Elana Chan, the chic and fragrant chief officer of Tai Tam Gap Correctional Institution, has a favourite word. 'Lovely!' she cries, adjusting her large sunglasses outside the institution's gates, where a noticeboard warns visitors about the penalties of smuggling cigarettes to inmates. 'Lovely! Lovely!' Although it is, indeed, a lovely day, she is making encouraging reference to the morning's forthcoming activities. It is the last Saturday in November, and for the fifth year in a row, as part of a project called Beyond Bars, a group of performers will transport their skills across the security barrier which separates the incarcerated girls and women of Tai Tam Gap from the sunny world outside.
Today, 33 girls, aged 14 to 21, will be given the opportunity to learn a variety of circus skills, courtesy of the KELY circus school. These girls have been detained under the Training Centres Ordinance which is intended to provide an alternative to imprisonment. Under the terms of the ordinance, the minimum length of sentence is six months and the maximum is three years. In theory, this means the crimes committed are at the lower end of the seriousness scale - shoplifting, minor drugs offences, petty theft - but at least one of the girls is here because she caused someone's death. 'They may have angels' faces,' comments Chan, 'but some of them have committed horrendous acts.' The aim of the Training Centre Ordinance is the rehabilitation of such young people so they can be folded back into society. The aim of Beyond Bars, however, is to re-introduce at least a tiny fragment of that society into the correctional institutions before the inmates are released. 'It shows them people care about them on the outside,' explains Sally Dellow, the project's facilitator. 'I'm 33 and I was 18, a baby, when I went into a prison for the first time. I was afraid going into a prison then.
Now I'm much more aware of what a positive thing we can bring to the kids rather than what a positive thing it is for me to go in there.' Dellow has been in Hong Kong for 10 years. Before that, she studied law at King's College, London University, 'and the only thing which got me through my degree, which I hated, was the prison programme which had been set up by the students'. The programme was the only one approved by the British Home Office in which volunteers could stay overnight at youth custody centres. For the three years of her degree, Dellow spent three consecutive weekends a year doing comic performances and helping to devise shows with inmates. 'They were very, very, very different programmes to what we do now and I'm a very, very different person. I'm older and, I hope to God, wiser.' In Hong Kong, Dellow became involved in community theatre. Five years ago, she approached the Youth Arts Festival about an adaptation she'd written of C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, and became friendly with Lindsey McAlister, YAF's director. 'I said I'd worked in youth prisons before, and Lindsey said she'd had correctional services in the back of her mind for a while. So I said great, and suggested one male and one female institution.' Ever since, for a day each during November - when the Youth Arts Festival is held - Tai Tam Gap and Lai King Training Centre for boys have opened their gates to Dellow's project. Earlier this year, the Correctional Services Department (CSD) also suggested a visit to Cape Collinson Correctional Institution for boys. As a result of time constraints, it turns out that the Cape Collinson visit has to take place on the same day as the Tai Tam Gap visit. Dellow has organised a group of drummers to give four workshops at Cape Collinson and she will attend one of these later. Meanwhile, she has to juggle the needs of the guards, inmates and circus performers at Tai Tam Gap.
THREE MEMBERS of the KELY circus school - David Simpson, Sean Mitchell and Lyanne To, who will act as the team's interpreter - plus a French street performer called Francois Zanini, have come to Tai Tam Gap. The school, which drew its founding inspiration from a report on the positive effects of circus schools in Northern Ireland, was set up as a KELY Support Group Initiative last year. And, lest these proceedings be accused of condescension, perhaps it should be noted here that the school makes a point of getting its weekend students to pass on their new-found skills, and the recipients are just as likely to be Goldman Sachs executives as young offenders.
Still, some adjustments have had to be made to the programme. A list of activities was faxed to the CSD six weeks before today's gathering; suffice it to say that Zanini will not be doing his amazing fire act, nor will the girls be allowed to keep the juggling balls they will make later. A watchful eye will also be kept on scissor use. But plenty of other equipment, including unicycles, plastic plates, clubs, stilts and - according to the mysterious list stuck to the side of the packing boxes - the Diablo Hummer, the Good Solid Diablo and the Beginner Hi-Fli Diablo, have made the cut.
While the performers are setting up in the Inmates-Parents Centre, a cheerful, airy annexe which was opened last March two minutes' walk from the main building, the girls are being laboriously transported round by bus. For 10 of them, this marks the first time they have stepped through the front gates since their sentences began and, as Elana Chan points out, the decision to allow them to do so is her responsibility. The gates of the compound, within which the annexe is situated, will be locked while the girls are on site. (Later, Dellow admits that while she was in England one of the inmates in her group was so impressed by the liberation of his mind and spirit that he subsequently decided to free his body too, and did a bunk.) Nice (or 'Lovely!') though it might be to write here that the girls are thrilled at the prospect of learning circus tricks, it would be an exaggeration. For a start, they have no idea what the day holds in store for them: for security reasons, they have been told only that they will be doing some unspecified activities this morning. The presence of the female prison officers is also an impediment to exuberance. Nothing, including trips to the lavatory, can be done without constant scrutiny and frisking.
When they are summoned, it is by number.