He’s dressed in all black, with his hood over his head. In the background, a darkened street appears on a screen behind him. He lifts his hood up, and the lights come on.
“Things are often not what they seem,” he begins.
Bryonn Bain, a prison activist and spoken word poet based in Brooklyn, N.Y., opened his performance, “Lyrics from Lockdown,” in Schoenberg Hall Tuesday night. The piece documents his three-day ordeal in prison for a crime he did not commit, and the misconceptions about him by law enforcement that followed.
To Bain, performance has allowed him to tell his story about false imprisonment and educate others about mass incarceration.
Bain also hosted a panel discussion called Life after Lockdown on Wednesday afternoon at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
The Global Media Center for Social Impact at the Fielding School put on the event.
“Policy change is important, but preceding that is a change of heart, and that comes from storytelling,” said Sandra de Castro Buffington, the founding director of the Global Media Center for Social Impact. “Stories move us from familiar territory, and can bring us into perspectives we’ve never considered before.”
During the course of the performance, Bain repeatedly tries to explain to law enforcement that there has been some kind of mix up. He is an artist and activist employed by NYU that has not been involved in a felony, and the victim of identity theft. No one believes him.
Instead, in the course of the performance he reveals his attorney diagnosed him with a bipolar disorder. The attorney believed he had created an alternate reality to lie about everything, from having traveled to India to being a graduate of Harvard Law School – both of which were true.
The identity theft was eventually revealed, and Bain was released from prison. He went on to sue the New York Police Department and won.
The performance intersperses among his ordeal in jail, family life and correspondences with Nanon Williams, a man sentenced to death in Texas. Like Bain, Williams was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and was released 20 years after his imprisonment by the orders of a federal judge.
Bain’s work around prison activism began at age 15 in upstate New York where he would perform for prison inmates.
After his arrest he said he saw the chance to turn his performances to something beyond entertainment.
“With my own experience of being thrown in jail, there were possibilities for turning my performances into something more political,” Bain said. “Art can be used to raise awareness and consciousness and understanding. There’s a lot of misinformation around who’s in jail, why they’re in jail, and the needs for prison.”
Sonja Perryman, a student in the Fielding School of Public Health who attended Life After Lockdown said Bain’s combination of art with the issue of mass incarceration was an ideal way to bring the issue to the forefront of the school.
“We can have all the data in the world, but most people are not going to go read a research paper,” she said. “What better way to learn than by storytelling. It allows us to bring this data to the masses.”
At his Life After Lockdown talk, Bain emphasized that anyone could use storytelling as a tool for social change.
“Storytelling doesn’t just belong to the arts,” he said. “It’s as old as human civilization.”