FREEDOM TIME: Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

Recess is proud to host FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, a new Session project by the California-based Dancing Through Prison Walls 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.

In 2020, year four of Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ten-year choreographic residency inside a medium security men’s state prison in Southern California, all programming and visitation shut down due to the Covid pandemic. Despite all odds, their dancing collaboration continued, with dances written from bunks under lockdown within lockdown, streaming out through the prison gate. Deeply inspired by the wisdom, knowledge, care, humor and radical thought that was carried forth in those dances, FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is an invitation to push past state and federal boundaries, bearing witness to the deeply interlinked chains of the prison industrial complex, but through imagined, dreamed, written dances. Dancing Through Prison Walls has spent the last eight years dancing in conversation with people caged inside carceral facilities. For Recess’ Session program, they bring these dances into the "free" world as tools for building liberated futures.

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, introduces new dances from incarcerated kin in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Palestine. These contributions expand our understanding of what solidarity can look like: multilingual, transnational, and beautifully entangled. They remind us that the carceral state is global, but so too is our resistance.

These dances arrive at a time when we are called to reimagine justice, community, and care beyond the boundaries of confinement. What began in 2020 as a tender response to the onset of the covid pandemic, has grown into an enduring collective ritual and choreography of memory, imagination, and resistance.

The term “Freedom Time” is inspired by Dancing Through Prison Walls collaborator, Richard Martinez, who dubbed his dancing time while incarcerated as a time of freedom, of feeling transported outside the prison walls, as if he would walk out of the prison gym and go home for dinner. It also echoes the Black Panthers’ call and demand for a “freedom time,” a radical, present-tense liberation: not someday, but now.

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is a space to dream together, across walls, boundaries, and borders. A space to build a community that defies caging through imagining ways we can move, create, study, and dance together. Regular public events will unfold across the seven-week installation, including: performances, community conversations, dance jams, printmaking workshops, letter-writing gatherings with Dignity Not Detention, and prison abolition trainings with Critical Resistance.

Join regularly scheduled public performances that share in-process dances embodied for the first time. From deep inside the granite walls of the Auburn Prison, Ellis Douglas’ speaks through his dance, “I glide with the hope of love in a hate-filled space” and “I slide from side to side to recognize my dance is a truth amongst the lies…”. Amneris transports us from inside the Bayamon Prison in Puerto Rico, “I would like to find myself by the river, listening to the waterfalls falling from the mountain above…the water crashing on stones…” And from Palestine, Motasem Abu Hasan’s dance invites us into a cell, where the Palestinian prisoner finds herself, “…awakening in another world…as if she’s flying through a new dimension…she raises her arms and smiles.”

The Recess Session space will be transformed into a dance studio, abolition library, rehearsal space, an ongoing archive of community input, a bulletin board of handwritten dances by incarcerated collaborators, and an archival altar of objects created by those inside. Visitors are invited to witness rehearsals, read incarcerated collaborators' choreography, drink Freedom Time tea created by Zindagi Apothecary, and join in collective study and dreaming.

“This work is abolition in practice. It is about creating spaces where those most impacted by incarceration lead, create, and imagine without apology. It is a love letter, a roadmap, and a refusal to succumb to incapacitation. Let it be received as a portal into lives that are often unseen, into dreams that will not die. Let it unsettle you. Let it inspire you. Let it move you to action. To those still inside, you are the pulse of this project. Your dances are the reason we keep making, keep moving, keep fighting, keep living.”

-Romarilyn Ralston, Senior Director, Justice Education Center, the Claremont Colleges