FREEDOM TIME: dancing justice dancing abolition
An evening of dance and conversation around dancing within prisons, community, care, and justice, with Dancing Through Prison Walls and Sming Sming Books.
Dancing Through Prison Walls, a porous community of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and “free world” performers and artists, will present dances written by incarcerated collaborators inside Bayamon Prison; in Puerto Rico.
Using movement and storytelling as acts of resistance and survival, Freedom Time is a call for a world without cages. This evening’s Open Access program will bring our community together to witness the astounding dances written and performed by the Dancing Through Prison Walls community.
“What Branfman and her collaborators have curated appears deceptively simple: minimal sets, direct narration, embodied testimony and movement. Yet the cumulative effect is profound. Art here becomes survival, protest, memory, and prophetic. The performance does not romanticize incarceration; it confronts it. It insists that creativity persists even in the most restrictive environments.” – Joanne DiVito, LA Dance Chronicle
Following the performance, Dancing Though Prison Walls members will be reading from their new book, Freedom Time: Dancing Through Prison Walls, published by Sming Sming Books. Artist- publisher Vivian Sming will speak about the book project and its creation process, and the evening will conclude with a conversation between the audience, Sming, Branfman, and members of the Dancing Through Prison Walls community.
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a 2023 Lucas Artists Program Fellow. In each residency, numerous members of their community arrived on property, working and creating in community with each other as well as other LAP Fellows. During their second residency in 2025, they began choreographic work on many of the dances presented in this Open Access program and worked with Sming Sming Books to edit the accompanying Freedom Time book, which will be available at this event. This evening’s program celebrates the meaningful work that Dancing Through Prison Walls does, highlighting their LAP residency while amplifying the dancing stories embodied within carceral landscapes and beyond.