A concert at Versailles women’s prison

In a first for its fall music festival, French magazine Les Inrockuptibles invited artists to perform in prison as a sidebar event. Organized jointly with the Yvelines Department’s probation service and reintegration program, a concert was held inside the women’s prison at Versailles. Here’s how it went.

• “It’s my first time in jail.”

• “Mine, too,” replies a roguish young girl sat on a school canteen bench. Hands thrust in the pockets of her nondescript loose pants, she looks pretty pleased with her smart answer. It’s obviously not the first time she’s had listeners laughing at her jokes. The unfunny side of it is, she’s the one behind bars. On Monday 2 November 2009 in the women’s prison in Versailles, just outside Paris, some sixty inmates aged between 17 and 60 are lined up like schoolgirls to hear one of the four or five concerts they’ll be getting this year. Today it’s New York-based musician Fredo Viola, on stage with four performers from Manchester and Paris to play material from his new album The Turn (on French label Because), a blend of choral and electronic music presented acoustically for this set. It really is his first concert in jail, and he’s a little intimidated. The audience looks unfazed – and yet “being in prison is a harrowing experience”, as Corinne Le Marre puts it. She’s in charge of the prisoner reintegration and probation service at Versailles women’s prison. “Most of them don’t yet know what their sentences will be. They have no idea when they’ll be getting out.”

The idea for the concert came from the Inrockuptibles festival, which worked together with the cultural reintegration program developed by the Yvelines probation service. Under the scheme, theater, dance, plastic arts and music events are organized inside the three correctional facilities in France’s Department No. 78: Bois d’Arcy prison, Poissy penitentiary and Versailles prison. “Culture is a part of the whole, not a priority in itself like the canteen or the exercise yard. There’s nothing indispensable about it, but it does make a contribution – like a good Christmas dinner,” is the way prison governor Florent Gonçalvez puts it. “It’s like a chain. If a link breaks, the effect is felt more severely than it would be outside,” confirms Romain Emelina. He’s the coordinator of the Yvelines cultural reintegration program, and he’s keen to make sure only experienced performers get into its schedules. A partnership has been set up with the “Blues sur Seine” festival, bringing American blues artists into a line-up that already features rock, funk and jazz musicians from France and Africa: the A & R is crucial. “We can’t risk disappointing our audience. And we don’t want to throw our performers to the lions, either!” continues Romain Emelina. “Fredo Viola was just right for Versailles. At Bois d’Arcy it would have been a bit of a gamble. The male audience is different. We take the necessary precautions, but we don’t completely change what’s on offer to suit the demand, and we do try to make sure that each event is led up to in the right way. So the most inventive, challenging or difficult things will be part of creative or practical workshops, or at least come at the end of workshops of that kind, so that the artist and what he or she represents can be explored in depth. Whereas the performances – concerts, plays and so on – should be a way of bringing people together and having fun, but not in a limited way or by trying to enforce consensus. The idea is also to encourage inmates to keep on going to gigs or to the theater after they’ve been released.”

Two out of the three acts billed in this first series were forced to pull out because of problems over dates and availability. But “Fredo was really up for it,” recalls Sylvain, an instrumentalist and chorus member with the group. Of course every one of the performers had in mind Johnny Cash’s legendary show at Folsom State Prison as the hard act to follow. “But he was playing the prisoners’ own music. They had common roots and so were already in touch,” adds the musician. But by the end of their set he felt there was “a direct contact, just the same as when you can have a beer with members of the audience afterwards and talk over a gig”.

Ninety minutes earlier, at 2 pm, the group met outside the prison gates on a typical autumn afternoon. Just a stone’s throw away from the Chateau of Versailles, the town’s small women’s prison is located on the magnificent, chestnut tree-lined Avenue de Paris that leads towards the great royal palace, taking its place in a long succession of office buildings and fine houses. Versailles women’s prison is the oldest correctional facility in the Department of Yvelines, with a partial release center  next door. The building became a prison in 1789 at the French Revolution. Later it was run by nuns as a detention home for prostitutes, before becoming a prison for general offenders again under the Second Empire. After some discussion as to whether the group’s van could be allowed into the prison courtyard, identity cards were shown, mobile phones handed in and the artists could start filing past the metal detectors. They found themselves inside the premises, a small three-storied block. Here they set up by the entrance to the building’s tiny chapel, classed as a national historic monument. No stage, lighting or sound equipment, they picked this spot as having the biggest echo and thus the best possible acoustics. “The really hard thing,” summed up one the musicians, “is being on the same level as the audience”.

The first inmates come in quietly, some with smiles on their faces, sweeping away the clichés and the nervous fears brought in from outside. It’s a break in the routine. They’re all dressed up, and one or two have even had their hair done at the prison’s own salon de coiffure. “Unlike the male prisoners, they do like to get ready for the show,” says Corinne Le Marre. During the performance they may even briefly forget the reality of imprisonment, two to a cell or six to a dormitory. Guitars, acoustic bass, drums and voice (all the guys sing, making a fine male chorus in the style of an English folk band) – Fredo Viola play through their set. From the soothing to the more upbeat numbers, the musicians can’t help thinking about what lies behind the faces in the crowd, about whom all they know is that they clap their hands because they’re not allowed to stand up, and that if they end up crying (as two women do during Death of a Son), it’s got to be about something more than the song. One prisoner claps and stamps her feet, intensely. As band members talk to the audience after the concert, she asks, “Do we frighten you?”. “No,” comes the singer’s surprised answer. The group are asked how they got together, how they travel, where they’re going on tour. A few of the women can speak good English. The others ask them to translate. “Are any of you guys single?” Everybody looks at the drummer. “Must be my lucky day,” he says. Fredo Viola has something to tell them. Two years ago he was still writing songs alone in his room. He’d never been on stage. Today makes exactly twenty times. He insisted on not being paid. “It gave me the same feeling as a rare moment of freedom, like you get at school”, he confesses as the band are packing up. Only this is prison. The bell for exercise has just rung.