We begin.
My name’s Kevin Bott. I’m the founder and artistic director of R4R — a project I conceived of back in the early aughts as a doctoral student in Educational Theater at NYU. The evolution of the project has been a journey, and like every journey worth its salt, it’s taken me to the highest highs and the lowest lows. Truly. My proudest moments as an artist and as an activist have come from this project. So, too, have my most shameful and humiliating moments.
The original version of this website went to seed after I hit rock bottom — personally, professionally, and artistically — after the last iteration of this project was complete, back in December of 2019. (I think it’s important that I share parts of the story at some point because it touches on a lot of difficult dynamics many of us confront in our work: race, class, power, privilege, ego, unconscious biases as well as unconscious agendas, etc.)
But anyway, rock bottom isn’t a place anyone sets out to reach but I know it’s a place we probably have to go at least once in our lives to learn some things we’re supposed to learn. I landed there almost 4 years ago and, since then, have become a different and, I hope, a better human being. A better husband and father; son and brother. A freer artist. An activist and ally with more consciousness and integrity.
A sober person.
What I finally came to understand at rock bottom — truly understand, in my bones, not just in my head — is that the only way I differ from the returning citizens I’ve worked with over the years was that I’d never been physically locked up. But if you want to talk to me about hurting people, about mistakes and regret, about shame and about how that shame made me want to avoid the world, made me feel I was unworthy of both love and community… If you want to talk to me about addiction as a mask for my pain and shame, and about feeling so desperate, stuck, and out of options that ending my own life seemed to be, just maybe, the only rationale solution. If you want to talk to me about trying to figure out how to forgive myself enough so that I could find the strength to reach out and try to make amends to people I hurt… If you want to talk to me about any of those things, then you’ll be talking to a man who knows what it is to be imprisoned.
And like most people trying to come home after imprisonment, I think I’ll always be working to make things right, to make amends, to right the wrongs. To come all the way home.
And so coming back into this work, at age 50, having been to my own hell and back, I come back with a new level of authenticity and humility. I come back understanding something about the dynamics of imprisonment. I come back knowing there truly is no “gap,” as the literature says, “between ‘us’ and ‘them’.”
Before every workshop, we say, together, “Incipimus!” Latin for “we begin.” And at the end of each workshop, we say it again. The savor of every triumph will fade on the palette, and so we must begin again. The sting of every defeat will only linger if we fail to dust ourselves off, reflect on how we failed, and begin again.
We are, all of us, always beginning.
I once came to this work, I think, with a white savior thing operating below the surface, despite my conscious mind telling me otherwise. I thought I could help someone. And it does sometimes bring tears to my eyes to know that this work does do something positive for people. But I realize now that some force beyond my understanding — the God of my understanding, perhaps — brought me to this work, or brought this work to me, because it contained so much of what I’ve needed to learn and understand about my own life.
Which is not to say I’m — as the kids say — “centering” myself in this work… On the contrary, the approach is Freirean — we’re all teaching each other what we know and, hopefully, all getting from each other what we need to grow and evolve.
I’m sure some of you will remember the book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Well, if I ever find myself retired and pondering a memoir, I might call it, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Prison Theater Workshops!.
And so, a third major chapter of Ritual4Returns commences. A post-midlife-crisis chapter as artist and activist commences for me. On December 10th, 2023, the 10 men I’m now working with will tell their stories. And in those stories they will tell a story about their city. They will tell a story about mass incarceration. They will tell a sad and troubling story about America. And through it all they will be exhorting us all, inviting us all:
Incipimus! (Again!)