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Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls

Dancing 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.

Date:
June 22–August 15, 2025

Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls is an activated, inter-disciplinary response to written dances, deeply imagined and authored from bunks within prisons in South Dakota, California, New York, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico…centering handwritten pen and pencil dances entrusted to this community of formerly incarcerated and “free world” choreographers and artists, these previously censored works will be activated through dance, full-scale transforming constructions, video installation, an abolition resource center, and weekly community dance jams.

About the artist

Dancing Through Prison Walls

Artists

Dancing Through Prison Walls is a 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. Grounded in the gymnasium of the CRC Prison in Norco, California, and moving out into the world from there, 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 their North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, they dance through prison walls. #carenotcages

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