This summer, Recess is proud to host FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, a new Session project by the California-based community. The result of years-long collaboration with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists across the U.S. and beyond, FREEDOM TIME brings forward a living archive of written dances created in confinement—gestures of memory, imagination, resistance, and love that defy the logic of cages.
Join us for the final public event of FREEDOM TIME, sharing choreographies from Auburn State Prison (New York) and Bayamon Correctional Institution (Puerto Rico). Performers include Bernard Brown and Kenji Igus, bringing forth the words and movements of Raúl Reyes Chalas, Gadiel Falcón RodrÃguez, Bartholomew Crawford, and Ellis Douglas. The evening closes with a Freedom Tea Ritual, a conversation, and a collective dance jam.
Part of , this event continues FREEDOM TIME’s abolitionist dance practice—building a world beyond walls, one step at a time.
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About the Artists
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a California-based dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people, and addressing mass incarceration. Begun in 2016, the work embraces a porous community of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and “free world†dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. The resulting hours of dance, dance making, performance, film creation, writing, and community conversations comprise a body of work that is at its essence a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. Moving towards our North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, we dance through prison walls.
