10/6/23

AMY: My name is Amy Oden. My pronouns are she/her. I'm in Queens, New York.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

AMY: I met Suchi during my undergrad at Pomona College. But because of the consortium and how it works, I took a lot of classes at Scripps. That’s where I took a composition class with her. I then got involved when she was doing a piece with some students outside of school, and one of the dancers dropped out. I’m so grateful to Suchi for showing me that dance can exist in a truly caring way.

Dance is the best thing in the world. I love it, and I think it’s magic, healing, and liberating. Unfortunately, in the institutions and in the ways that it is taught, the way these certain kinds of dances get funded could be really messed up. It’s sad to see something so beautiful be corrupted.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

AMY: The first dance that I mentioned was called SUSTAIN and that’s where I hopped in to replace the dancer. After that, it was Freedom Dances and working on Angee’s Journey which I think was the first major process that I was a part of. And now I’m in DATA or 7 ways to dance through prison walls.

RAMON: What was that like?

AMY: For Angee’s Journey, Ernst had this dream of understanding what his mom went through while he was incarcerated. His mom was based in Southern California, while he was incarcerated at CMF in Vacaville. Once a month she would travel by multiple trains and buses to get to Vacaville. It was an incredibly long journey for her to do by herself, and she did it faithfully all the years that he was incarcerated and stood by him and visited. Sometimes she would be turned away when she got there. So he wanted to honor that. So he and Suchi did that journey from LA, taking all the buses and trains and they recorded it, made videos, and then we created a dance about it. It was a tribute and a storytelling piece for Angee, but also more broadly for the families and communities of people who are incarcerated. Honoring their experience and how to support the labor that goes into staying connected and supporting your loved ones when they’re incarcerated is something really special about this piece. Also, Angee would join us for almost all the performances.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with before being involved with this project?

AMY: My path to Dancing Through Prison Walls is a little different than the majority. I would say I came from a really intense dance background. In my childhood and through college, I started off on a drill team in middle school, which has its roots in the military. I loved being a part of that team and executing something precisely like that. I went to an arts public high school and learned about modern dance and ballet, very pre-professional. I got a lot of really amazing training there, but I also got some really weird values about what dance is, how to act as a dancer, and how to act as a person who wants to get a job in the arts. A lot of those values were based on racism, classism, and sexism. Then I went to college and continued taking dance classes.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work?

AMY: I came into this work through a love of dance and dance being my craft. A lot of my approach to the actual choreography is seeing myself as a sort of empathetic vessel. On Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic and DATA were pretty similar to that we received a dance that was already choreographed through words by Forrest Reyes. As a performer, I was tasked with coming up with movement to embody that dance that already existed. Using my dance training, I try to bring that dance as clear to the audience as possible to amplify Forrest's words.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

AMY: Back in 2018, we had this opportunity to make dances on the beach. They set up a little dance studio in Santa Monica on the beach. Suchi, Ernst, and I went out there a few days in a row and just tried different things. We interviewed people walking by, asking what freedom meant to them. Ernst mentioned the story about a power board and how we should make a dance about that. It was the first time that I had ever heard that story in full and being able to transcribe it in my body.

Also, we were lucky to perform one time at the Berkeley Museum. A lot of the people Ernst was incarcerated with were based in the Bay Area, and at that point, a lot of them had been out. So, many attended the event, and some brought their families. Then after the show, Ernst’s community from inside and the people involved with this project ate together, and we set up tables in a circle and just asked to hear from this community. Primarily from the folks who supported their incarcerated loved ones, similar experiences to Angee’s journey.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

AMY: This group became a real family, and I know we shy away from using the word family in professional settings, but it isn’t a professional setting at all. The care doesn’t stop at performing. The people who I have worked with have been there for me in so many different ways. They continue to be my friends. I’m used to showing up and leaving. In dance a lot of times you leave your personal life at the door. So, it’s just really nice to be able to do this thing that I love in a way that I can just be myself and connect with people, knowing that I’m valued fully as a human being.

It’s also important to practice caring for a whole person, caring for a community, and showing up for each other. It’s changed how I treat my friends, and how I show up at my job. I wish more people could see that because we can all incorporate those principles and those politics into every aspect of our lives.

12/4/23

BERNARD: My name is Bernard Brown. I use he/they pronouns, and I’m currently living in Los Angeles on unceded Tongva land.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

BERNARD: The bulk of my relationship to Dancing Through Prison Walls has been through Undanced Dances. There have been iterations of that, and those iterations talk about this preview at ICA LA. We’ve done a lot of virtual gatherings in this regard and live performances, in addition to the film that we’ve made, which circulates around the globe. I’m in a great position as a tenure track faculty member at Loyola Marymount University, where we were able to bring Suchi and Mokhtar and Ernst to the campus to screen the film. I got to host and be part of the panel that addressed the student population and our faculty about this very important issue and how we’re all implicated, especially on college campuses that have dorms and other sort of checkered histories. We were also able to bring Suchi back this fall to be a part of our decolonizing dance series called Shift, where again Suchi, Mokhtar, and this time Tom Tsai and Selina Ho joined in sharing a bit of DATA or 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls . They engaged with the students here. I was the host and the coordinator. We shared with the students this work and notions of abolition and how it relates to our own lived experiences. Even if it feels indirect, it’s actually very directly connected. Additionally, I helped secure a version of DATA to be performed in our Fall concert just a few weeks ago in November 2023.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

BERNARD: My initial involvement was an invitation from Suchi Branfman. Just before the pandemic began, Suchi had invited me to come and go inside Norco to teach a workshop. The date that I was scheduled to go was the initiation of the shutdown that we all experienced in March 2020. My initial intro was halted because the world shut down. Understanding that the prison didn’t shut down, we kept in conversation, and in the other version of this project we imagined, we took letters from folks on the inside and gave them life through embodiment. I joined the crew at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (ICA LA), a museum there and gallery space where we got to bring the narrative to life. That was around Labor Day of 2020. We were masked and distanced, and thankfully, we had the whole art space to figure out where we would be. I had this unfinished room as my playground—as my feeder, so to speak—and it was really amazing to perform to Terry Sakamoto’s words, which are all about imagination and decay and rebuild in this place that’s in transition. The area was not a finished space, it wasn’t demolished, and it wasn’t fully built. And so, with the words, thinking about what can be, it made the most sense for me to do the filmed version of what we now know as Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls.

RAMON: What was that like?

BERNARD: I told you a bit about going inside and what that was like. That was a nerve-wracking experience for me and as a queer person, I have notions of what it’s like to be “inside.” I also have lived experiences of being dehumanized and degraded because of that, being spit on, on the street in South Central as a teenager. With that in mind, going into the space seemed super hyper-masculine and very judgmental; Everyone is ready to defend themselves; that’s my inexperienced notion. I have all of those preconceptions squashed going into that space. I was received so openly and so gently even trying to figure out the new workshop in the moment. Everyone was so caring, and I think the things that connected us overpower the things that seek to divide us. I hold that really close to my heart. It gives me a bit more confidence, a more erect spine, and that’s really important because I can realize through that experience that what I think or what I carry with me may not actually be true. To be open to other truths is so important.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

BERNARD: Not all dance is storytelling. The beginning of my training was rooted in the rigor of movement, but also having stories as the center. I began training in public school, if you can believe it, back in the nineties. My very first performance was a series of dances about stories and people that look like me, which led to my intensive training at a local institution, Lula Washington Dance Theater School. The work there from whoever comes in, if you’re there recreationally or to train professionally, is to tell the stories that are often untold. I feel like for 30 plus years, that has been my journey to illuminate stories of those that are often invisibilized or undertold because that is the service that dance does.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

BERNARD: I really feel connected to this work, I feel connected to the people that are involved in this work. Having eventually made it into Norco and teaching a workshop the spring of 2022, I was able to finally go in and experience the transformational movements with the folks that are “inside,” in addition to the folks who are coming “inside” from Scripps. It was very magical talking about storytelling. We as dancers, we are flexible when we are solution-oriented, and we understand improvisation in a deep way. There wasn’t a sound cart available to me or Suchi or any of us while we’re in there during my workshop. In the moment, I devised a new workshop that involved body percussion, taking aspects and movements from your history—like a treasured memory with a family member, for example—and embodying that. Using body rhythm and spoken text to create many dances in your small groups in that way, each person got to share a bit of their history and make a dance together that combines their history. really underscoring the web of connections that we all have as human beings. This work continues to transform me as I work through the many, many pockets and the many branches of this really deep garment that is this project. The last thing on this: As a person who is affected by the carceral system, my mother having been in and out since I was a preteen, this has really opened up those memories and spurred on more action because I know I’m not alone in this. There are family members who are missing, who are separated from us through this really tragic and violent way of being that our government continues to enact and our private corporations as well. Thinking about all the ways in which I can use my gifts, I think dance is a gift, to work towards the end of this system.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

BERNARD: Another sort of critical moment for me, two of them actually from the same event. It was November 2021. We were performing at Scripps, Undanced Dances, and that was my first time doing it in front of an audience and meeting Terry Sakamoto, whose words have been informing a lot of my practice in this work. I got to share a bit about my mom with him, and he had been “in” for quite some time and was recently released. He gave me some words of confidence about reconnecting with her and what it would take for this woman who gave birth to me to survive in a space like that. I felt really connected to him and more connected to her. I also got to meet Susan Bustamante at that time, and she was so kind and said we are going to find her. I haven’t found her, and it’s been some years. Even though we haven’t found her yet, it’s really comforting to know that there are people looking for her and who care generally about human beings who may be written off as a number or not cared about. We also had this panel in front of all of the people that were scattered because they had to walk to each site, and we finally gathered under this tent, and we all got to talk. I was able to lead folks in Assata Shakur's chant that she wrote in her autobiography: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” You do it in different volumes over multiple times. Thinking about it now, having this diverse group of people—intergenerational from all types of backgrounds coming together, not in performative allyship, but really yelling from their guts about how it is we can break these systems down—it's a collective journey, and that's been one of the most impactful experiences in quite some time for me.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

BERNARD: What's really impactful about the work that the collective is doing is that it isn't just advocacy. It's actual action and showing up at places, calling institutions to task, spreading awareness so that it's not a burden held by just a few. I feel like we're all connected. Sharing with the students that some of the furniture that they sleep on in their dorms is made by folks who are in prisons. They respond with, “Oh, my gosh! I was just going to school. I had no idea that I'm implicated in this.” It doesn't have to be super large all the time. These small things really chip away at the structures of the walls that divide us.It may not happen in this moment, the shattering of the wall, but with enough people chipping away at it, it comes tumbling down. I'm not necessarily about incremental change. I would love, like, bam instant change. There are many ways, as my grandma would say, to skin a cat, and if we can skin the cat in all the ways, it gets done really fast. How can I be a transmitter of these pathways to liberation and change, knowing that we all are co-conspirators, because we're breathing the same air? That that has been really impactful to me, shifting a type of understanding of what agency and change looks like.

12/7/23

DAMIAN: My name is Damian Busby, he/him, and I’m in San Diego right now.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

DAMIAN: I was involved with the Sunday dance jam that we have. I find that really inspiring, and its sense of community, that's really a beautiful thing. The only piece that I've really been able to get involved in is the one in Desert Hot Springs. That was a great project to be involved with. It was really interesting, and it was touchy. I couldn’t believe the moves that were going on.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

DAMIAN: I took Suchi’s class in 2020, and since then, I've just been involved on and off. After I got out, I became more involved with Dancing Through Prison Walls. Somehow, I just fell into it.

RAMON: What was that like?

DAMIAN: I learned a lot. She had some cool stuff and gave us some handouts, which were about dancing, and it was really good. We got to write some stuff. I still have the Dancing Through Prisons Walls book that we made for that semester, which has a portion of a piece from everybody.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

DAMIAN: I've been exposed to Native American dancing. But not as a study. That's a part of my culture. I'm a Lakota from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Crazy Horse and Red Cloud and those people—that's my tribe.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

DAMIAN: For me, I'm a scientist. Engaging the other part of my brain, my creative side and enjoying art, is cathartic for me. I'm just amazed at the creativity. I have kind of a broken body, from years of incarceration. I can't really dance like I would like to, and I'm not a small person, so it doesn't go over well.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

DAMIAN: The ones that I remember are the narrative ones from Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic. It was really hitting home, and it's the same dance that they performed at Desert Hot Springs. But it was done in front of a county jail or something. I remember writing dances and talking about dancing. In the class, we created these pieces while trying to envision stuff. At first, it was very alien to me because I just don't have that creativity. I don't know the words and all this other stuff. For me, every time I go to the dance jam, I see them dancing, and I'm like man, it just seems so warm and inviting, and organic, just having fun. Watching people let go, and not just let go, but be creative—they creatively dance. Those are really cool times for me. Every time is just amazing.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

DAMIAN: I learned a lot. I've learned to appreciate talent and creativity, especially Suchi and her abilities I just really look up to her. She's so creative and so driven, and she gets all these projects done. She's just really amazing. I think about all the people that are engaged in this. Every one of them is just super talented. It’s like watching a master do something—like a sculptor or a painter—you know they have that creative spark. That's just spectacular for me. What’s really important is the way that it builds community and provides a space for creativity that is lacking in our world. When we were kids, we had music and arts in school, but they don’t have that anymore. It's important for art to be passed on to the next generation. It is so important to have this space because dance provides an out and a safe space inside that carceral setting. I remember, every time I was in the room and the guys came back from Suchi's class, they would just be happy and laughing. They weren't prisoners for that small moment in time. When they went in and danced and were able to connect with the people around them and let their hair down and take off that prisoner façade just for a few hours. That was a life changing event for every one of those guys that when they came back, you could just tell. I'm kind of bummed because I didn't get to dance in the class, because of COVID. So that experience that I could see, that's what can stop people from the negative repercussions of being incarcerated. The ability to say ‘Hey, wait! I'm a human being.’ That makes a big difference, to be looked at as a human being instead of a number. It's great work because it changes lives.

11/22/23

ERNST: My name is Ernst Fenelon Jr. He/him and located in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

ERNST: There’s one called SUSTAIN, one of the first ones we [Suchi and I] did together. Then there was Angee’s Journey which we did together. We did one dealing with the Angola Prison, Pops, then we did Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic and then we did DATA or 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

ERNST: Through Suchi. Suchi came in and worked through the Prison Education Project. She came in to do a dance class and when she came in to do the dance class, I was basically going to be her escort since I was a coordinator at the CRC Prison, California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, California. We were beginning to expand programming under the Prison Education Project. The opportunity came up where Suchi heard about what we’re doing and then we talked about doing a dance class. She came through and I thought wow, this is not gonna work, men’s prison, dance, that’s probably not going to work too well and to my surprise, it went very well the first day. First we were in one of the trailers, the education trailers. Then, they moved us to the gym where we had more space and from there it got more elaborate in the ability to move and do things. I was kind of challenged to get involved in actually participating. That’s when Suchi and I began to talk, and we worked on different projects. From each of these projects grew this portfolio of work. There was SUSTAIN, Angee’s Journey, and some of the other works. That’s how we got involved and then eventually the work evolved into getting formalized, getting official through Dancing through Prison Walls.

RAMON: What was that like?

ERNST: I started off as a narrator in Sustain where I had to read someone else’s words and so I began to realize I could use my own voice in when other people may not get a chance to have their voice heard, I can make it heard through being a narrator. Then came Angee’s Journey when I then got involved in movement and realized I could use my body as well. The idea of being able to use all of my being to tell these stories really impacted me a lot and I really liked that idea. The more I can use every aspect of my body, words I write, my voice, my body movements, the more I can tell stories and the better it would be. And the more that I get to be this incredible bridge because being formally incarcerated speaking the words of the incarcerated, working with people who have never been incarcerated and we’re all working towards the same goal, that’s inspiring to me.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

ERNST: Well dance? Definitely no. Storytelling, it depends, I had already written my first book, so along that line there were some levels of storytelling or storytelling capabilities in place.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

ERNST: One of the things I saw with dance, going back to storytelling, is that dance tells stories. I started thinking about West Side Story and other musicals that really were able to incorporate storytelling with dance and I realized that dance could tell stories. Usually, I thought of dance as anything other than relating to incarceration, liberation, dealing with the prison industry complex, looking at these institutions as a problem. When the opportunity came to look at it from the lens of telling the story of those inside and connecting them and humanizing them and beginning to talk about the whole process and mass incarceration, that was very enticing to me. When I got out, at first, I did not want to acknowledge my incarceration. I wanted to act like it didn’t exist. What I realized was that was hurting me more than helping me and so I needed to figure out how I would tell my story. I could tell her [Suchi] one on one. I could get it out but I realized that dance and the arts, like paintings and different things can touch people’s emotions. I realized that to change the narrative, we have to touch people on their emotions. Your emotions will change your psychology about things, how you feel. If you can feel the humanity in something, then you can humanize that situation. When that began to open up for me, that began to be a place where I saw that working with Suchi and her life experience and of being able to look at dance as not this technical endeavor. But what I really saw when we had the dance class in the gym was that I saw these grown men suddenly turn into their inner child and I saw the possibility of change. As long as they stay grown men who experience whatever trauma or decision they made, it was hard for them to transform, but once they could get in touch with their inner child and become that kid again with a positive outlook, I could see much greater potential for change and transformation.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

ERNST: With Angee’s Journey, my mom is involved with Angee’s Journey and I walk with her in the beginning and at the end. That all started because Suchi asked me is there something you really wanna do, something on your bucket list and I said you know I wanted to take the journey my mom had to take from Southern California to Northern California, just to visit me, which was over 400 miles one way or 800 miles round trip and being that she didn’t drive, know anybody, and she was very private. She would take a bus, train, bus, train all the way around and it was a 50-hour round trip. It was important to me to understand her experience. To deepen my empathy, my understanding, my healing, my mending of the harm I did by being incarcerated. The aspects of Angee’s Journey included: my mom for the first time talking about her experiences, her meeting Suchi and how they hit it off, and hearing things I had never heard before as to what her experiences were. And from the first 4-hour conversation and then to the first time my mom saw the rehearsal, she was crying, my wife was crying. Then my mom saying no one knew and her bravery to want to tell the whole world part of her experience. There’s so many memorable points but to top it all off was when we did the actual performance at the Claremont Colleges, and we did it. We got a standing ovation, a lot of applause. Just before we ended my son joined us on the last walk. At the end of Angee’s Journey my son’s picture comes up and then he runs up on stage. It was me and my mom and my son walking across the stage and that was amazing.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

ERNST: Just this idea of dancing through prison walls, dance is liberation. Prison walls are what divide us but we are able to be liberated through these walls. Where else are these walls that divide us? In our ideology, whether it’s socioeconomic, religious, or political. How many other walls can we dance through and really connect? I think that’s the whole thing is the idea of bringing humanity in all sectors for me. That’s a big, big deal for me because the world has gotten more and more divided. I think the more we can connect, the better it will be.

11/20/23

FORREST: My name is Forrest Reyes. My preferred pronouns are he/him. I’m located in Pinole, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

FORREST: I’m the choreographer and I wrote the poetry and the dance moves for the original version of DATA or 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls. There are now three generations of people that are taking that dance and changing it and adding new moves and making better music. Each and every single generation has changed it and made it their own in more ways as they go. I’ve been there to help and encourage them and allow them to breathe their own expressions and ideas and everything into it. For that they give me guest artist credit.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

FORREST: Suchi! Suchi came and I was taking her class through the Inside Out Program that I was a part of at the time. Basically I had my assignment done early on and then COVID had hit, and everything was shut down. Nobody could talk to anybody, and everything was cut off and that assignment was an “I am you” dance assignment that Suchi ran with and turned it into a whole dance experience that is on its third generation right now.

RAMON: What was that like?

FORREST: It was very hit or miss. Once every other month or two or so during that time [COVID time]. But I was able to keep in contact with Suchi through the colleges.

I talked to Suchi every other month or so on zoom, and in prison at CRC, to get a zoom call, people notice that, they see that, and then they want to know who you’re talking to and who’s calling you. It makes it seem like its big, official deal thing to get a Zoom call from the professor.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with before being engaged with this project?

FORREST: Yes, I engaged in dance a little bit. I’m Native American, I grew up with the Hupa so I learned several different ceremonial dances growing up.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work?

FORREST: The only constant is change. When watching this dance go from what I imagined it, and then seeing all these different people and watch it change and grow. It’s still the same thing in a million ways, it hasn’t changed at all and then in a million ways, it’s a completely different thing. I wouldn’t even recognize it, from day one to today. I think that’s another lesson that’s really sticking with me, especially in my own transitional state of living right now is change. Kind of like a constant fluidity: accept it, run with it. A see what happens kind of feeling.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

FORREST: When Suchi was starting out to work in Norco Prison and I was getting to know her and working with her, she was there all the time. It wasn’t like I took her for granted, but it wasn’t till she wasn’t there all the time it was like, “Oh man I really need Suchi to work on this and work on that.” All of a sudden I realized, I was like, “Oh wow this person, Suchi, just coming to my life and becoming this integral component in all these different things.” It’s a year or two later and people are continuously seeing me doing things with Suchi and there’s multiple people that have seen the dance or have been a been a part of different dance classes. Dance itself kind of grew at the prison in a couple different ways also. A bunch of guys learned how to do the gumboot dance. Dancing kept growing and me just being attached to that got more questions as time went on.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

FORREST: I still continue to learn from it. This work for me really began with trying to think and live beyond individuality and a simplistic self. And that path, this project, this idea, this seed that was planted has grown and turned into this whole giant other huge thing that’s going all these different directions. It’s so much bigger than me and I’m so happy and proud and just amazed at how successful it is and what Suchi’s done with it. I really take that feeling of wonder. I think about how huge this thing is, that it came from an idea that I had, it came from a meditation on letting go of individuality and a belief that anything is possible or that if you can create how you work, how you carry yourself, you’ll create around yourself. I think those ones are good ones that I can always carry with me. The other big part is just the ceaseless changing.

10/16/23

IRVIN: My name is Irvín Manuel Gonzalez. My pronouns are he/él, they/elle. I'm currently located in Columbus, Ohio.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

IRVIN: I would visit with the CRC and share work there. Also, during the pandemic, Suchi started Undanced Dances through Prison Walls and reached out to a couple of different artists who had already been inside and had asked us to write down choreographies to share with the men on the inside. I think the purpose of them was to read the choreography and be able to see if they could move with it. Then she [Suchi] sort of flipped that. So, she was like, I'm gonna have the guys write down their own stories. Whatever story they wanna tell, and then she was gonna have artists on the outside perform it. So, that was a particular project that I worked with. I also did a film that connected me with Terry Sakamoto's story regarding his wife's journey to go visit him. From there, I have been performing the same work just in different venues. We've done the film version, and now, there's a live version that I do with Marc Antoni, who was also formerly incarcerated. So we turned that solo into a duet.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

IRVIN: I got involved in 2018, and that was because Suchi had initially reached out to my partner to go inside the prison to teach dance classes and showcase some work. But he wasn't able to do so. So, he passed on the project to me, and I thought it was a cool opportunity. Particularly because I've also had family members who've been imprisoned. So I thought it would be a cool opportunity to go in and just share art. That was back in the summer of 2018, and I got to go into the CRC and share a quebradita dance class.

RAMON: What was that like?

IRVIN: That was the first time going into a prison. I never went to visit family in prison. My dad did, but I didn't. They [My parents] would sort of try to shield us from that. But this is my first time physically going inside and beyond just the visitation room to where you're actually in the gymnasium. That was a different experience, and it was cool to sort of see a lot of the stigma behind it sort of be taken away but also, at the same time, see the very real realities of this institution being sort of secluded and closed off.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with before being involved with this project?

IRVIN: I was a dance minor in college, and my major was English. That's where I did a lot of my professional training, but previously, I grew up dancing with my family. We did cumbias and salsas. My aunts and uncles were like my first teachers. In terms of storytelling, I feel like storytelling, it's like a big part of Mexican American culture and Mexican culture in terms of just like chisme and gossip. I feel that storytelling, within itself, is the passing down of our family stories and legacies. Those are sort of my initial connections to storytelling. Then, in college, being an English major and a dance minor, a lot of my work in English focused on looking at BIPOC folks telling their stories. I read a lot of indigenous storytelling, and that was my focus in undergrad. When I started grad school, the focus that I went in with was to look at post-modern autobiographical solos to see how marginalized artists told their stories through solos.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A dancer?

IRVIN: I think being Mexican American, my parents having migrated from Mexico and then also having family members who have been incarcerated or deported. It's such a personal project for me to work through this unjust justice system that does its best to keep people under their control and under their punishment. For me, it's really using dance as this tool to rehumanize us because I feel there's nothing more about the body, and who we are as people than dancing with each other. So, part of that is using art as a tool to combat a lot of the dehumanization that prisons try to do. Because the goal of prison institutions is to turn you into a number and then turn you into basically a non-person so that people forget about you. That way they can continue doing whatever they want with your body for cheap labor or deportation. Being the child of immigrant parents and having family members be affected by these unjust systems, it's always been important for me to do a lot of advocacy work. Beyond, Undanced Dances, I also have a collective (Primera Generación Dance Collective) that focuses on creating art that speaks to the issues that the Latinx community faces in the country. A lot of it has to do with connecting art and social justice because I grew up in a marginalized community.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

IRVIN: There were 2 powerful moments where I finished teaching class and then some of the men came up to me, and they were just like, “Oh, have you done this before?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I always teach dance. I'm a dancer”, and they're like, “No! Have you come into prisons and taught dance before?” And I was like, “Oh, no! This is my first time getting to teach a dance class here.” Then they were like, “Oh, you felt so organic. Sometimes people come in here, and they're afraid to get close to us or talk to us. But you weren't afraid.” I was like, “Oh yeah, I wasn't afraid because I have family members who've gone to prison.” That person doesn't stop being that person just because they're inside of this cell, they’re whole beings. So, for me, I didn't come in here, and I wasn't like, wow! I'm surrounded by incarcerated folks. For me, I was surrounded by people who wanted to dance, and I was surrounded by people who have whole identities that were not related to being incarcerated. So that was a powerful moment for me. Part of it is breaking down the stigma of going inside and thinking that you are going to be with versions of people that we see on TV versus versions of people that have whole identities and lives outside of this.

The second thing, too, was that I was there teaching them for 2 hours, and at the end of it because I was finishing my PhD at UC Riverside, we sat down in a circle and started talking. They started giving me advice about how to finish my PhD. It was a community, particularly because many of them were Mexican American too, and my dissertation research focused on Mexican American dance communities. So, I was just talking to them about how hard it was trying to finish a lot of the work, and they were just encouraging me and giving me tips. That was a powerful moment in the sense that, oftentimes, I think as teachers, we go into spaces being I’m there to teach, and that you're there to learn. But I didn't realize I was going to be taught that day too. They taught me a lot about just coming together as a community to finish a project.

Also, I feel anytime we gather, there are always just cool things taking place. I feel that's a cool part about art; whenever you get together and make art it just builds cool experiences because art really allows us to think outside of the box. It just brings new possibilities together. So, each time I gather with the entire team, there's something different or amazing that pops up. I feel this last time, we were at Critical Resistance in San Francisco for their 25th anniversary, Marc Antoni had previously done the piece that I do. He does this thing where he maps out this journey and puts tape on the wall. Typically, I'll just do most or all of the dancing, and that day at Critical Resistance, I was like, “Hey, you dance too, why am I doing all the dancing? Let's put you in there too!” And he was just like, “Oh, really?”, and I was just like, “Yeah, we’ll throw you in there today. I’m going to give you this section of the music, and I want you just to create something”. Then he just created this beautiful solo. It was nice to just see him have no apprehensions. I think he mentioned something after getting out: I’m just going to live life. So that day, he was just gonna throw myself into a solo and he just did a solo. It was amazing.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

IRVIN: I was a reformist and transformed into a complete abolitionist. Early on, and this is before the project, I was still very much so like, well, there are some people who belong in prison and some people who don't. Versus now, I’m just like prison itself should just completely be done away with. There are different forms of rehabilitation work that can be involved. I think another aspect is there are times where I'm just like, “Damn, I feel like I don’t wanna continue being a professor anymore. I just want to go do abolition work, like if it paid more.” But that sort of takeaway has allowed me to really just venture some of my research into abolitionist work. Even over here at OSU now, I'm connecting with their prison initiative where professors go over there and teach. I'm gonna be doing training in May so that I can build a course that I could teach inside. So, part of it is just seeing the small steps that we can take in order to really make them into a larger change. I think the biggest takeaway has just been becoming a full abolitionist and seeing how it can connect to different facets. Sometimes we feel like there has to be different versions of ourselves, which there are sometimes, but part of it is also, how can we connect the work together. So, it's not just I'm a professor, and then when I'm done being professor, then I'm an abolitionist. But how is it that I can mix both together. So, part of that is also in my courses, like engaging the abolitionist theory and philosophy within it, too.

11/21/23

JAY: My name is Jay Carlon. I use flexible pronouns as long as it comes from a place of love and understanding. I am currently located on the unceded territory of the Tongva people.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

JAY: I have been doing a lot of the projects that include performances at Highways and other performance spaces. So we were doing showcases, and then Undanced Dances happened. We couldn’t go into the prisons anymore, so it was like a pen pal situation and then that evolved into me imagining Richie’s Disappearing Act. As I was performing Richie’s Disappearing Act at the Institution of Contemporary Art in Downtown Los Angeles, Richie calls Suchi in the middle of me performing. Then it became this thing that felt really spiritual as I was doing Richie’s Disappearing Act embodying his beautiful language about the power of the imagination when it comes to survival in a place that cages you. I was feeling like all of a sudden when Richie called and we were doing that performance this became bigger, this became spiritual to me. Since then, I have been working with Richie, we made a film together on Santa Monica Pier. I know Richie has been on tour with Suchi, I have kind of been on tour with Suchi going to conferences. So, I’m here for the ride.

Richie’s Disappearing Act is a piece that I have been embodying since 2021 and it's only been two years of this, but I feel like this piece has been in my body, in many iterations and spiritually. But that first happened at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 2021. Since then, Richie is free, and we have been collaborating. We made a dance film together and that included Richie recording his own words and me overlaying with the audio. Furthermore, collaborating with Tom to edit the film in a way that made it feel like you can understand the ways in which you can embody and yearn for liberation. Richie and I have been trying to collaborate in a live performance because we have yet to do that, but our schedules have just never aligned.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

JAY: I met Suchi through Tom Tsai. Tom had this show where he had 10 of his friends perform an opening two-minute piece and the beginning of this concert and Suchi was one of the artists, and I was also one of the artists too. I met Suchi through Tom and from there Suchi asked me in 2017 to come into the prison and teach. I think this was at the early stages of her residency at Norco, this was pre-Scripps before it became a class. I was supposed to teach a class at the prison in 2017 but there was a really hard lockdown. The class was from 6:30 to 9pm but because of the lock down we got in at 8 o'clock, so I was only able to perform for them. That was my first time at the prison in 2017. That’s how I first got involved.

RAMON: What was that like?

JAY: I do modern dance, contemporary dance, meditation kind of stuff, which I especially as a queer person, feel nervous going into these spaces especially spaces that feel highly masculine or machismo. I get nervous, I’m like oh are they going to like me? Or do I have to make this tough. The first time I was in there, I was so surprised at the willingness that these men had, and the bright-eyed kind of joy that they bring into these spaces. I was just so surprised how much dance meant to these people in prison.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

JAY: I have been a choreographer for the past twelve years. Since I graduated college and I guess before that I still was a storyteller in college, so for the past almost 20 years I have been a ‘storyteller’ through dance and song. This has taken a long time for me to figure out but within the past five years, I was really interested in looking at my family’s migrant history and their colonial past. As Filipino and Filipino Americans in the diaspora, to make understanding and understand belonging a little bit deeper in my relationship to myself, space, and others. And the ways that I would do that is through making dances that interrogated my identity as a queer Filipino immigrant as a dancer, that’s the way I am storyteller. Through heavy inquiry and being so invested in interrogating my body in its relationship to space, this can go into liberation. The goal is searching for liberation. Secondly, I come from a long line of storytellers of oral tradition, not in the written form, so a long line of stories passed through oral tradition. I like to think about it as gossip or chismis in Filipino or chisme in Spanish. But I like to think about the stories that have been passed down through both verbally and body/ dance. Sometimes I try to remember those stories and then relate it to some of the work that I’ve been on working with Suchi. The reason why I look into intergenerational trauma through storytelling is in pursuit of liberation. So how can I make sense of my queer brown body here in this space, in any space, as I go into white institutions or as I go into prisons, or in schools that are best when you perform ‘whiteness’. How can I imagine my body navigating that space doing all the contorting myself in certain ways to shape shift and feel like I belong in those spaces.

My dad came here with 8 other men from the Philippines. They came here not knowing English, not knowing anything but they made a pact that every Labor Day weekend, they would come together and have a dance. They have been doing this since the ‘30s. But my dad always had a dance and that became a way to preserve our culture. We are nearing a hundred years of this new culture, fiesta culture which fiesta in the Philippines usually means everyone comes home back to the Philippines. But that still happens here in the States. The dancing ranges from just social dancing to cha-cha to line dancing and sometimes then I’ll do Filipino folk dance. To bring it to my current practice, I want to get the essence of the beauty of the preservation of the ways in which my family gets together. I think Suchi does a really good job in this, in trying to make things intergenerational, make them accessible to the community, but still be incredibly thought provoking. To relate it back to my work, I want that essence and I want to bring it to different audiences to show the beauty and preservation of my people.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A dancer?

JAY: I am going to paraphrase Bell Hooks right now, “The revolution will not happen without rest. The revolution will not happen without humor. And the revolution will not happen without dance.” If I were to talk about the revolution specifically, I think the revolution is essentially in pursuit of liberation particularly for those of us who have been unliberated, for those of us that feel bound and have to fragment ourselves to fit within society or for those of us that are literally imprisoned. So how does my dance come into this process? My pedagogy in all my creative pursuits, privileges the imagination and the imagination as a way for us to imagine a world that we want to live in. If I could get people to believe in their imagination, then they can better manifest the world they want to live in. There’s a really trendy word right now called manifesting and I really want people to learn how to do that, how to feel it, how to embody democracy, how to embody liberation. I think in the West, especially we write stuff down and it needs to be intellectualized. If I get people to feel this instead of just intellectualizing it, they can better choreograph liberation.

There’s 1) imagination and 2) a sense of agency. These are the two things that I like to bring into all my spaces and all the communities I engage with. If I can make people believe in their imagination and empower them with a sense of agency. That’s the way I want to choreograph. If I get people to believe in those two things, then I can empower them with a sense of liberation. To me, the dance, the things that I am choreographing, I don’t care about the steps. I don’t teach steps ever. As a choreographer, I’ll come into a space and if you want unison, if you want people to look like they’re doing the same thing for a sense of community, cool, we’ll make those steps together. But for me as a choreographer and someone that’s focused on composition, I don’t care what you’re doing. I care about creating a sense of agency and I just want people to feel like they belong. That’s how I end this space, that’s how I’m choreographing. I choreograph the things you don’t see; I choreograph spirit. I’m Avatar: The Last Airbender.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

JAY: I taught this class where it’s a lot of embodied improvisations that are about using the imagination to kind of almost be overwhelmed by the imagination so much that you feel like you’re in this dream state. I was kind of overloading them with all this imagery and all of a sudden when I was talking about imaging our shoulders as holding all this baggage and imagine you could take off the baggage and maybe there’s a book in there from high school that you forgot about, and we just hold onto these things, and we don’t realize. So, we pretended to take off the baggage and imagine having a dusty heart, imagine dusting it off and then for a moment were just dancing lighter, moving through space lighter. There were 20 of Suchi’s “outside” students 15 of these incarcerated students and everyone was skipping around the gym, laughing at the top of their lungs and to me, I wish this was filmed because that image will be seared in my brain forever.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

JAY: Something that I’m trying to learn right now and I’m learning through just being around Suchi is what are the action items? What are the actionable things? Aside from calling Congress and marching, how can we actually work towards abolition? Because as I left that experience with them all of a sudden, I was free, and they were not. I started to feel unsettled that I wasn’t doing enough. Something that I’m looking forward to is figuring out ways to organize in the way that Suchi does so beautifully that I can not only just raise awareness about these issues, but also create communities and coalitions that enact change. I’m not sure how that looks yet.

9/22/2023

LUKAZA: My name is Luzaka Branfman-Verissimo, and I use they/them pronouns, and my name as a pronoun too. I am based in upstate New York, in Highland, New York.

RAMON: Can you tell me how you got involved with dance or storytelling or the arts before being engaged with this project?

LUKAZA: Without stating the obvious, I am a visual artist and someone who’s called themself a storyteller throughout my whole practice and much of my life. I’ve always been interested in preserving, archiving, and telling the stories of folks whose stories don’t often get told. As a person with mixed identities and that carries a multitude of identities, I’ve always been drawn to the ways that we tell our stories, the ways that we listen to each other, the ways that we know where we come from or the ways that we choose who we come from. I primarily do that through visual arts, printmaking, painting, installation, and community-based work. I have been a fan of Dancing Through Prison Walls since its beginning; I like how they practice storytelling and engage with the work they’re doing in abolition, activism, and performance. There’s a lot of overlap between the work that I’m interested in, the work that they’re doing, and the multitudes of forms of storytelling that Dancing Through Prison Walls is doing not only in dance but in so many ways.

RAMON: Without stating the obvious, how did you get involved with this work? Was it through Suchi, or how did you get exposed to this to get involved?

LUKAZA: The beauty of this project is that everybody in the community is involved. I’m so honored to have Suchi be my mom and see that we are each other’s resources because there’s overlap within the arts in our practices. There was this automatic interest in pulling each other into projects we worked on. A few years back, in 2017 or 2018, Suchi invited me to lead a storytelling and zine-making workshop with the folks she works with at CRC, and that was my first time being inside a prison. It was just an incredible way to be in dialogue with folks inside. We had made zines with paper and pencils around honoring someone in their life who has impacted them or who they want to call into telling their story. This was the first moment that I was a collaborator with my work.

Since then, I’ve done a few things. I designed the Angee’s Journey poster and supported a collaborative storytelling piece that Suchi and I performed at the Berkeley Art Museum. I’m always ready to dream up how my work and my practice can weave in with this work.

RAMON: This is a good segue into the next discussion. Being a part of Dancing Through Prison Walls, what dance pieces or projects have you been or are you involved with?

LUKAZA: After the workshop I led inside CRC, I often made takeaways or prints that reflected stories that had been told as another way to continue doing the work. I made three color risograph prints. It's like a screen print and Xerox combined. With the permission of these storytellers inside, I wove all these stories and text on top of each other, and that was distributed and sold to support Dancing Through Prison Walls and support money going back to the guys inside. Then the piece that I did with Suchi was called Janie. It was a storytelling of some of the women she had worked with and gotten to know at a different facility, a women's facility. It was a performed, embodied piece. Not a dance, but it was using a form called cantastoria. I supported dialogue structures that happen after performances that Dancing Through Prison Walls does and thought deeply with collaborators about what we do after the work and how we continue the work, which is a form of collaboration. Being part of the dialogue in terms of what happens next.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work as an artist?

LUKAZA: I bring visual strategies. It’s one thing to bring movement and tell stories in that way, but then how do we make it look or how does it resonate with people. I am also committed to this work, committed to attending Sunday night dance parties and having this work also be a part of my community. I also bring my network and my community when I show up for this work.

RAMON: What experiences, conversations, or performances do you strongly remember doing this work?

LUKAZA: So many, where to begin? Being able to go inside and work with folks inside was a big impact on me. I’ve worked with Critical Resistance for many years, specifically in Oakland and with other abolitionist organizations. I think it doesn’t matter if you’ve been inside or not; it doesn’t matter if you are system-impacted or not. I think it re-changes your brain and how you think about these terrible systems to actually go inside. I've heard about that work through my mom all these years and how it's just impactful to go in there and also be able to leave as someone who’s not incarcerated. That experience was big.

Also, I’m just thinking about their most recent DATA or 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls (DATA) piece I saw performed in Downtown LA two summers ago; that piece felt very strong to me and had all these collaborators who have been a part of the project for a long time and newer folks. Visual arts was a part of it, and dance and movement, just witnessing so many projects was powerful.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

LUKAZA: I’ve learned what commitment looks like, what showing up looks like, and what it looks like to learn, grow, be wrong, and figure it out together. This project is committed to dreaming and working towards a cageless society and world. Things that I admire from projects and work are that it’s slow, long work and to show up again and again, making different iterations of the work. I learned a lot from Suchi and other collaborators too about what it means to be committed to doing this work, whether we see it or don’t see it all the time. It’s carving a way of reimaging. I feel like I'm always in awe and learning from folks inside. This work helps us be curious to learn about experiences that we haven’t had.

11/20/23

MARC: My name is Marc Antoni Charcas, he/him, and I am located in Orange County, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

MARC: I’ve been part of Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic We’ve done performances at San Francisco University and downtown LA. Pretty much since it started, I’ve been doing all the performances with Suchi. We did others while incarcerated and then here.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

MARC: While I was incarcerated. It started off as a college class, like an elective. There was no college involved initially; it was just for the prison but later on, they turned it into a college class with Suchi. I pretty much started when she gave her first class.

RAMON: What was that like?

MARC: I remember not a lot of people went to it [dance class]. I don’t know. It wasn’t too appealing to inmates in there. But I would go back and talk about it, and then some other guys who would be in the class would go and talk about it too. I did bring a few people. Some stayed, some would go sometimes, some wouldn’t. Even when they started implementing RAC (Rehabilitative Achievement Credits), a few more people started going.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

MARC: I was involved in storytelling. I took some storytelling classes and danced with Suchi in prison. Growing up, my mom and dad would always have parties at the house—that’s kind of where I learned to dance, watching my mom and dad and their friends dance. It didn’t need to be a birthday; they wanted to get together and dance. I would join in here and there and go back to playing. That’s how it kind of was growing up.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

MARC: I guess I had a Latin flavor in dance, a little bit of culture as well. But more than anything, I think the message is that of people who are incarcerated, there are dancers that are incarcerated. It was definitely used as not only therapy, but I also used it as a way of escaping incarceration and as a form of rehabilitation. Now that I’m out, I definitely have been doing a lot more dancing, whether it’s with Suchi or privately or dancing clubs or salsa clubs.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

MARC: Definitely the one in downtown LA and the one at San Francisco University. The one in downtown LA left an impact on me because my mom and my son were there and saw me perform. That was pretty impactful, seeing them participate with the dance because Suchi has the audience participate. Looking back on the video, I can see my son and my mom doing the dance. It was very fulfilling. Then at San Francisco State University, it felt like I spent a lot more time with Amy, Selina, Suchi, Tom and the other people performing. I felt like it also got me closer to them, and I liked that. It felt like it was more personal dancing together over there cause we were so far from home. That was nice.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

MARC: Well, it’s changed me. How I went from being incarcerated and dancing with Suchi to now being here in the real world and dancing with Suchi. It’s hard to believe sometimes, so it keeps me humble and it reminds me of where I am now versus where I used to be 4 years ago. It also makes me realize I’ve made a lot of positive changes. That’s the main thing.

11/29/23

MIMS: Yes, my name is Brianna Mims, but most people call me Mims. She/her for pronouns, and I’m in Los Angeles, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

MIMS: It’s just been one poem that I’ve been working with for the past 2 or 3 years, Terry’s Solo. I was working with the poem while he was inside, and he’s been out and still has been working with that solo. We’ve done it a couple of times and then we also shot the solo for the film. We performed at ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). The most recent one was out in the desert at the Desert Hot Springs Springs Library. We did one at Scripps College.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

MIMS: Suchi just invited me into the process. I met her through one of my dance professors, and we’re in the same circle. I’ve been working in the space of the abolition movement world. So, it was natural for him to connect us together. There are not a lot of people who are dancing in this space, so I connected with Suchi that way.

RAMON: What was that like?

MIMS: I think a lot of time in ‘performance space’ you come in; you do this thing but there’s something different. You’re working with a person and you’re building a relationship with people in a community, and I feel like for me, I value and get more out of those kinds of processes. Where I feel like I’m actually in relationship to people. I’ve been a part of a lot of performances and processes where I don’t know the people in the room that I’m working with and once the process is over, I still don’t know them and that’s really strange to me. But I think in this process, being in relationship is important. It’s not disconnected.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

MIMS: I have been a dancer my whole life. I actually met Suchi through a dance professor. My family is a dance family, just any sort of gathering. I’m just thinking about the holiday times when everybody is at the house. There’s music playing, people are up dancing. For some reason, there’s a culture of always hyping up my grandma to dance. I feel like most people in my family, social dancing is a big thing, but I grew up in this sort of institutionalized dance setting as well, which is very different. Obviously.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

MIMS: I feel like my life is a practice of abolition. I feel like it’s in everything that I do. Specifically, sharing the stories of folks who are inside is something that’s important to me. So, I’m always happy to use my movement to assist or highlight people’s stories and their words and things that they want to share with the world because it’s not always easy for folks inside to get their art out and into the world.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

MIMS: I’ve been inside with Suchi at Norco. We actually played a game. It’s an abolitionist world building game I’ve been working on and that was a really beautiful experience. There’s a lot of reasons why it was beautiful, but I think my favorite part was watching people play and frolic inside. That was really beautiful, and it seemed like it felt good to them, so that was nice. I also enjoyed the range of conversations that we had and then they got to present dances at the end. I enjoyed the different presentations and the different communities they built and why those dances were done in their communities.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

MIMS: I think I do more listening. We’ve done this a couple times and I really like just sitting and listening to the words. Even this last time that we did it. I felt listening to the words, I get something out of them every time, it’s a new experience. I think that’s a call to listen more specifically to the folks that are inside.

11/24/23

MOKHTAR: Mokhtar Ferbrache, He/Him, Riverside County

RAMON: Were you involved with any dance or storytelling, or arts before being involved with this project? In your community, family? Can you explain?

MOKHTAR: No dance or choreography experience, but I’ve been a visual artist for approximately 20-years.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this Dancing Through Prison Walls project?

MOKHTAR: My involvement began in the Fall Semester of 2020 as a student in the Inside Out Prison Exchange program.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects/films/writings have you been/are you involved with?

MOKHTAR: While I did write and choreograph dances as an “inside” student, I’ve most recently performed multiple times with the DTPW group on the production of DATA.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? As a parent? As a dancer/artist/data analyst? Etc?

MOKHTAR: Frankly, I do not carry my life into the work. All of this is entirely different from anything that I do in school or at work. To best provide something close to a good performance or understanding of the processes in which we dance, I check my life-baggage at the door.

RAMON: What experiences/conversations/performances do you strongly remember in doing this work?

MOKHTAR: My best memories really are not related to the performances, as I am not a performer—at least not in the standard sense of the word. Rather, I have gotten the most joy and fulfillment from the other tasks which I have been able to participate in due to my DTPW involvement. Like in-person workshops at LMU, or Zoom meetings with CSU Fullerton.

RAMON: What do you carry with you, or have learned from the work?

MOKHTAR: Patience and understanding, but mostly, dedication. Almost everyone is so motivated to do, and that is hugely influential.

RAMON: What is something you would want people to know about this work?

MOKHTAR: The amount of effort and work that goes into making this stuff happen. The logistics alone, of having numerous dancers who are separated geographically from one another yet still be able to come together to produce something so beautiful, is beyond my comprehension.

RAMON: Any dreams for the work, and/or your engagement with the work in the future?

MOKHTAR: I’m just here for the ride. It will continue with or without me. So I do not have such dreams or aspirations.

12/1/23

RAMON: My name is Ramon Guadalupe Mora Jr. My gender pronouns are he/him and I am located in Pomona, California.

SELINA: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

RAMON: I helped put together the recent performance at Desert Hot Springs in October, Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic. I just helped organize and flyer. When I was there, I was translating the performances as they were happening.

SELINA: How did you get involved with this work?

RAMON: I got involved through California Lawyers for the Arts. I applied for an internship opportunity that’s advertised for people that are formerly incarcerated just on a whim. I would say this June I never log into Facebook, but after my spring semester I logged on and somebody posted a link to the application to the internship opportunity. I applied on a whim. I was like, I’m going to apply and see how it goes. I got it, and Toyin reached out to me and said “Hey, we’d like to place you to be part of it”. She asked me what I’m interested in and that’s such a tough question for me to answer because I love so many things. I go down rabbit holes in anything. I wanted to work with formerly incarcerated people, so more of an organization that focuses with this population. Originally, she was like, “Okay, I’m going to place you in a Historical Society for Chicanos’ but it's all the way in Inglewood” and I live in Pomona. I was like “That’s too far, but I’m down.” Then a week before the internship was supposed to start, she was like “Oh I’m going to place you in Dancing Through Prison Walls. Have you heard of them?” I said “No, Dancing Through Prison Walls, what is that?” Then she goes “Oh you’re going to love it, we’re going to have an interview, and you’re going to meet with the director. Her name is Suchi''. And that’s how I got involved.

SELINA: What was that like?

RAMON: It has been an amazing opportunity, seeing the performances, seeing it come together. Then hearing people say I’m here because of the flyering I had done. That was like, “Yes!”

SELINA: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

RAMON: My family dances a lot at parties. When I was a kid, we would go to a lot of Mexican parties: bautizos (baptisms), quinceañeras, there would be a lot of dancing. Dancing is a big part of the culture. So is singing. My family loves to sing. My family, they are all singers. Everyone thinks they could sing in this house. I sing in my car… My family is from Sinaloa and Michoacan. Both sides have their own vibe and you could tell both are two different states. On my mom’s side, it's way more fun and upbeat and with my dad they listen to slower music. With my mom it’s just partying, going crazy, whoever tap dances the hardest. One of the moves in Sinaloa is called the “zapateado”, it’s almost like tap dancing but you’re skipping your foot. As a kid, I would mimic everyone in my family at parties and as I grew older, I got away from dancing. Through my teenage years, I definitely lost touch with art.

SELINA: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

RAMON: I come in open-minded. I’m very mindful of my experiences and the opportunities that brought me to work in this space. To have met people from diverse backgrounds, being open minded, being respectful of everybody, each individual. I feel that’s what I bring to this work. The idea that it's open for all, that everyone is welcomed. That’s something that resonates with me and I feel like I try to embody that every day, be inclusive with everyone.

SELINA: What memories do you have from working in this work?

RAMON: During the performance Richie’s Disappearing Act, I was working translating the narrator for Spanish speakers. I wasn’t able to see the performance. But reading the words and then having met Richard recently, I shared with him how beautiful it was for someone to write a piece on a shared experience every word resonated with me very profoundly. Even though I wasn’t seeing the performance, when I turned and I saw only a few movements, that’s exactly how it feels like in there. Where you just want to expand your wings and stretch out, but you’re just put in a box. You’re constantly affirmed that you’re in this box, this is who you are, this is why you’re here. That really resonated with me especially because I’m formerly incarcerated. I was released in 2019. Until now I’ve pushed away from those feelings and those experiences because I don’t want to relive it. It’s been very hurtful for me to think about those times, but to see something so beautiful come out of it, it’s such a beautiful juxtaposition. Where I’m at now, I can channel that pain and that experience towards something positive to inspire others. I would say listening to that performance and the whole lineup that day was just amazing.

Where to start! I have a ton! I would say listening to Jay at the end when we had the sit down, the Q and A. Hearing one of the performers, Jay, speak about his experience and his relationship with his family in relation to this whole system of incarceration. It made me tear up hearing him talk about his sibling after the fact. Him feeling like he could have done more for his brother, he didn’t really understand his brother’s experiences coming in and out, being caught up in this cycle. I had to give him a hug after he was finished talking, I was like ‘Hey what you just said it nourished me. It brought me to tears and it was amazing. Thank you for sharing your story. It resonates with me and just know that wherever your brother is, he’s super proud of you.’

SELINA: What do you carry with you from the work?

RAMON: I learned how people generally don’t know about prisons, like people don’t have a clue about what goes on there, the people that are in there. It’s not discussed enough. Seeing the performances, I see how everyone that’s incarcerated shares a similar experience. There’s a similar visceral feeling of prison and what it does to all of us that we all share. The diversity of people that care also. Scholars like yourself [Selina] and Suchi that are invested in the work. Hearing it’s not just people that are directly system impacted, but it's people that literally don’t have a horse in the race, they’re taking an interest in this field. It reminds me that there’s people out there that do care… I’ll always remember my meeting with Suchi. I remember her asking me what I plan to do, what I’m trying to get from this experience, and I made a comment saying “I’m just staying in my lane, and you just tell me what to do.” And she was like “No, no staying in your lane. You spread out. You take up as much space as you need to.” And now I know what she means. No, you’re a person. You do what you want, you speak up and that’s something I’ll always carry with me.

11/29/23

RICHIE: My name is Richard Martinez. I’m currently living in Corona, California. I was born and raised in LA. But I lived in South Gate up until I was 16 years old.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

RICHIE: Richie’s Disappearing Acts was how I felt while I was in prison because I would have to disappear, because we couldn’t do these dances anymore. So, I would be in my bunk and then I’m writing about them [dances], but I’m writing about things I would actually do and imagine. It’s not even a dance. What I wrote is things I imagined and then we just created a dance out of it. I’m not actually dancing: like move to the left, move to the right. It was like hey, I’m disappearing, this is my disappearing. If you saw my dance with Jay Carlon, it was odd because we were performing and there was no music. We were just moving on the beach freely. We said let’s mirror each other and we’ll take turns and then that’s what it became. I wrote that I was on top of a briefcase trying to surf and even riding a horse. So, these are things I was imagining and that is what I wrote about. Soon after that, once I got out, I was able to do some of those things. Then I did a writing called Richie’s Reappearing Acts. At that moment, I couldn’t do those things, so I had to disappear to these places and now that I’m out, I’m able to actually do the things that I’ve been imagining and that I’ve done before. I’m able to redo them and actually be there. So that’s me reappearing back into my life.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

RICHIE: I’ve had a challenging life. For some odd reason, being in a negative situation, I met Suchi. She had this project and brought it to prison. I’m not proud of that but I was able to turn a negative situation into a positive situation. By taking college courses while I was incarcerated so I don’t feel like I’m wasting my life away. I took a chance, at first it was a modern dance class, which was not a college course. That’s where I met her [Suchi] first and then the following year, she was actually teaching a college course called Choreographing Our Stories which I was able to get units.

RAMON: What was that like?

RICHIE: It was basically a dance class learning about different cultures, different dances from cultures and different countries. Unfortunately, it all came to a halt in March of 2020 due to COVID and she [Suchi] did the same thing as far as taking a negative situation and turning it into positive. If it wasn’t for COVID, this project wouldn’t have come up. She figured out a way because she couldn’t come into the prison, we couldn’t get no visitors and we still wanted to finish our college course. Besides, that was our freedom time. You can just imagine being incarcerated, that little bit of freedom that we got when she came in, and that we got to go to the gym and actually just be free and be ourselves. That all came to a stop when COVID came, so she said ‘Hey, why don’t we just start writing about dance’. Even when I tell people now that I’m out here, this is what we did, and we created this. We created dances through writing, that’s something that’s never been done. That’s why it became Undanced Dances Through Prisons Walls During a Pandemic.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

RICHIE: I can express myself through writings, I would do creative writing. As far as dancing, I grew up in LA when break dancing and pop locking was in. There were always the neighborhood kids, we were all battling and besides that I’m Hispanic. Hispanic people know how to dance, I grew up dancing. That’s the only dance experience.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

RICHIE: To be open minded. It’s a whole different lifestyle for me. I have to keep up with regular work and I tell Suchi, if you had a full-time job of me just dancing, I would be there. I would do that. I actually like that I’m able to dance. If I take anything, I always tell them [boxing students], you have to dance in the ring, you have to move your feet. You have to know how to move your whole body.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

RICHIE: My writing mentioned me surfing and going to the beach, that’s one thing I’d love to do. So, she [Suchi] said, “Hey do you want to perform at the Santa Monica pier?” I’m like “Let’s go for it!” It was not even a week or two after I got out of prison, I was still going through this PTSD. I still wanted to stay indoors in my house. My mentality wasn’t fully there but I went and took a chance to perform with Jay Carlon. It was his idea because it was still COVID time. It was super hot, he wanted to wear a beanie. I had a khaki Dickie’s long-sleeved shirt and Dickie’s pants. Kind of looked like I had prison clothes.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

RICHIE: People don’t need to be there just as prisoners to get people to listen. I think a lot of Suchi’s work has paid off because they're listening. I was giving up on the system period but things are changing.

12/5/23

ROMARILYN: My name is Romarilyn Ralston, my gender pronouns are she/her. Currently, in Long Beach, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

ROMARILYN: I think it was the COVID piece I was involved with, not really any pieces before or after that. She's invited me into a number of things over the years. I've just been really preoccupied with work or other issues that I can’t be more committed to Dancing Through Prison Walls. But I'm not sure how I actually got involved. I want to say it was through Ernst, who had been working with the project. I had known of the project, and I had known Suchi for years. When I got involved with the Prison Education Program, I met Ernst, who was working with Cal Poly Pomona. Suchi was in the process of working with Ernst on Angee’s Journey. It's amazing. I want to get involved in some kind of way, and I don't know how we connected, but we did. Suchi invited me to be a part of the piece around COVID. She had a bunch of stories from folks inside before COVID [Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic] that she wanted to put to dance, and she needed readers. She reached out. I, of course, said yes. I narrated a couple of stories; Bernard was the dancer. It’s actually the trailer for the film in 2021 that was at the film festival. My voice is the opening piece, and I speak throughout that trailer for the film. I can't remember the names of them, but there were 2 or 3 pieces that I narrated.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

ROMARILYN: While in prison, Suchi came in with a group of Claremont College professors, and they were starting to create a story around one of our friends: Lucene Carter, though we called her Lou. They wrote this whole narrative and dialogue around Lou’s story. Once I was released, I became a student at the Claremont Colleges, and they performed a story for Lucene. That's when I first noticed Dancing Through Prison Walls and what it was all about. But I still didn't really get involved with it until probably a few years later, after I had graduated from the Claremont Colleges, went to grad school, and came back to California.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

ROMARILYN: Prior to working with Suchi with Dancing Through Prison Walls, I taught a dance class in prison, I’ve been part of plays, I went to modeling school as a teenager. I always loved the arts. I’d like to think I was pretty involved in the performing arts, or at least performance in a variety of ways prior to Dancing Through Prison Walls.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

ROMARILYN: As a formerly incarcerated person, I think it's really important for us who have had the opportunity to come home and return to our communities and families to use our voice, to give, to amplify the stories and the voices of those who we've left behind. I spent 23 years in prison. A big part of my community was there; a big part of my community is still there. When given the opportunity, I want to shine light on their lives, give voice to their stories, amplify the things that are important to them. I want to do that as much as possible.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work? / What was that like?

ROMARILYN: I remember the first time I went into LA to meet with Suchi, the dancers, and some of the other readers. It was really cool to actually see what people were working on. We had come together, and I remember seeing the tap, the lyrical and modern dance, and the break dancing. Watching everyone perform and hearing each of the pieces being read by different people and breathing life into those stories. Then Suchi talked about the guys at CRC, who are still there, and those who will be coming out very soon. I thought, wow, this is so cool. This is such a cool project to not only be able to lend my voice to the voiceless, but to work in community with some really amazing talented professional dancers, other activists and artists, and bring this whole community together to share with the world the importance of those behind bars. I thought it was such a cool project. So, we were in downtown LA, and I got to see the dances up close and personal. I was so moved by the commitment of everyone and the dedication and hopefulness for all of the people who had written those stories who were still inside for their release, as 95% of the folks inside are going to be coming home. But the question is always when. It was really cool to be in a space like that.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

ROMARILYN: We need to do more. I recall when I was incarcerated back in the early nineties, I watched a PBS special called “What I Want My Words to Say to You.” It was Eve Ensler, and a number of other artists, and they were in Bedford Hills Women's prison in upstate New York. They were part of a writing workshop, and they took those stories (from the women’s prison), and really famous artists like Rosie Perez read those stories on stage and breathed life into them. It was such an incredible documentary to see how these famous actors and actresses came to take these stories and perform them on stage in front of the women. It was just incredibly powerful. I always think about that when I'm working with Dancing Through Prison Walls and how we can connect and stay in touch with those who have been erased from our communities who have been rendered somewhat invisible behind prison walls and remind us that they're still there. They're still alive. They're still human, and their lives still matter. It's so, so very important that this project continues to do that work. That we continue to give voice to those who are voiceless.

9/20/2023

SELINA: I’m Selina, I use she/her pronouns. I’m based in LA.

RAMON: Were you involved with any dance or storytelling before being involved with this project?

SELINA: I grew up with a classical ballet background. It was the only dance technique I was allowed to train in and be exposed to. I know my mom loved dancing as a kid and singing, my grandma on my dad’s side also loved dancing. Sometimes when my grandma comes over, she’ll hop on the Zoom calls and say Hi, do some dances, and then lecture everyone on Chinese traditional medicine. Everyone was so interested, which I think is adorable. I was also involved in high school dance and contemporary dance. Most of my expansion of dance happened during and after the Dancing through Prison Walls project.

RAMON: How did you get involved with Dancing Through Prison Walls?

SELINA: I had been researching the Claremont Colleges and noticed they had funds for criminal justice education programs. When I got to campus, I was asking around on how to get involved. And then they’re like, there’s a dance professor who works in prisons named Suchi Branfman; maybe you should reach out to her. I looked up her bio to find her email and said, “Hi Professor Branfman, my name is Selina. I really like dance. I’m really passionate about criminal justice reform. Can I meet up with you? I’d love to help with anything.” Now knowing Suchi, she gets so many of those emails. I don’t know how I ended up sticking around for this. I know the paperwork to go into prisons is really time-intensive. It’s like 30 pages. So maybe that scares people off. But I was like, no, I want to do this.

RAMON: How many years would you say you’ve been involved?

SELINA: I transferred to Scripps spring of 2019, and that’s when I got involved. I also was in a spring concert show as part of work that Suchi choreographed, called Freedom Dances, which was created from the gestures made by the people inside. Gestures that they created about what freedom looks like, all these gestures that would symbolize freedom. So that was turned into a dance at Scripps.

During the pandemic, there was a Pitzer cohort in Spring of 2020, where people started writing written dances. One of my first projects was to scan all these dances and turn them into a book using InDesign and write a preface and all that. So, I have all the original scanned copies of some of the dances that are in Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls. Then, the first time I formally performed through Dancing Through Prison Walls was for DATA or 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls.

RAMON: What was that like?

SELINA: I love dance. I know the power of dance and I know the freedom of your body dancing. When I came into this project with the idea that it would be a dance class. A lot of the people who were in Norco were asking what are we gonna learn, what type of dance is this. First, I was like I don’t know and still, I’m like I don’t know. It’s just dancing in a circle and seeing what happens. I think part of it was letting go of what I knew about dance because ballet emphasizes how it looks and how it should look right and be in the right position. But what this was about was really how you move in a way that connects you to people. How do you move in a way that makes you feel closer to people, how do you move together, and collaborate.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work?

SELINA: Before going into the prison, it’s interesting that preparation starts way back to my dorm, like picking out clothes. I was not allowed to wear anything blue, or anything green, which was interesting because my entire closet was blue, green, and black. It’s interesting how the institution of prison demands conformity and even extends outside the prison walls.

Then when entering the prison, there’s this juxtaposition of fear and anxiety in my body on a visceral level. These systems do not produce a feeling of safety within your body. Barbed wire fences do not make me feel safe, they make me feel scared. The whole arduous process of trying to get inside, which I think is so ironic because we’re trying so hard to get inside a prison and then go into the gym. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have to be open to it and I don’t want to bring this feeling of fear and anxiety into my body and onto new people. How do I, in my body, find a way to find openness now. How do we release all of that fear and anxiety inside? Instead, I’m just so happy to dance with people, I think holding that side by side and then releasing one.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

SELINA: So many, there’s so so so many. There was a person, who always came in with such incredible energy. For whatever reason that day he was not feeling that well and he just came in and started crying about how his mom was sick. There was a vulnerability that not many get to witness.

Suchi also does this mirror dancing exercise. This is where you mirror someone wherever they go. You can start it and then they start it. Then at some point, you both just end up following each other and being attuned to each other. There’s an intimacy with prolonged eye contact. I think intimacy is so punished, so forbidden, so exiled within the carceral institution.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

SELINA: There’s this quote coming from Margeaux Feldman recommending this book called Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning by Carrie Jenkins, “Jenkin’s thesis is that the myth of happily ever after is one that we must let go of. In its place, Jenkins proposes sad love or what they’ll call eudaimonic love: ‘The eudaimonic conception of love ditches the focus on pleasure (or ‘happiness’) and orients instead towards meaningful, creative co-operation and collaboration.’ For Jenkins, being sad doesn’t have to pose a threat to love. With eudaimonic love, we have space to feel all of the emotions — positive or negative — and this is what enables us to move towards flourishing.” So that quote reminded me a lot of this work. How much of ourselves we bring to this work, and not coming into this work to make me look good. But we come into this because of who we get to work with and who we get to learn from. Everyone that I’ve met has somehow moved me. Maybe I can’t necessarily articulate it but I think what I take into my work and my life is the question of how do we sustain each other. How do we nourish each other? How do we lean into our interdependence? I think Dancing Through Prison Walls has really brought a humanistic perspective to the data work. It is part of the active effort to make sure that I’m always really aware of and trying to tell the story in the best way possible.

11/20/23

SUSAN: My name is Susan Bustamante, she/her, currently living in Orange County, Placentia, California.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

SUSAN: I’ve only done Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

SUSAN: Through Suchi, I met her, and I can’t even remember where, but it just seems like our paths keep crossing. And when she asks could you, would you. And I’m like sure you know. Because I just read. I can read, I can do that.

RAMON: What was that like?

SUSAN: It’s given me a different perspective on modern dance. When I’m watching it or there’s something on TV, it’s not just dance movements or stories; people are just putting their souls into it. I see it in a whole different way now.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with before being engaged with with this project?

SUSAN: No, there’s no salsa in this Mexican.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work? A parent? A dancer?

SUSAN: I was 31 years incarcerated with a life without parole sentence, and I’ve been out 5 years. Dancing Through Prison Walls is right up my alley, it’s in the prison system. I’m a big advocate in trying to break down those walls. So how do I not help, if I can? Everyone is system-impacted because I’m the one out here, I just couldn’t walk away.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

SUSAN: Just this one [Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic]. Being the second time that I’ve done this, the same reading has more of an impact because I already knew the people dancing and I was greeted quite well, and it was just very, very warm.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

SUSAN: The words that the incarcerated write are always so profound and it always has an impact on what the words are actually saying. Because as I listened to the words, I could picture it. I could picture when I was there and thinking those same things. So the words have the impact and then the emotions that the dancers put into the words are breathtaking.

10/19/23

TOM: My name is Tom Tsai, and my preferred pronouns are he/him. I’m based in Los Angeles.

RAMON: What dance pieces/projects have you/are you involved with?

TOM: I knew Suchi in school and by then she was already working with incarcerated folks and choreography but maybe not at this level. She started to go into the prison in 2016/2017 and she was working on a piece called SUSTAIN where they were creating movement, and then the dancers would take the movement they created from inside the prison and then bring it back to campus and teach other students. Ultimately doing a show of the movement that was created from these people who are locked away. As a part of the process, she wanted to document the process. I had never been in a prison before that and never really thought about incarcerated folks. But I know the work was meaningful just because Suchi was doing it and she was someone that I was always looking to be more involved with. So, she asked me to do documentation for the film.

I was also doing documentation for Angee’s Journey. That was very impactful. There were some casting changes and Suchi asked me to be in the piece. I had a good idea of it from observing and documenting it for some time so I wasn’t going to say no.

RAMON: How did you get involved with this work?

TOM: I went to school out in Claremont and that’s how I met Suchi.

RAMON: What was that like?

TOM: Going in, I was ignorant of what prison is and the politics of it all. I had to get my gears cleared and get a document that says don’t wear these things, don’t say these things, if you do this such and such. And that really created this concern in me: what kind of place am I going to that I need to be aware of everything I’m saying? Just conveying this state of needing to be on high alert or being fearful of where I was stepping into but once you finally get into the class, into the gym and then Suchi starts playing the music and then meeting some of the guys, they put out their very welcoming energy. I noticed how they grooved to music or they messed around and played in the dance warm ups, just the joy they could bring into these simple movements or gestures that was very impactful because my background is in hip-hop dance. Even in seeing something like acknowledgement of music, like a head bob, a grooving, or a swaying in the body, that spoke volumes to me because prisons were deliberately created to be barren. There’s no expression, it's completely inhumane. Seeing this acknowledgment of music, that was sort of my window into the history of what these people carry individually.

RAMON: What kinds of dance or storytelling or arts were you involved with prior to being engaged with before being involved with this project?

TOM: I went to school for media studies and dance. I was always interested in images whenI grew up in Taiwan. So, movies were sort of like windows into American culture, which maybe were not so accurate.

RAMON: How do you carry your life into this work?

TOM: I had to learn about incarceration, policing in America because there’s so much media out there that glorifies cops and propagates this idea that police are there to protect. I think in Taiwan because the crime rate is relatively low, the police presence isn’t really a thing that is threatening and that is all stuff that I had to learn here. My access point into all that is stories I’ve heard about.

RAMON: What memories do you have from working in this work?

TOM: Suchi did the class in prison where at the end she opened it up to a dance circle and then people started busting out actual hip-hop moves. Such a big part of me coming to America was seeing hip-hop dancers or break dances on videotapes and being “oh I want to be in the spaces where this culture is thriving and developing.” So much of my adjusting to America was about seeking and learning about hip-hop dance but then to go into a prison and to see these guys have that in them, it was so powerful.

RAMON: What do you carry with you from the work?

TOM: One of my favorite things is dancing with people from other cultures, other countries who might not even speak the same language, but if we can get in a circle and vibe to the same music and to go into a prison and find that was just mind-blowing. Especially in an environment that is oppressive, that is barren and void of expression. Just seeing people carry the information that I spent years seeking out was just life changing. When I came out of the prison, I was like who cares about who dances better than who. These guys, they’re in horrible conditions and they have this information in them. The environment that they’re in is suppressing that information. It was such a great experience to see Suchi’s class and the environment that she created within the prison environment to not teach them something they don’t already know, but to bring out something that they carry in them already. That just shifted my perspective so much about hip-hop. Hip-hop comes from the Bronx, it comes from disenfranchised folks and majority of people who are involved in hip-hop arts kind of come from that background and a lot of hip-hop philosophy is about the hustle, like proving your worth, getting out from bad conditions. But something about that day was just there’s value in everyone. Everyone holds value and how can we find ways to honor that value without making people hustle for it or push for it or suffer for it. That was the day that shifted my mindset, and I just knew that I had to keep being involved, keep doing this work.

The roots of restorative justice like what do we think about healing. How do we think about redemption on an individual level. How are we thinking about these things that aren’t punishment? How can these ideas of healing, of redemption become more commonly thought of in everyday life?