Grasping on to the gray metal bars of a jungle gym, Brianna Mims pitches her head forward and digs between her arms. She swings powerfully from one bracket to the next to the next to the next to the next…
These movements are her voice, shouting for someone to pay attention.
“This is a spatial violation. This is a human rights violation.”
The phrase rang out of speakers and echoed off the high ceilings of the California African American Museum in April 2019. This was where her own interactive installation, #jailbeddrop, started.
Jail Bed Drop began in 2017 as a series of installations curated by Cecilia Sweet-Coll and Patrisse Cullors with JusticeLA. Artists used 50 jail beds to create art that protested against L.A. County’s $3.5 billion jail expansion plan that would build two jails with a total of 6,000 new jail beds. Mims and her collaborator, Jeremy Grandberry, created an installation in Manhattan Beach, CA, where they did a movement meditation with the jail bed and wrote statistics on the planks of wood connected to the bed.
Mims’ short installation was not where she wanted it to end.
Her hands reached from link to link.
Everything is connected.
Mims came across JusticeLA by chance. She was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a post about an upcoming meeting and decided to check it out. What followed were countless opportunities to share her passion for abolition and create work that allowed people to question their notions of “crime” and punishment.
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She pushes audiences to think about who the criminal justice system is for and how it disproportionately affects Black and brown communities.
It’s a lot to unpack, so she turns to childhood memories to introduce prison abolition.
The jungle gym, she says, is meant to replicate the feeling of childhood. Like the ones children climb on in the park, surrounded by wood chips and laughter as hands slap against plastic and metal. Children climb. Mims climbed.
Everything is connected.
“This is a spatial violation. This is a human rights violation.”
Every system, institution, and structure is connected to the prison industrial complex. It’s just like the jungle gym. Each small bar intersects at multiple points.
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In April’s perfomance as she tethered herself to the jungle gym, Bindhu Swaminathan shifted from corner to corner in a room built next to the gym. It was the same size as a jail cell with a single jail bed. Swaminathan’s voice fought against the walls as she performed spoken word, and once again reiterated,
“This is a spatial violation…”
Mims clung to a large cloth attached to her head. Arms swung, reaching out, but her body returned to the jungle gym. It was inescapable. This conversation was inescapable.
Slowly, objects were introduced to the space. Artwork, love letters, and birthday cards hung on the walls or lay next to a stuffed animal sitting on the bed. All of these items were from incarcerated folks. The room filled with warmth and innocence. And the jungle gym devolved into chaos until…
“This is a human rights violation.”
The world was still and the audience applauded, but it wasn’t the end. They were invited to explore the space and interact with the world of the prison industrial complex. They were able to look at it, hold it, feel it. Mims’ mission was accomplished in the conversations that followed.
What began as a part of JusticeLA’s Jail Bed Drop series in 2017 evolved into Mims’ senior project while pursuing a BFA in Dance at USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Now, the lessons and explorations from the project are part of her everyday embodiment of abolition, from her dance projects to her own time dancing somatically with a community or for herself.
How did she get here? When did abolition work become an important part of her life? There was no specific track or event that led her to this project.
She, along with her team, travelled with the project to The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA with For Freedoms Congress and Reform LA Jails Day Party at A Noise Within Theatre. Each time, the conversation changes. There’s no trajectory, she said. She follows where the project needs to go. It’s similar to how the project began. Mims said it is “an amalgamation of things” that brought her to where she is today.
AUGUSTA, GEORGIA
Mims spent the first nine years of her life in Augusta, Georgia. In Augusta, the institution of the carceral state was a normal part of life.
“Being in and out of jail was something that was kind of normalized on one side of my family,” she said. “They’d even call it, ‘so and so was just like on vacation.’ And I used to be so confused. And I realized that people were going to jail once I got older.”
Georgia is the only state in the United States that is both the top jailer and leader in probation, according to a study by the Prison Policy Initiative. Georgia’s incarceration rate is the highest internationally with 970 of every 100,000 people incarcerated. The United States as a whole follows Georgia with 689 of every 100,000 people incarcerated.
For Mims, incarceration is more than just a number. Her uncle has been incarcerated for 20 years for a crime he did not commit. It affected her and her family financially, emotionally and geographically. It became part of her narrative, but didn’t shape her decision to make abolition a part of her everyday life.
BALLET FEET
Mims didn’t always love dance. In fact, she wasn’t that interested in the classes in the beginning.
She moved to Jacksonville, Florida, from Augusta, Georgia, when she was nine years old to be with her step-dad’s family. She enrolled in an arts-based elementary school where students had to choose a discipline to focus on. There was nothing drawing her to dance, she chose it just because. There was no direction until her friend introduced her to Jacksonville Centre of the Arts.
Mims walked home from school with her friend, but things got complicated when her friend wanted to join an after school dance studio program. Mims decided to audition as well since she was already tagging along and got in. From there, her love for dance grew. When it came to dance, especially ballet, she enjoyed the discipline and rigor of learning the dance style.
“There’s a part of me that loves like the discipline of movement forms, and the discipline of the body,” she said. “That is something that keeps me really grounded.”
However, that discipline evolved into an unhealthy habit.
“I prioritized ballet more than things that I might have been naturally better at or that just felt better for me to dance,” she said. “It was more fulfilling. So there was a point in time where it built up to me trying to prove myself to ballet.”
Ballet has an emphasis on lines in the body. For Mims, she lacked flexibility in her ankles. Her instructors put her in pointe shoes too soon for the ballet Paquita. While rehearsing on pointe, she noticed that her ankles didn’t go completely over the box of the pointe shoe. She wanted a straight line all the way down her leg, but her feet couldn’t do it. As a result, both she and her teachers pushed the limits of her anatomy.
“People would sit on my feet,” Mims said. “I had private lessons specifically for stretching my feet. I bought all this equipment for foot stretching, there was a time where my teacher hammered my foot. She was talking about, ‘Oh, maybe if you can get this bone broken, or maybe you can have the surgery.’ They will have people come in, massage therapists, trying to massage different parts of my feet to get it to release so the line could be better.”
She got caught up in the superiority complex of ballet. Mims shared that in the dance world, there is an unspoken hierarchy of dance styles, ballet being at the top. In reality, the ranking of styles perpetuated the Eurocentric understanding of dance that left other styles like West African dance in the shadows. Ballet is a hidden form of racism that Mims said many other dancers experience.
“Now thinking back over it, I could have spent so much time focused on styles of dance that naturally came to my body, that I actually enjoy,” she said. “But I was spending so much time trying to prove myself to something that that wasn’t even for me.”
THE FUNCTION
Through West African dance, Mims’ understanding of movement changed.
“Just hearing the djembe, there’s a visceral reaction in my body to hearing the sounds of those drums,” she said. “And that’s something that I have to tap into.”
She took her first classes in West African dance in elementary school. She didn’t understand the importance of the dance style yet, she just knew she enjoyed it. Sometimes that is all it requires. She enjoyed the dance and the drums and the community. There was something about it that felt grounded.
“It feels like, you know, tapping into ancestral memory,” she said. “It just feels right. And the communal aspect of it, dancing with people in a certain kind of way.”
She defines “ancestral memory” as part of an inner exploration of abolition. It comes with decolonizing movement to connect to how your body wants to move. Like many somatic practices, it is a reflection of the self.
“You can learn so much about yourself in a somatic way, in a way in which you’re using your body to problem solve,” she said. “Dance holds a lot of knowledge that is really valuable and connects us back to ourselves, which I think is important when we’re talking about dismantling systems.”
Dancing for the self soon became a large part of her work in abolition.
Her favorite way of doing this internal work is in the club. Bodies moved in unison, riding the beat and flow of the music. Before COVID-19 stay-at-home orders in March 2020, she spent at least one night a month at Afrolituation, an African Experience party that celebrates African culture. For her, the experience opened up a cultural exchange that brought along a feeling of joy and liberation that is indescribable for her.
“Everyone’s body knows how to respond to the music and it’s not because they’re trained dancers, it’s because we have very similar lived experiences,” she said. “We all saw our moms and our aunties and our grandmas bopping in the kitchen to this song.”
Everything is connected.
Everyone is connected to the same lived experience. There is a mutual groove that vibes through the club.
“It’s really important to be in community with my people like that, and to drip in joy,” she said. “And I think that is something that has to be centered in conversations of abolition when we’re talking about joy.”
This is abolition.
Everything is connected. Abolition doesn’t just look like protests and difficult conversations with people of differing beliefs. It is also joyful and in the moment. Abolition doesn’t just stare you right in the face or hang from the bars of a jungle gym. It is also in the act of self-love, embracing your community and yourself as you dance to the music your body knows more than you know.
“We’re in the same sort of bag like everybody is their own individual sauce,” she said. “We know how to respond to the music in a certain sort of way and there’s so much play that happens. Yeah, it’s just beautiful. It’s really beautiful.”