Across the fields of applied theatre and prison theatre, there appears to be little analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic engagement for participants in prison-based participatory practices. This article presents a pragmatist aesthetic frame that I developed to analyse the experience of a drama programme I ran in a women’s prison. This frame evolved alongside the practice, drawing largely from John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience and a selection of contemporary scholars who, influenced by Dewey, work in the areas of aesthetics, ethics and education – most notably Richard Shusterman (2000, 2008) and David Granger (2006). I also incorporated narrative within this frame as an interpretive and expressive structure for experience, and a key element within my applied theatre practice. I began to conceive aesthetics in terms of an ‘art of living’, identifying a ‘poetics of renewal’ that informed the selfand world-creation of participants in the drama. I share this theoretical framework as a possible way to integrate the instrumental and the aesthetic in applied theatre theory and practice, specifically in a prison context.