A campaign supporting our FREEDOM TIME project collaborations, performances and residencies in the US and beyond… an amplification of our broad incarcerated community members’ dances into the world. During deep funding cuts and silencing of so many voices, we cannot do this without you. Thank you for joining us in dancing toward a world without confinement, without cages, without surveillance. Towards a world of care, of freedom, of song, of dancing together.

 

Freedom Time is an invitation to push past state and federal boundaries, witnessing the interlinked chains of the prison industrial complex, through imagined, dreamed, written, and embodied dances. Dancing Through Prison Walls has spent the last nine years invited to dance and be in conversation with people caged inside prisons in the US and beyond. We are honored to have the extraordinarily moving opportunity to embody and dance new dances written from far and wide, from prison bunks, desks, and yards.

 

Freedom Time is an ambitious project that will see us spending 2026 choreographing and performing new dances from incarcerated kin in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Palestine. These contributions expand our understanding of what solidarity can look like: multilingual, transnational, and beautifully entangled. They remind us that the carceral state is global, but so too is our resistance.

 

Freedom Time is inspired by our collaborator, Richard Martinez, who we started dancing with while he was incarcerated. Richie dubbed our dancing time as a time of freedom, of feeling as if he was transported outside the prison walls, as if he would walk out the gym door and go home for dinner. The term also echoes the Black Panthers’ call and demand for a new time, a “freedom time” in the here and now, in which they developed free community clinics, lunch programs, cafes, clothing giveaways…spaces of deeply radical care.

Freedom Time is a space in which we dream together, across walls, boundaries, and borders… building a community that defies caging through reimagining the world together, moving together, creating together, studying together, and dancing together. 

 

“This work is abolition in practice... It is a love letter, a roadmap, and a refusal to succumb to incapacitation.

Let it be received as a portal into lives that are often unseen, into dreams that will not die. Let it unsettle you. Let it inspire you. Let it move you to action.”

-Romarilyn Ralston, 

(Senior Director, Justice Education Center, spent over two decades in prison)