Mims, a 2019 graduate of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and a Dance Magazine<\/em> 2022 \u201c25 to Watch\u201d pick, joins a growing array of artists using dance to shed light on issues surrounding incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline and the justice system as a whole. Some are teaching dance and choreography directly to inmates. Others are using their personal experience as the foundation for concert works addressing these complex, and sometimes controversial, themes. And others still are channeling their frustration towards the justice system into something more hopeful: a dance-based imagining of a different, more just future.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you think about imprisonment or the justice system, you think about the ways our bodies are under attack,\u201d says Ana Maria Alvarez, founder and artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in Los Angeles. \u201cOur access to liberation and our access to power is through our bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n Alvarez\u2019s work joyUS justUS<\/em> takes on the justice system\u2019s disproportionate impact on communities of color and, instead of dwelling on hardship and deficit, focuses on the joy emanating from these communities as the root of freedom. The dancers don\u2019t move only to music, but they also dance to the cadences of spoken text that incorporates elements of the U.S. justice system, like poetry derived from the Miranda rights and courtroom discourse.<\/p>\n For Alvarez, combining strong, full-bodied movements with these emotionally and politically charged words underscores why embodied performance is such an apt medium for this kind of work. \u201cDance is such a powerful tool because it\u2019s rooted in our bodies, in our movement, in our connection with one another and in the ancestral wisdom of continuing to move in the face of incredible struggle and violence,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Choreographer and prison abolition activist Suchi Branfman, who works with incarcerated men in the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), a medium-security facility in Norco, California, explains that the same idea applies to her work. Plus, she says, dance is just a whole lot of fun. \u201cTo witness and be with people who are dancing while living in a cage is a direct antithesis to confinement,\u201d she explains. \u201cWe laugh a lot. There\u2019s deep joy and community-building in dance, which is amplified when you\u2019re dancing with folks inside prison.\u201d<\/p>\n Choreographer Kyle Abraham\u2019s 2016 work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Untitled America<\/em>, dives into the ripple effect imprisonment has on the families of the incarcerated. Abraham has an uncle who served time in prison, and the family\u2019s lived experience informed the work. But he looked beyond those connections during the creative process. \u201cI wanted to focus primarily on the humanity of the situation,\u201d says Abraham, whose interviews with previously incarcerated individuals played a large role in the development of the work and the stories that were told onstage.<\/p>\n Mims, too, drew from her own experiences, family memories and the stories of her ancestors when creating Uncle Ronnie\u2019s Room<\/em>. At the beginning of her choreographic process, she looked to her great-grandparents\u2019 legacy as organizers in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. For the score, Mims asked her grandmother for suggestions from her great-grandparents\u2019 music library. \u201cI just sat with the songs for a long time and really let them get into my body and my spirit,\u201d she says. \u201cAfter doing that for a bit, I went into the studio and started moving to them.\u201d<\/p>\n While some dance artists are using the stage as a platform for change, others are going inside to create it. Patrick Makuak\u0101ne, an innovative hula artist and the director of N\u0101 Lei Hulu i ka W\u0113kiu in San Francisco, has been the spiritual advisor at San Quentin State Prison since 2016. In this position, Makuak\u0101ne now leads the Native Hawaiian Religious Spiritual Group, which, before the pandemic, was a gathering of San Quentin men from Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures\u2014as well as several Vietnamese, Filipino and white members\u2014that met once a week to learn about Hawaiian culture and dance.<\/p>\n \u201c\u00a0\u2018Spiritual advisor\u2019 is the term that prison officials use, but I think of myself as a community builder,\u201d Makuak\u0101ne says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what the men really responded to. They learned that hula is more than a dance, it\u2019s about taking care of one another in community.\u201d<\/p>\n Branfman made a similar discovery through her choreography project at CRC, which, prior to the pandemic, had been meeting weekly since late 2016. \u201cWhen you make a big circle in a gym in a prison and turn on good music, everybody dances,\u201d she says. \u201cThe root of the work that we do is understanding that dance is a way of being together in community and thriving and sustaining ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n After COVID-19 restrictions made in-person gathering impossible, Branfman pivoted in an effort to maintain the community she and the CRC prisoners had created. Using written packets, she invited the dancers to continue choreographing. What they wrote and sent out became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic<\/em>, a series of works directed by Branfman which continues to be performed in person, virtually and via other forms of media by dance artists on the outside.<\/p>\n Branfman\u2019s and Makuak\u0101ne\u2019s work reverberates beyond prison walls too. Makuak\u0101ne says that it\u2019s not uncommon for members of his group to reach out to him after they\u2019ve been released to thank him for the skills they learned through hula. Branfman\u2019s work presents a great deal of food for thought for audiences, as they witness stories told from the inside.<\/p>\n Abraham, too, kept the lessons Untitled America<\/em> could teach his audiences in mind, specifically those viewers who haven\u2019t directly experienced the impacts of incarceration. \u201cSomething that I was really drawing on in a lot of ways was my mother being in the hospital and knowing that she wasn\u2019t able to leave,\u201d he explains. \u201cPeople who may not have someone in prison can connect with being in a space they don\u2019t want to be in or thinking about how hard it might be when they can\u2019t see a loved one.\u201d<\/p>\n And, in addition to using the visceral nature of dance to convey the difficult emotions surrounding incarceration, artists like Alvarez are using movement to put a new future on the table, showing by example what a reimagined justice system could look like. \u201cHow do we use joy, community, dance, music and power to build a system that is thinking about our health and well-being?\u201d she asks. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take rethinking the entire model of how the justice system works. JoyUS justUS<\/em> is a proposal on how we can imagine a future that\u2019s full of more love and more justice.\u201d <\/p>\n The post How Dance Artists are Addressing the U.S. Prison System in Their Work, Both Onstage and on the Inside<\/a> appeared first on Dance Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For 22 years, dance artist Brianna Mims and her family have believed that her uncle Ronald Coleman Jr. was wrongfully convicted of involvement in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Abraham-AAADTinKyleAbrahamsUntitledAmericaSecondMovement-credit-Paul-Kolnik-courtesy-AlvinAileyAmericanDanceTheater_Web_R1-edited-scaled-1.jpg\")
Movement as Liberation<\/h2>\n
![\"a](\"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Makuakane-NativeHawaiianReligiousSpritualGroup-courtesy-SanQuentinStatePrison_Web_R1-1024x599-1.jpg\")
Going Beyond the Personal<\/h2>\n
![\"a](\"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Mims-UncleRonniesRoomperformance3-credit-MykailaWilliamsandTianaAlexandriaWilliams-courtesy-BriannaMims_Web_R1-1024x574-1.jpg\")
Community Behind Walls<\/h2>\n
![\"a](\"http:\/\/sothyro.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Alvarez-CONTRA-TIEMPO-credit-SteveWylie-courtesy-CONTRA-TIEMPO_Web_R1-1024x683-1.jpg\")
Reclaiming the Ripple Effect<\/h2>\n