The power of song
SALIFE went inside the Adelaide Women’s Prison for a front-row seat to the way music can instil hope and optimism in the most unlikely of places.
Think back to the last time you saw a show.
Perhaps you walked through the doors of Her Majesty’s Theatre, turned left and headed to the bar for a glass of wine before taking your red velvet-clad seat, waiting for the curtain to part.
At today’s show, there are no curtains and no velvet seats. We, the audience, arrive at the carpark, where corrections officers guide us towards vacant parking spots. We relinquish our car keys and are scanned in a security area before we make our way down a path flanked on both sides by towering chain link fencing. This afternoon’s venue is the Adelaide Women’s Prison.
The performers are eight women who are currently serving time in prison and behind them, cradling an assortment of instruments, are musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
The seeds of this unique concert began to germinate five years prior, when South Australian filmmaker Shalom Almond and singer/songwriter Nancy Bates came together with a shared goal to help tell the stories of the women in the Living Skills Unit (LSU).
The medium security section of the prison gives women the opportunity to connect with rehabilitation programs and employment inside the prison, more closely reflecting life outside.
The opportunity to be in the unit doesn’t have any correlation to the women’s crimes, only their behaviour in the prison.
The plan was to form a group of women from the prison – the Songbirds – who would learn to play the ukulele, and write and perform music in front of a live audience inside the walls of the prison, accompanied by the ASO.
The whole process, along with the women’s life stories, would be captured by Shalom to create film, Songs Inside.
It sounds an impossible task, but Shalom and Nancy are no strangers to working within the prison system.
In 2017, Shalom released Prisoners and Pups, a documentary following a group of prisoners who signed up to foster retired greyhounds.
She already had standing with the Department for Correctional Services, but that didn’t stop the uncertainty in pitching this project.
“After Prisoners and Pups, Corrections said to me, ‘If you ever want to come back, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when’. I thought, that’s such a golden opportunity that I’m not going to let pass.”
Nancy has held music workshops in men’s and women’s prisons and had been running a song writing workshop in the Adelaide Women’s Prison during NAIDOC Week 2020.
She sang a song from the program at a prison art show, which Shalom saw, and was blown away by.
“It was as if Nancy was a portal to the women’s experiences in here,” Shalom says. “I told her I was desperate to go back to the prison to do a project and asked her to collaborate.”
Shalom says she’ll never forget the day she went to meet with the head of corrections, the deputy and the whole communications team.
“There was a table of 20 and me at the end in a massive boardroom. My heart was in my throat pitching it and they didn’t even blink.
“Working with the Department for Corrections has honestly been a dream because the level of trust they’ve had in me and given me my own freedom allowing me to work with the women respectfully to be able to share their stories.
“There were no limits placed on the access around the storytelling, except for the safety processes around being in the space.”
First came the auditions, where around 50 women living in the prison went along to see what it was about, including Tina.
“I remember walking into this room and Nancy and Shalom were there,” Tina says. “Nancy started singing and these girls were absolutely mesmerised, or tears were pouring down their faces.
“That’s the moment I knew this was something special. I just saw something in both of these ladies… they were a breath of fresh air in the prison and were just light and strength to all of us girls. It was like a present.”
The small detail of the live performance was left out when the women auditioned for the group, but Shalom says once she broke it to them, it brought something special to rehearsals.
“It was about creating an opportunity where the stakes are so high – what do you do with an opportunity like that?” Shalom says. “To have that level of quality and people investing in you, how does that manifest and how do you deal with possibility and hope?
“Some people haven’t had opportunities where they’ve been backed, and to have people backing and believing in you endlessly, as we did and still do, there’s got to be an effect that comes from that.”
Shalom was worried the footage of her telling the women they’d be singing with the ASO would be unusable because she was shaking so hard. To their credit, every woman in the room bravely accepted the challenge with trust in Shalom and Nancy.
The group had 16 weeks from conception to performance, and only six or so weeks to write eight songs, because the lyrics and ukulele music had to be sent to conductor Julian Ferraretto for orchestral arrangements.
Julian was touted by the women as ‘King Julian’ and Tina says he was so admired for his judgement-free demeanour.
From Nancy’s point of view, the song writing component was a vital part of the program.
“My observation is there’s a need to supress emotion when you come into a place like this and I’m asking people to be their most vulnerable because the best song writing comes from vulnerability,” Nancy says.
“The authenticity of the process is feeling the pain and the love and the laughter. You can’t be distanced from that and make music.”
Today, here on stage clad in Songbirds shirts with their hair and make-up done professionally, the women are finally living the moment they’ve been working towards.
They’re looking out to a sea of grey – the colour the women in this unit wear. This crowd is supportive to the core. They laugh heartily at every joke. Cry openly at the heartbreaking lyrics. Applaud raucously at the close of every song.
“I didn’t know someone could walk into a women’s prison and make them all cry with one song,” Tina says, reflecting on the concert months later.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life. In one minute, they were bawling. I’m looking out to the crowd seeing all of these people that I know and they’re just bawling their eyes out.”
Tina was one of the women who did actually have a music background – she studied contemporary music at TAFE years prior, but left when she fell pregnant at 16 with her daughter.
“I had this baby to take care of and I had to go to work doing whatever I could to feed the baby and I drifted away from music,” Tina says. “For me, this course wasn’t just about music – it was about getting a little bit of confidence back.”
By the way so many of the audience members are crying when the singers perform a song about a mother’s love, you know they’ve got little ones on the outside.
Correctional officers walk up and down the aisles offering tissues.
The swell of music behind the women is nothing short of magical.
“Orchestras are generally accessed by people with a certain level of privilege,” Nancy says.
“Organisations such as the ASO that are looking at their responsibility to reach out to people who are marginalised and vulnerable, and people whose voices we don’t hear.
“In my view, that’s the role of the arts and we gave them that opportunity and they rose to the challenge.”
One of the performers, Simone, noted that she never thought she’d see an orchestra in her life, let alone perform beside one.
For Shalom, the whole experience has been a privilege.
“To come into a place like this where most women are, I imagine, at the lowest points of their life and may be dealing with so much pain and trauma and disconnection with family, dealing with addiction and mental health, and then to sign up for an opportunity to have a camera in your face and talk about all of that.
“Then to have someone in your room and personal space – and in here you don’t get a lot of that anyway – and to have me in there with a camera asking some of the most deeply painful questions, and being able to be open and honest is a huge ask of anybody.
“For these women to do that is so brave and so courageous.”
“The process has felt like an honour and a privilege for me to be in this space and on this journey, and there have been so many moving, poignant, transformative moments.”
The film captures the women’s stories, tears, drama and laughter.
“It was like four seasons in one day in the workshops,” Shalom says. “The amount of sobbing and debilitating laughter.”
The audience is quick to stand for an ovation and while we may not be jumping up from red velvet seats, this plastic chair right here in the middle of a women’s prison is the best seat in any house.
A fundraiser screening of Songs Inside is being held at The Capri on Saturday, January 18, including a special performance from Nancy Bates and the Songbirds.
