Freedom Time is a bold and moving collection of written choreography from inside and through prison walls. The book brings together a variety of dances created in confinement in California, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and beyond, including voices from formerly incarcerated and "free world" dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. Using movement and embodied storytelling as acts of resistance and survival, Freedom Time is call for a world without cages.
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a California-based dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people and addressing mass incarceration. Begun in 2016, the work embraces a porous community of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and "free world" dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. The resulting hours of dance, dance making, performance, film creation, writing, and community conversations comprise a body of work that is at its essence a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. Moving towards our North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, we dance through prison walls.
Suchi Branfman, choreographer, performer, educator, curator, and activist has worked from the war zones of Managua to Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre and Kampala's Luzira Prison to NYC's Joyce Theatre. Her work strives to create an embodied terrain, grounded in storytelling, dialogue, listening and action. Branfman is currently amidst a ten-year choreographic residency at the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium security state men's prison in Norco, CA and is Artistic Director/Facilitator of the multi-faceted Dancing Through Prison Walls project. She serves on faculty at Scripps College, where she has received Mary W. Johnson Excellence Awards in both Teaching and Research, the Claremont Consortium Faculty Diversity Award, and the QRC Lavender Award. Branfman is a community gardener, a prison abolition activist, and a Session Artist at Recess Space (Brooklyn, NY), Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA), City of Los Angeles Neighborhood Engaged Artist Resident Fellow and COLA Master Artist,18th Street Arts Center/California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow, City of Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellow, and recipient of funds from the Foundation for Community Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, amongst others.
