Bring us to you

We are interested in meeting your community members where they are. Thus, we offer an abundance of presentation and engagement possibilities to be adapted for your community. Below are possibilities of what we can bring to you - one gathering or a series. Let’s dream together.

Conversations and amplification of the voices and realities of folks impacted by and held within the grips of the prison industrial complex is central to our work. This means that the work is always situated within a conversation, action-taking, and asking us to understand the ways we are each implicated in the carceral system. Our work always includes a team of Dancing Through Prison Walls community members - formerly incarcerated and “free world” dancers, movers, writers, visual artists, community organizers.

Our performance repertory can fill an evening or be part of a larger event. The work runs from ten to ninety minutes, with as many as twelve performers and as few as two, and can be performed within traditional theatre venues, or adapted to informal performance spaces, or site-specific settings. The work is deeply in search of ways to activate, engage and include the audience, whether as dancers, conversationalists or narrators.

Workshops and embodied lectures run from one hour to three-month long experiences, including embodied improvisational and choreographic storytelling explorations of sustenance, freedom, life-journeys, restriction, surveillance, survival and building community through it all. Often inspired by dances written inside the prison and sent out to us, the work is deeply evocative, and a rare opportunity to be in conversation, through the written word, with folks on the inside.

Film screenings and community conversations, whether in movie theaters or makeshift screening rooms, are a powerful way to experience the work come to life before a community’s eyes. Followed by a conversation with performers and filmmakers, these screenings/conversations run from 75-90 minutes.

Choreographic Residencies are a place for us to collaborate with trained and untrained dancers alike, to embody the dances we carry through prison walls. These dances include setting current, or past, repertory or creating new work based upon the stories and issues brought to the table. Our process is deeply collaborative and inclusive of all experience levels, all bodies, and all abilities, from professional to college dancers and street dancers to folks with no traditional dance experience.

(During this ongoing age of COVID-19, we are open to and fluid around creating a safe and care-filled option for us to gather, share our work, and be in conversation with your community.)