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, with the artistic direction of social practice choreographer Suchi Branfman, whose ten-year choreographic residency at CRC Prison in Norco, California runs through 2026. 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, curator, performer, educator, 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, is Artistic Director of the multi-faceted Dancing Through Prison Walls project and serves on faculty at Scripps College. She is also a community gardener, a prison abolition activist, and a current California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow, Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, City of Santa Monica individual artist grant fellow.
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