someone who knows someone with some experience of Palmasola, so this show speaks to its audience in a different way than it does in Europe, where it is more of a curiosity - to them, the European performances were in many ways secondary, which seems absolutely as it should be.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
The Other Place – Following on from The Confessions, which was inspired by the life of his mother, Alexander Zeldin returns to the National Theatre in London with a new play, this time drawing on a classical text. Zeldin’s riff on Antigone features a cracking cast - Emma D’Arcy, Saltburn’s Alison Oliver, Tobias Menzies and Nina Sosanya and music by Foals’ Yannis Philippakis. It opened last night - here’s the Guardian review - and runs until 9th November.
FIT de Cadiz - The Iberico-American Theatre Festival of Cádiz draws on the Andalucian city’s location and history to showcase work which explores the European connection with the Americas. The international festival features a wide range of performances, including street theatre and puppet theatre, and this year’s programme includes Palmasola - A Prison Village. The festival runs from 11th-19th October.
Fierce Festival – The Birmingham-based international festival of theatre and performance features an eclectic programme of cross-disciplinary work including Selina Thompson’s new show Twine, the premiere of a new piece by Sheila Ghelani, and a one-on-one piece performed in the public library. The festival takes place in various spaces across Birmingham between 15th-24th October.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
Once again you take the reader right into the middle of this production. Beautiful writing. I really appreciate the even handedness of your critique of the various elements involved. What you writing about in Europe is but a dream for US theatre. So rare for that type of immersive theatre, and for your type of reporting. Thank you for your insights