Liberating Visions: Adad Hannah’s What Fools These Mortals Be

To set the stage: fourteen women collectively served over 100 years in the Canadian federal prison system. After they were released, they came together to develop a series of arts interventions that challenge “the time of incarceration with non-linear memory of time, healing, and sisterhood.”¹ Filmmaker Dr. Brenda Longfellow and restorative justice advocate Dr. Brenda Morrison formed The Circle Project in 2019. Morrison and Longfellow activated a network of artists to work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to imagine together, through artmaking, new futures for themselves and for society at large. The project carried out a series of artistic experiments and invited Adad Hannah and his team into a collaboration with the women of the Circle Project to retell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

After three years of dreaming and the realization of two related projects, Adad Hannah’s What Fools These Mortals Be opened at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at Simon Fraser University. Angela Davis and Gina Dent presented a keynote at the opening and discussed their new book, Abolition. Feminism. Now. The authors spoke about the historical development of the current abolition movement that seeks to interrogate and unravel the prison industrial complex. They urged the necessity of feminisms and community organizing as strategies to disrupt the narratives that feed our sociological complexes, which support the systems of incarceration (from prisons to the child welfare system). And they advocated: art can be part of both the academic and everyday practices we might use to “imagine a future where we can all thrive.”² Hannah’s three-channel video installation, What Fools These Mortals Be, illustrates the powers of dreaming new realities for the project’s participants and viewers alike. 

The Circle Project formed before COVID-19 lockdowns and began to meet in person in 2021. All participants were led through a series of weekly workshops with the Vancouver-based artist and creative engagement facilitator Kat Thorsen. Together, they explored practices of drawing and collage, storytelling, performance, and play as they built towards some form of tableau vivant, Hannah’s signature medium. Cathee Porter, one of the models for Puck, recalled, “we learned to draw, we learned to be creative. I haven’t done those things for so long. I never knew how to draw and I started to learn. That kinda gelled our group together. That put our creativity in the middle of the circle—we had a circle pedagogy.” Hannah participated in the workshops and also gave a presentation about his own arts practice to spark inspiration for where the project might lead. Several weeks in, Jess Hanley, who modeled Lysander, Oberon and Titania, suggested staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She remembered the play from high school. “The drawing, the painting, and the organizing brought back a lot of old, positive thinking.” Hanley recalled that she had picked a monologue from the play to perform to her high school class.

Her choice proved fertile ground for the project to unearth. That the tableaux would be enacted by a group of women subverts the already complex gender bending of Shakespearean theatre, where originally men played all the roles. Tableaux vivants have long been a place for women to hold space, literally, and in this instance participants held a heightened respect for sisterhood and female autonomy.³ Many feminist theatre scholars have observed the liberating potential within Midsummer, specifically for women.⁴ Regina Buccola suggests that the Athenian woods, where the majority of the play takes place, establishes “a space free from sociocultural strictures,” where women might behave as they wish without the fear of repercussions.⁵ The arc of the play begins with a man invoking Athenian law over his daughter, who must escape to the forest where the wills of men can be magically transformed before she is able to return and reclaim her personhood.

The play’s major themes—magical thinking, dreaming, and transformation—also manifest in The Circle Project’s mission. While What Fools These Mortals Be developed, The Circle Project created The Dreaming (2021).⁶ Hosted on the project website, dreams are visualized simultaneously as a constellation in the universe and bubbles of oxygen in the deepest ocean. The interactive constellation allows audiences to listen to the dreams of the formerly incarcerated women. We hear their stories, memories, and aspirations firsthand. We witness their experiences of incarceration as dehumanizating, and take in the echoes that resound between stories; we share in the humility and humanity of the dreams that come to us all. 

Meanwhile, Hannah and his design partners, Russ Bonin and Nicole Hayashi, fashioned the set, and his mother, Barbara Hannah–an artist and performer herself–coordinated the blocking with Longfellow. Hannah remarked on the process:

As with many of my community-based projects, the participants helped build the sets. While I often work with volunteers, for this project, we were able to pay the participants an hourly wage. These women have busy, complicated lives so I’m glad we were able to pay them thanks to the SSHRC grant. The women helped with building and painting the sets and helped put together costumes and props.⁷

Over the course of a wild weekend the collaborators filmed more than 100 tableaux vivants that were later arranged into three projections that tell Midsummer’s story. 

Hannah has honed his career with tableaux vivants, or living pictures, where a group of carefully costumed models pose in scenes from paintings, theatre, or literature.⁸ Curator of his retrospective at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Lynn Bannon writes, “By reconsidering the devices of the conversation piece, these works by Adad Hannah are not only self-reflexive and play on inversion, they also reveal the impossibility of fully identifying with olden times.”⁹ When Hannah tackles the titans of the art historical canon, from Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress to Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, he invites audiences into disruptions of time as well as gender and race. His tableaux operate as art that is, as Davis and Dent might describe it, “a means to disrupt the ways we know what we know.”¹⁰

In this Shakespearean reimagining, Hannah and his collaborators additionally present the complex, layered experiences of women who are redefining their lives.¹¹ Their time has been disrupted and, in making space to make art, they can reclaim it. Porter says:

It brings us to a fantasy world. We have to be who we are every day, with these pretty crazy past experiences. So this takes us out of that and lets us be somebody else–a beloved character–and lets us really embody that, and leave prison behind, leave parole behind, and leave all the stigma and yuckiness that you feel every day behind.¹²

At SFU Galleries, this fantasy world was arranged into a 15-minute film installation: the final tableaux vivants sequenced and projected onto three screens, scored with an original quartet composition written by another of Hannah’s longtime collaborators, composer Brigitte Dajczer. The individual tableaux are presented in relation across the three screens, not only to move the story forward, but also to view the scene from multiple perspectives. As with Shakespeare’s play, where the perspective shifts from character to character. The music helps guide the audience through the narrative with sonic whimsy and climactic tempos. The installation immerses the audience in the tableau vivant experience, something less serious than a painting or a play⁠—the conversation piece to which Bannon refers. 

Puck famously concludes Shakespeare’s play, “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended,/ That you have but slumber’d here/ While these visions did appear.”¹³ At the end of What Fools These Mortals Be, collaborator Rosie Cece invokes the same sentiment as she holds for Robin Goodfellow’s final bow. Audiences may take what they will, content to have been transported for a moment in time or keen to take up our own imaginings. 

The installation will be presented by The Circle Project at the PumpHouse Steam Museum in Kingston this summer. It can be booked through The Circle Project website: https://thecircleproject.online

India Rael Young, PhD, art historian and curator, researches Indigenous and media arts. Her curatorship and writing negotiate feminist, decolonial, and critical race frameworks to map the cultural geography of the North American art world. With this piece she recognizes a formative professor, Dr. David Linton, who revealed the intertextualities of literature, art, and media.

1. Brenda Longfellow and Brenda Morrison, The Circle Project (website), accessed October 25, 2022, https://thecircleproject.online/about/.
2. Angela Y. Davis et al., Abolition. Feminism. Now., The Abolitionist Papers Series (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 3.
3. Mélanie Boucher and Ersy Contogouris, eds., “Stay Still: Past, Present, and Practice of the Tableau Vivant,” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 44, no. 2 (2019): 8, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26869474.
4. Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Angela Schumann, “‘But as a Form in Wax’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Colloquy, no. 30 (2015): 42–60, https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.571870225702003.
5. Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture, The Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 61.
6. Brenda Longfellow and Brenda Morrison, “The Dreaming,” The Circle Project, accessed October 25, 2022, https://thedreaming.thecircleproject.online/.
7. Adad Hannah, interview by India Young, Telephone, October 23, 2022.
8. A special issue of RACAR delves into the history of tableaux vivants; Boucher and Contogouris, “Stay Still.”
9. Lynn Bannon, “Adad Hannah: Reflets et Réflexions de l’art ‘Vivant,’” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 44, no. 2 (2019): 173.
10. Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent, “Abolition Feminism: Dreaming a New Reality” (Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, SFU, September 15, 2022).
11.  Longfellow and Morrison, The Circle Project (website).
12. What Fools These Mortals Be (The Making Of), 2022, https://thecircleproject.online/what-fools/.
13. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Complete Moby Shakespeare, accessed October 26, 2022, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html.

This article is published in issue 39.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue