Janice Ross
Humanities Scholarship
Spring 2022
(Dance-Scholarship) – Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University – United States
Janice Ross explores a timely and urgent subject: the unique bonds between incarceration and performance. Tracing the role art can play in changing lives of detainees through culinary training programs in Italian prisons, she investigates role play, sensory escape into the aromas of food, and kitchen labor and waitstaff training as choreographies of transformation. Understanding the role of performance in the context of punishment reveals how social reality and meanings are intimately tied to representation.