Freedom Time: Dancing Through Prison Walls

ISBN 978-1-953189-20-2
July 2025, English, 5 x 7 in, 158 pages, b&w, softcover
Design: Sming Sming Books

Edited by Suchi Branfman

Freedom Time is a bold and moving collection of written choreography from inside and through prison walls. It brings together dances created in confinement in California, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and beyond, with voices from formerly incarcerated and “free world” dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. Using movement and storytelling as acts of resistance and survival, Freedom Time is call for a world without cages.

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Proceeds from this book go to sustain Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ongoing Freedom Fund, which supports members of our community coming out of prison. Whatever form that may take, the funds are there for our system-impacted brothers, sisters, and siblings to decide what they need and when they need it.

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. 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.