How does one embody freedom while caged, confined, and policed? For some, the answer comes from dance. In prison, dancing can provide a transformative reclamation of bodily autonomy. This potential has been realized with Dancing Through Prison Walls (DPW), 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 folks, and addressing mass incarceration.”
Dancing Through Prison Walls originated within the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) in Norco, CA, where cultural worker, dancer, and educator Suchi Branfman teaches dance classes for both college and rehabilitative achievement credits. During COVID-19, these classes became virtual. Incarcerated dancers continued to take the class via correspondence, where their written dances were sent outside and performed in collaboration with dancers. The project has blossomed, and it now includes dances from prisons across the nation and the world: its most recent public iteration, entitled “Freedom Time,” featured dances written in prisons in Occupied Palestine and Puerto Rico alongside those written in California.
The following conversation with Suchi Branfman and formerly incarcerated participants Forrest Reyes, Linden Sawyer, and Arthur Groneman, co-facilitated by Uma Nagarajan-Swenson, expands upon their experiences as incarcerated dancers and dreamers in the ongoing fight for liberation.
Participants
- Arthur Groneman
- Forrest Reyes
- Linden Sawyer
- Suchi Branfman
Uma: Tell me a little bit about your involvement in Dancing Through Prison Walls
Arthur: Initially, I just joined to get Rehabilitative Achievement credits. I was very apprehensive about dancing and expressing myself, I’m a little bit closed-off personally and in that environment it was difficult to open up already, but I found myself continuously supporting Dancing Through Prison Walls through different projects after my incarceration. I can’t forget my experience with the dance class. After having been at CRC for 4 years, I didn’t feel very human. This felt like an awakening, I’m still human.
Forrest: I can’t agree with you more and you said it so beautifully, about giving your humanity. I just got done telling someone else that the most important thing you can do to another person is to treat them like a person. The world was not a good place and things were bad, and it was just like hey! Let’s dance! Dancing Through Prison Walls (and Suchi) gave me my humanity. We give it to each other, man.
Suchi: I’m honored to be able to be doing this. We started it and had no idea what it’d be and where it’d go. It’s a constant learning conversation through dance, through words, through dreaming, through imagining.
Linden: Your experiences are mirroring mine, but for me it was even much more. I’d been inside a long time, starting from a level 4. You look at that environment with constant violence and masculinity––the definition of violent masculinity was just saturated. As I gradually got down to Level 2 and got to Norco, I was amazed when I first met Suchi. First it was during COVID, going through the class program through writing. People say writing and literature has a long-lasting, in-depth impact. Reading every response she sent, the encouragement, the warmth/connection, all the inside/outside classmates connecting even though we’d never seen each other. Moving forward, I had the opportunity to see her and to actually dance together. The class happened and it was incredible. I was able to take her spirit, her love for change and second chances, through words that moved me. That was just like a fire inside me. Forrest was saying it gave me a touch of humanity that wasn’t lost. It was there, despite all the darkness that was around physically and emotionally. That dancing brought a spark of life, hope, resilience, activism.
Uma: Why did you start this program?
Suchi: What brought me into doing this work is being what I call a cultural worker and artist, meaning that whatever I’m engaged with in my artistic practice, it’s always in the context of the culture and society we’re in. I guess the prison might’ve thought this would be an exercise class. They continued to have this idea, which is so great because we do that, but behind it, underneath it, is the idea that we’d all have potential to learn from each other all the time and we’d co-create a space where we could all be human together. It’s worth it to do anything you can to get inside to be human together. There wasn’t a plan, we’ve just been uncovering it as time has gone along. I was centering the question of how do we create freedom time inside and outside?
Uma: Tell me more about dance as the medium for this.
Linden: It peeled off layers of filth––you felt you were alive again. I’m an avid salsa dancer, cumbia, merengue. Imagine not having that in your life anymore. It makes you feel alive, your heart beating, sweating, I had a smile that was radiating inwardly coming out. It’s moving historically across each nation. Dancing has been an essential part of humanity and culture, and DPW just caused me to say “okay, everything’s gonna be okay.” It was a spark that’s missing. It was like you were hugging yourself. That’s how dancing is a reflection for me. It makes me alive. It’s intoxicating.
Arthur: My first four years of prison was rules upon rules upon rules. Prison rules, rules amongst us, rules between different groups and races. Everything was so restrictive: you can’t step in someone’s driveway, you can’t talk to so-and-so. All the movement was restricted. Then there was all of the violence and alarms and having to get on the ground for safety. The restriction was so claustrophobic-feeling: all these rules and walls are closing in and you can’t move, you can’t be free. But when you’re dancing, all of a sudden you matter. You can breathe a little. Just being asked a question, like what do you think? How do you feel? Basic things like that open up the space and open up the feeling from constant constriction. Instead of the space tightening around you it’s opening and you can express yourself, you can smile without having someone think you’re laughing at them. Like Linden was saying, it’s very hyper-masculine because everybody is all on guard. In class, you didn’t have to worry about those things. How would you move your arm or your body to say something or express yourself? It’s those cues that make you feel more free and alive instead of having to monitor everything.
Forrest: When COVID was going down and people were dying, they took a bunch of our veterans and elderly people and knowingly mixed them together, healthy and with covid. This is what we’re doing to traumatized bodies: you’re literally making a decision to kill people. The whole prison is isolated and aggravated, the little that you have is taken away. Men don’t know anything, they’re angry about everything. We fought as hard as we could but there was nothing we could do. Everything that was inside of me that was human was just dying because there was just no humanity anymore. When Suchi came, she had created a dance based around the numbers [of incarcerated people killed by COVID]. I thought, this is soul weaving, this is kindred, this is to the people who believe in humanity and who cry when it’s stripped away. Dancing through Prison Walls reminded me that people are good.
Suchi: Why did you take this [class] in the first place?
Forrest: You take what you can get.
Arthur: RAC for me, I didn’t know about dance but it was the only class I could sign up for.
Linden: When I even heard the thought of dancing, and I heard “modern,” I was skeptical but I’d give it a shot. In modern dancing, you let go—you’re free. The class was called “Choreographing Our Stories,” and I said you know what? Lemme venture into that. And oh my god! I didn’t know that a few months later, COVID was gonna hit. The class encouraged us to visualize a dance we wanted to create, to share with others and the world about our own stories. It was so rewarding. It brought all the cultures together. All the men that wanted to but couldn’t interact with everyone could. The whole objective in prison is for us to be divided and conquered. The dancing gave us an opportunity to come together––it was like a gumbo. We all brought a seasoning.
Uma: Do you remember any specific moments from the class?
Suchi: We did the lifting, where eight people would lift up one person. I guess the first time I did that in a class, we finished it and I asked how everyone was doing and everybody just stared at me, like do you understand what we did? They were like Suchi, you have no idea what we’re talking about.
Arthur: There was a simple exercise of sitting in a circle and celebrating each others’ gestures that we shared. We were breaking a subtle rule, but a powerful one.
Forrest: While all this is happening, these big tough men are in there and they’re scared. It’s this whole new environment. Not everyone’s just gonna let down their shields, but they do. You see these big tough macho men like wait, I can do this? You see the normal, more dominant behavior suddenly become timid and playful and creative.
Linden: Yeah, it just turns down the aggressive masculinity that society expects males to follow. The dancing just peels it off. Once they get into it, they realize how supportive the community can be. That’s how the seed was planted: the idea that even within this oppressive community, there’s possibility. That’s how change starts to happen. Then it’s like a positive virus: someone who wouldn’t have spoken to me at all, after being in class together, we’ll walk past each other and they’ll stop like “Oh how you doing?? Still practicing?” And we connect.
Uma: Tell me about the dances you wrote. What inspired them? What was your process like?
Forrest: We did so much. At the time, I was really into philosophy, this context of how we’re all connected to each other. Not just metaphorically but how our actions have consequences. What does that mean for the self? Especially when you’re incarcerated? I was working on those thoughts in poetry, and that’s when Suchi came. The poem grew into a dance and Suchi used it, and everyone that’s touched it has continued to grow with it. Before I even had the thought, it was a living thing. Here’s this thing, and it’s beautiful, and it’s making lives better, and I’m a part of it.
Linden: I looked at it like building a house, where you have a moment of comfort and getaway. You can put what you like into your home. I was initially concerned—How do I do this? Do I mimic others? Does it matter?—but came to realize that what’s important is what I bring to the house, and the welcoming of the guest. People come in and see the house. They can sit down, feel comfortable, eat a good meal, get some rest. That’s what my dances were.
Suchi: Another thing we did with CR, we put together a packet of prompts for dancing in solitary. We started getting all these responses from all over the country. We invited people to imagine and write prompts about dancing or moving in solitary.
Arthur: I remembered just having been in solitary myself, either in the hole or in a one-person cell. Just remembering that and what I thought about was freeing to me. I went through a lot of childhood memories, the feeling of delirium and wanting to feel some sort of change through thoughts. I wanted to try, through the delirium, to try to transgress or transcend that small room.
Forrest: When I was at San Quentin, on my third day there, three people tried to jump me on the stairs. It didn’t work out well for them, and the guards told me they would only protect me if I signed a form saying I was friends with the guards, or I could go to the hole. I happily went to the hole. I lived there for six months. I wrote my first book. Compared to county jail and the gladiator school that is reception, the hole is hell, but at the same time, it was quiet. It was a place I was okay with, but it degrades you and it breaks you down: you become habitualized to nothing. The only thing you have is you. When I was thinking about the prompt, I thought about isolation being the weapon of the oppressor. I wanted to say to people, you’re not alone and just because you’re here it doesn’t mean anything. The two biggest lies you’re told are that you deserve to be in the hole, and that everything that happens is out of your control. I wanted to give people that back.
Arthur: I remember the first prompt was to think of a childhood memory and your favorite place. Then the humanity part: once you come into yourself again, laugh at the delirium of it all, as long as you have those memories and places in mind that you’ve been they can never take anything away from you.
If you would like to send dances, ideas, or responses, or if you want to receive prompts for dancing while in solitary confinement, write to:
Dancing Through Prison Walls
2720 Neilson Way, Floor 1, #5550
Santa Monica, CA 90409
You can learn more about Dancing Through Prison Walls, watch videos of past performances, and find events in your area here. You can buy a copy of Freedom Time, a compilation of dances edited by Suchi Branfman and published by Sming Sming Books in 2025, here. All proceeds support the Freedom Fund, which directly supports members of the DTPW community coming out of prison.
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