Dancing Through Prison Walls with Suchi Branfman

You are invited to Performance as Public Practice’s Fridays@2! Join us Friday, September 22, at 2 pm for a film screening and conversation with artists from Dancing Through Prison Walls.

In 2016, choreographer and educator Suchi Branfman began a ten-year choreographic residency inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security state men’s prison in Norco, California. The project, dubbed “Dancing Through Prison Walls,” developed into a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. The dancing abruptly ended in March 2020, when the California state prison system shut down programming and visitation due to COVID-19. The work was rapidly revised, and the incarcerated dancers began sending out written choreographies from their bunks to the outside world. The resulting collection of deeply imagined choreographic pieces, written between March and May of 2020, became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic.

Join us for a film screening of Undanced Dances, followed by a Q&A as we are joined by these visiting artists.

When: Friday, Sept. 22, 2–3:30 pm CT

Where: Winship (WIN) 2.112

Register: https://tinyurl.com/DTPWFridays2

For friends joining from afar, please feel free to tune in through the Zoom room: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/99607103283