Choreographic Projects
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In March 2020, when Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ten-year choreographic residency inside the CRC Prison in Norco was put on hold due to the pandemic, artistic director, Suchi Branfman, began an ongoing handwritten log, archiving covid positivity numbers and deaths inside the California state prisons. Unbeknownst to her at the time, this archive handwritten on pads of yellow legal paper would become the basis for this latest work, DATA - 7 ways to dance a dance through prison walls. All the while, dances written from prison bunks were being sent out, including the stunning piece that drives this performance, I Am You, written by Forrest Reyes, who remains locked inside prison walls. The profound devastation of covid inside prisons living side by side with acts of resilience and community survival.
The 45-minute piece is performed by an ensemble of seven formerly incarcerated and “free world” performers. Held through a deeply landscaped sound score created by visual/sonic designer, Jimena Sarno, and massive set design supervised by graphic designer Kimi Hanauer – both of which are inspired by paper, the material that holds the data and carries the dances through prison walls.
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In March 2020, when the California state prison system shut down all programming and visitation due to COVID-19, dancing abruptly ended. The work was rapidly revised, and the incarcerated dancers began sending out written choreographies from their bunks to the outside world. The resulting collection of deeply imagined choreographic pieces, written between March and May of 2020, became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic.
Highlighting six of the dances written/choreographed inside the prison, the 60-minute piece can be performed in the theatre or as a site-specific work. The 12-person cast is made up of both formerly incarcerated and “free world” dancers and narrators. Between them, they are steeped in hip hop, rhythm tap, breaking, performance art, quebradita, spoken word, butoh and contemporary dance forms. Released from prison during the summer of 2020, Richie Martinez joins the cast as he narrates and performs in “Richie’s Disappearing Acts” which he wrote while incarcerated at the Norco prison during the pandemic. And having been released in the spring of 2021, Terry Sakamoto Jr., who authored three of the dances, joins the project as a narrator and to share his experiences dancing on the inside, and now, outside of prison walls. It is an honor to dance these works into the “free” world.
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Resulting from her visit to the Angola Prison Rodeo in Alabama, Branfman's new work honors Moreece “Pops” Bickham, locked up in Angola Prison for 38 years, with a sound score created in collaboration with his nephew, Bentonia Blues legend Jimmy “Duck” Holmes.
“a stark, but powerful movement duet where Branfman and Fenelon slowly moved with stilted steps in a square around the table and chairs. . . their movements were plain, but the message was one of confinement which ended with a sense of assisting others to freedom.”
Jeff Slayton, LA Dance Chronicle
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Angee’s Journey retraces a mother’s pathway to visit her son during his fourteen-year incarceration; three trains, two buses, two cabs, and twelve hours each way. Choreographed by Branfman, in deep collaboration with Ernst Fenelon Jr., who took his mother’s journey together during the summer of 2018, the work includes his mother, now in her eighties, his six-year old son and a chorus of dancers. This thirty-minute piece honors the thousands of women that persist in supporting their incarcerated sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers.
"Angee’s Journey was a true testament to how art can help heal, to an artist’s devotion, to preservation of one’s spirit, and to the power of a mother’s love."
Jeff Slayton, LA Dance Chronicle
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Janie, an intimate performance piece, draws on Branfman’s personal prison interviews with MaryJane, also known as The Bird Lady, who rescues and raises birds while serving a life sentence inside the women’s maximum-security prison in Southern California. During her twenty-five years in prison, MaryJane has rescued more than one thousand birds. Performed with visual imagery by Oakland-based artist, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo.
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Resulting from one of the incarcerated dancer’s questions, “What really is freedom?”, the collaborative choreography of Freedom Dances melds dance and film footage from inside the prison and on the Santa Monica beach to explore answers to that question.
Created by choreographer Suchi Branfman, in deep collaboration with the performers and Terrance, Joshua, Jeremiah, Sheboyea, Robert, Neto, Raymond, Trenell, Jesse, Chris, Atlas and Marc Antoni inside California Rehabilitation Center, a medium security men’s prison in Norco, CA. Movement and video sourced from, and recorded at, CRC prison in Norco and at the Annenberg State Beach, in Santa Monica,
“Freedom is not a thing freely granted… it is struggled for, hard-fought, transformative, a participatory process, new ways of thinking and being.” Angela Davis
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(a dance collaboration on the inside and outside)
During 2017, a group of dancers and incarcerated men spent every Friday afternoon dancing together. This performance is a result of that collaboration: honoring the experience and the movement created together and celebrating the ways that we are able to survive and find sustenance, whether inside or outside of the prison walls.