Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 2:00 PM to Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 5:00 PM
18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica
**FREEDOM TIME: dancing community, care, justice** **Sunday, April 19th | 2PM – 5PM** **1639 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404** **Free + Open to the Public, Registration Required** Through dance, poetry, storytelling, and conversation, we will engage the community with issues of reentry and realities of life within the California prison system, as shared by system-impacted and “free world” members of the Dancing Through Prison Walls community. “In a world where we dance with, believe in, and cherish one another; we rise on wings of unity. Only together, may we be free.” -Forrest Reyes, DTPW collaborator inside CRC prison **About the artist** 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 their North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, they dance through prison walls. **For more information contact:** https://www.dancingthroughprisonwalls.org/ dancingthroughprisonwalls@gmail.com ##