FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls
A Session artist residency at Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY from June-August 2025.
FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is a space to dream together, across walls, boundaries, and borders. A space to build a community that defies caging through imagining ways we can move, create, study, and dance together. Across our three months, fifteen Dancing Through Prison Walls community members from around the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico joined in the creative process in New York.
Regular public events unfolded across the seven-week installation, including: performances, community conversations, dance jams, printmaking workshops, letter-writing gatherings with Dignity Not Detention, and prison abolition trainings with Critical Resistance.
Public performances shared new in-process dances from incarcerated kin in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Palestine embodied for the first time.
The Recess Session space was transformed into a dance studio, abolition library, rehearsal space, an ongoing archive of community input, a bulletin board of handwritten dances by incarcerated collaborators, and an archival altar of objects created by those inside. Visitors were invited to witness rehearsals, read incarcerated collaborators' choreography, drink Freedom Time tea created by Zindagi Apothecary, and join in collective study and dreaming.
