{"id":290,"date":"2022-11-07T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robiky.com\/?p=290"},"modified":"2023-10-17T00:32:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T00:32:26","slug":"how-dance-artists-are-addressing-the-u-s-prison-system-in-their-work-both-onstage-and-on-the-inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/robiky.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/07\/how-dance-artists-are-addressing-the-u-s-prison-system-in-their-work-both-onstage-and-on-the-inside\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dance Artists are Addressing the U.S. Prison System in Their Work, Both Onstage and on the Inside"},"content":{"rendered":"
For 22 years, dance artist Brianna Mims and her family have believed that her uncle Ronald Coleman Jr. was wrongfully convicted of involvement in a murder. Coleman has been serving two life sentences plus 65 years and is currently in Calhoun State Prison in Morgan, Georgia. During this time the family has worked tirelessly on his behalf, soliciting lawyers and criminal-justice\u2013reform nonprofits to take his case. So far, though, they have struggled to get the help they need to challenge Coleman\u2019s conviction.<\/p>\n
But Mims refused to give up. Drawing on her years of experience creating work at the intersection of art, abolition and social justice, she decided to advocate for her uncle in a new way: through dance.<\/p>\n
As part of a 2022 multidisciplinary installation called Uncle Ronnie\u2019s Room<\/em>, Mims mined her family history to transform an old cell in Los Angeles\u2019 Chuco\u2019s Justice Center\u2014a former juvenile detention center turned community space\u2014into a re-creation of her uncle\u2019s childhood bedroom, with the space between the cells becoming the site-specific stage for the dance portion of the work. Her goal was to inspire audiences to get involved by showing them who Coleman is as a person, the impact incarceration has had on his family and\u2014had he not been imprisoned for the last two decades\u2014the alternate possibilities for his life.<\/p>\n Mims, a 2019 graduate of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and a Dance Magazine<\/em> 2022 \u201c25 to Watch\u201d pick, joins a growing array of artists using dance to shed light on issues surrounding incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline and the justice system as a whole. Some are teaching dance and choreography directly to inmates. Others are using their personal experience as the foundation for concert works addressing these complex, and sometimes controversial, themes. And others still are channeling their frustration towards the justice system into something more hopeful: a dance-based imagining of a different, more just future.<\/p>\n