There is a freeing power in dance.
As performers navigate space, defying gravity—flying, if you will—the audience experiences a kind of kinetic transfer. We feel in our stationary bodies their jetes and pirouettes; an illusory suspension of weight carries our spirits, if not our limbs, away.
That power is made almost literal in Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic, which premiered in live performance on a weekend in mid-November at Scripps College.
Forgoing an auditorium and stage, Undanced Dances happened outdoors. Spectators were led through Scripps open campus to see a series of collaborative performances conceived under Covid-19 quarantine at the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), known as Norco. Six multimedia pieces were presented, each written by an incarcerated individual while in lockdown.
This remarkable project grew out of Dancing Through Prison Walls, a choreographic residency started in 2016, by artistic director Suchi Branfman. She was given permission to bring dancers, prisoners and educators together in dance classes at Norco, a medium security facility. They’d been “making movement” for three and a half years when the pandemic hit, driving them into quarantine and threatening to upend the program.
“The guys were like, ‘Don’t stop, whatever happens,’” Branfman said. She sent the men dance articles and prompts for writing and asked them to imagine dances with no restrictions on time, space or place. From their bunk beds, they wrote poems describing their innermost passions.
After months of passing written notes through the prison gates, and communicating with the writers, Branfman began matching the pieces with seasoned dancers. As part of the “choreographic process,” the writings became the narrated portion of the works and writers worked with dancers to help them “embody and interpret” their words for performance, Branfman said.
Outside, the freedom conjured in Undanced Dances is palpable. Against the lush gardens at Scripps, with only daylight and fixed structures as set, dancers interpreted words and movement that had been conceived in confinement.
In a courtyard patterned with geometric planters and towering olive trees, Bernard Brown, a choreographer and arts activist, put agile and acrobatic movements to “The Mountain.” Narrator Terry Sakamoto Jr. created this and two other pieces for the show. He was released from Norco in March and partnered with Brown and Branfman to curate the performance.
Jay Carlon contorts, prances and runs full out in an open grassy round as the pre-recorded voice of creator Richie Martinez narrates an 18-point primer of personal coping strategies. Martinez was released from Norco in 2020; his words give a window on how dance buoyed his thoughts while inside:
Point 1: “It’s always away from here, I disappear.”
Point 12: “It is possible to disappear without eliminating me.”
Point 17: “At least once a week…, I disappear into a good memory and new ones created through dance…”
The piece, “Richie’s Disappearing Act,” is expansive, and Carlon’s movements use time and space to coalesce from frenetic and disjointed to airy, lyrical and elegant.
There is a tap dance. Leo Manzari performs staccato rhythms atop a small platform, his angular frame towering among a lush overhang of olive branches, as Daniel Duron reads the words of creator Landon Reynolds. Duron later tells the audience he will graduate from Pitzer College soon; he had been in prison. Reynolds is still.
Brianna Mims dances a Sakamoto creation. Set in a rustic garden and framed by Italianate columns and creeping vines, “A Solo” starts with Mims earth-bound, almost prostrate.
The dancers’ goal is to try to embody the writer’s words. “Some require more interpretation, but mine, the way that it’s written it’s quite literal in terms of the physicality of it,” Mims said in an interview.
As Mims blooms flower-like, up and out in a sporadic, twisting arc of arms, legs, and spirals, Susan Bustamante narrates the “two-minute dance” of a plant reaching for light. “Because I finish on time, I am applauded, I literally feel on top of the world.”
After serving 31 years of a life sentence, Bustamante’s sentence was commuted by Governor Jerry Brown, and she was released from women’s prison in 2018. She is an activist and organizer who advocates against intimate partner violence.
Visual artist Mokhtar Ferbrache was released from prison four months ago. He is now enrolled in a graphic design BFA at CSU San Bernardino. His multimedia installation “Siren” combined painting with film and scoring.
Author Brandon Alexander is currently serving a multi-year sentence. He sent a letter out to Branfman, to be read in conjunction with the screening of the film made out of his written dance piece. Narrator Ernst Fenelon appears on screen behind dancer Tom Tsai in “Internal Battle: Negative and Positive,” a one-man b-boy battle of inner conflict. Fenelon works extensively in prison education and rehabilitation, after serving over 14 years of incarceration.
In the final piece, Irvin Gonzalez conjures form-shifting sensuality, his body as fluid as water. We remain in the garden for this and the lush grounds seem to come alive under his sway. Gonzalez uses the space, making it large; languishing among the columns, contorting his arms and torso like a snake-charmer, C-walking and back sliding; he contemplates as he pours and sips from a tea set, the one prop apparent in the show.
It’s the longest piece in name and length. In “Safety and Security: Two Nations’ Borders” recorded narration tells the exacting detail of a 16-hour sojourn from Mexicali to Norco—a wife’s monthly conjugal visit. It is Sakamoto’s (and his wife’s) story, but it is Gonzalez’s movement that embodies the expectations, and obstacles, navigated on the trip.
In an earlier interview with Match Volume, Sakamoto talked about the program that led to this unconventional dance concert.
“I was hesitant at first,… it’s a very tense and mind joggling [sic] event and you’ve got all these officers around watching,” Sakamoto said, describing the early classes of 15 dancers from outside and 15 incarcerated individuals.
“The things we learn inside, you’re not allowed to be yourself.” He said it was amazing to watch guys shed the “rules and regulations” of prison culture and escape for two hours.
“That was our time to come and escape,… dance, shake, whatever. People that had no rhythm,… at the same time they were still out there trying.” Sakamoto was taking Suchi’s class for college credit, and when the pandemic hit, he said it was heart-breaking.
“Dancing while living in a cage is a liberatory act,” Branfman said. She said locating the concert in multiple locations at Scripps was a figurative way to show the impact of the carceral world, “how it’s all over the place but hidden in plain sight.”
“We don’t even consider what is around us,” said Branfman, noting that the dorm furniture at a lot of college housing is made with labor from inside prisons.
Her group uses the language of activism as much as dance, in talking about the show. They refer to themselves as abolitionists, and many of them are involved in other organizations that work to mitigate the harmful effects of mass incarceration.
“Abolition work is about changing society,” said Branfman. “It’s about imagining a society that doesn’t lock people up.”
Freedom in dance is a metaphor, but for those deep within the carceral system it is an obsession with little respite. The choice to stage Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic in edenic gardens rather than between proscenium arch and theater walls was perhaps a small serendipity, a chance to let freedom take the stage, literally.
In this production, as dancers and former prisoners broke free, bound only by their connection to the earth, the freedom they must imagine daily, came full circle.
This piece has been updated to correct previously inaccurate lengths of time and facility descriptions and an instance of a misspelled name.