Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division?

Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.

Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe.

"Women's Prison Association is a fabulous organization that everybody should be aware of. And they do things in the fall like Pack your Book Bag and things like that. So there's a lot of different ways to get involved with them, and they're really wonderful. And the WPA started in like the 1860s in New York because what was happening to a lot of women is - they've kept their books from that time of the people that they helped and the stories that they helped, so this within the books of the WPA archives. What was happening were these women were coming over as immigrants, and maybe their husbands were already here, but their husbands, maybe they got a new family or maybe they just kind of disappeared, checked out for whatever reason. Quite often the husband, it's documented, would sell the children from that woman coming over to the industrial complex - real factory child labor stuff. And the woman was forced to become a prostitute, which I actually think should be legalized, but obviously, at that time it was not. And so the WPA had a lot of women who were immigrants who were prostitutes. And what they sought to do was to help these women not go to prison, get their children back, and get jobs. " -Catherine Curtin

"In America, incarcerated people are not seen by us. We act as if we know that oh, they've been tried, they deserve to be in there. And some do. Some are victims themselves. Many of them are women. I just did a month of grand jury duty a month or so ago. And that's where we go and sit with 22 other people and decide, from witnesses, if this case has enough proof for the person to be arraigned, and go to trial.

And something that I came away with was it feels like most people who got themselves in that situation were, most of the time, stupid and greedy. Or they were in abject poverty. They have had nothing but violence in their life. How we can continue to make it a practice and a policy to punish these people and then put them away, punish them some more in our brutal for-profit prison system and expect them to come out and want to be different. Or even have the capacity to be different." -Kate Mueth

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