From Solitary to Solidarity: Unravelling the Ligatures of Ashley Smith | Theatre Production Archive

UWaterloo Drama presented a new project exploring issues of mental health in the context of the troubling, and still emerging, story of Ashley Smith, a teenager who died at Grand Valley Institution for Women in 2007.

From Solitary to Solidarity: Unravelling the Ligatures of Ashley Smith used a collaborative performance approach to try to understand the life and death of Ashley Smith. In the performance, students investigated the social and political consequences of broken correctional and mental health institutions, and addressed the evolving perceptions and assumed objectivity of the media.

See the production archive webpages for Solitary to Solidarity

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Written by UWaterloo Drama alumna Melanie Bennett and conceived by Professor Andy Houston, this ‘auto-ethnographic performance’ incorporated the personal perspectives of the students who performed – students who were roughly the same age as Ashley when she died. Differing from docudrama, which attempts to represent real events, auto-ethnographic performance connects the personal to the storytelling; it avoids presenting ‘the facts’, but instead represents truth as always mediated, unstable, and entangled in politics and personal interests. Watch video below to hear Andy talk about the approach to this play.

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During the run of this production, there was a symposium of invited speakers who addressed the issue of mental health awareness at the University of Waterloo and in the broader Waterloo region; following each performance, there was a Q&A that invited critical reflection, discussion, and feedback from the audience.

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Who was Ashley Smith?

In 2003, 15-year-old Ashley Smith was incarcerated for a minor offence (throwing crabapples at a mail carrier) at the New Brunswick Youth Centre, where she spent 27 of 36 months in solitary confinement. At 18, she was transferred to the adult prison system in which she was moved between cells and intuitions 17 times in less than a year. In October 2007, Ashley was brought to Waterloo Region, and on October 19, inside her solitary confinement cell at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, she died by self-strangulation using a cloth ligature – while prison guards allegedly watched, failing to intervene in time to rescue her. An inquest investigating the circumstances surrounding her incarceration and eventual death finally commenced in September 2012; in December 2013 the jury declared Ashley’s death a homicide. This troubling story and inquest has sparked a great deal of media attention for its shocking exposure of Canada’s prison system and neglect of those suffering from mental illness.