The New Jersey Council for the Humanities has selected Rutgers Arts Online/Community Arts director Kevin Bott‘s theater and social justice project Ritual4Return (R4R) as the 2024 winner of the Katz Prize celebrating excellence in public humanities.
R4R is a 12-week program that establishes a public storytelling ritual for formerly incarcerated individuals returning to their lives outside the prison system. Participants use readings, movement, dialogue, writing, and theater, among other tools, to probe themes such as home, sin, judgment, punishment, and repair. The experience culminates in a public rite of passage honoring and acknowledging participants’ reintegration into their communities. The project is now connected to a course here at Mason Gross, operated in partnership with Rutgers-Newark.
“Rather than buying into the popular narrative, or even their own internalized narrative, that they are defined by the worst thing they ever did, people who can successfully re-biograph [are able to] tell their stories in ways that give the entirety of their lives meaning and purpose,” Bott says in a Q&A about the program, which he founded and leads.
View a short video about R4R.