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By Mabel Pais
Ritual4Return (R4R – https://ritual4return.org), one of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Arts & Well-Being initiatives, will be offered on Saturday, May 2, 2026 starting at 1 PM at NJPAC’s Chase Room.
The initiative is a workshop offered twice a year to those who have returned from incarceration. This is a remarkable, moving theatrical event.
Ritual4Return (R4R) is a 14-week program utilizing theater, improvisation, mindfulness exercises, chant, mask-making and storytelling to help returning citizens address and overcome the shame, stigma and trauma of incarceration.
On May 2, participants will enact the theatrical rite of passage they created together to formally mark the transition from prison back to their communities and into a new chapter of their lives.
EVENT SCHEDULE
1PM: Pre-event audience workshop and dialogue
3PM: Homecoming ritual
5PM: Dinner and celebration
Registration
The program is free, but registration is a must.
Register @ https://njpac.org/event/ritual4return-a-homecoming-rite-of-passage-for-returning-citizens/
Attendees are welcome to stay for a celebratory dinner afterward.
The Program
Over the course of 14 weeks, participants learn how to use improvisation, drumming, mask-making and other theatrical techniques to tell the stories of their lives.
Then, at the end of that process, they offer a public performance of the work they’ve created, which also serves as a symbolic return and reengagement with the communities they were separated from while imprisoned.
John Schreiber, President and CEO of NJPAC adds, “And it’s both heartbreaking and hope-restoring, every time.”
“The state locks people up for 20, 30 years – and then they hit the streets,” explains Kevin Botts, the founder and Executive Director of Ritual4Return. Often, they return to a world that is bafflingly changed; in one memorable moment in a recent Ritual4Return performance, a recently released man recalled how he had searched, fruitlessly, for a phone booth.
“Social service agencies may offer food, housing, education, all important things. But there’s an aspect of shame, of trauma, that they don’t address.”
This program does.
Kevin, who is also the director of Rutgers Arts Online at Mason Gross School of the Arts, developed Ritual4Return as a graduate student at the Steinhardt School at New York University, after running theater workshops in prisons in New York. Now, the program is offered jointly by NJPAC and Rutgers University-Newark; every season, two cohorts of returning citizens – one made up of men, one of women – go through the workshop and perform their works as its finale.
“It’s one thing to know that someone killed another man. It’s another thing to also know that he was beaten with an extension cord from the time he was four years old,” Kevin tells me, about the context into which these performances put the lives of the participants.
“One of our guys this year, his first memory is running drugs from his parents to the stash house. He became a drug runner because that was literally the family business.”
Participants may have been out of prison for a few months, or for decades, by the time they take part in Ritual4Return. But the program offers them all an opportunity to tell their story to others, and to process it themselves, in a way they never have before.
A formerly incarcerated man Dallie says, “The people I know at work? They know Dallie the bro; they never met the person I am at Ritual4Return,” explains Dallie Shell of Newark. A social worker at the City of Newark’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, Dallie had been incarcerated four times – but he’d been out of prison for years, and was working and simultaneously earning his second master’s degree, when he joined the program last fall. “The program reconnected me with a lot of stuff I had closed off and put aside. I had never dealt with it,” he says.
During the performance, Dallie spoke of growing up with parents who were also incarcerated; often his mother and father were imprisoned at the same time. He told his story in the form of a spoken-word poem that had the audience leaning forward to catch every word:
I was born
in a part of the city where the concrete never slept—
where crack smoke hugged the block
and the streetlights flickered
like even they were scared of what they saw.
I grew up visiting jails
before I ever visited a campus.
Little kid hands
pressed against that cold plexiglass,
trying to touch parents
the system kept stealing from me.
Each person’s story is different, and told through a different medium; participants have presented critical moments in their lives through dances, hip hop and R&B songs, and play-like scenes with a full cast of characters. They perform most of the ritual in masks, physical manifestations of the personas they needed to adopt to survive.
What unites all their stories is an openness, an honesty that invites connection and understanding.
“We’re not changing their life stories, not escaping them – but through this introspection, this storytelling, the participants are able to have agency over their story and narrative. As one of them said last time: They went from being owned by their story to owning their story,” Kevin says.
And at the end of the performance, their masks come off.
The women’s cohort of Ritual4Return is the group presenting their final performance this Saturday at 3PM in the Chase Room.
“Women jump into the emotional depths with this; they are ready to go there on week one. We start deep and go deeper,” Kevin says. “But the men are getting there, especially as word has gotten out in Newark that this is a good program, it’s a worthwhile thing to do.”
Kevin and NJPAC will now offer the program in Camden as well as Newark.
And past participants and prison theater organizations have worked with Kevin to start sister initiatives in Boston and the Twin Cities.
“There are 700,000 people released from prison every year,” Kevin says. “And more than half of them will be arrested again within ten years. The system is set up for them to fail. And instead of investing in schools and arts centers and rec centers, our response to that is to build more prisons.”
“I would love to eventually be able to train teams of teaching artists to take Ritual4Return across the country,” he says.
I hope someday we can. We’re working on it! Until then, every person who is brave enough to walk onto our stage and tell his or her story represents a step in the right direction – and a testament to the power of the arts to heal and build community.
Learn more about Ritual4Return at https://ritual4return.org
(Excerpted and adapted from John Schreiber’s newsletter)
Mabel Pais writes on The Arts and Entertainment, Social Issues, Education, Business, Spirituality, Health and Wellness, and Cuisine.
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