Wednesday, April 8, 2026 at 12:00 AM to Monday, May 4, 2026 at 11:59 PM
18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica
**Artist Hearth** *FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls*, a project by the Southern California-based Dancing Through Prison Walls community. The result of years-long collaboration with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists across the U.S. and beyond, FREEDOM TIME brings forward a living archive of written dances created in confinement—gestures of memory, imagination, resistance, and love that defy the logic of cages. The Hearth will be transformed into a dance studio, abolition library, rehearsal space, an ongoing archive of community input, a bulletin board of handwritten dances by incarcerated collaborators,a film nook, and an archival altar of objects created by those inside. Visitors are invited to witness rehearsals, read incarcerated collaborators' choreography, drink Freedom Time tea created by Zindagi Apothecary, and join in collective study and dreaming. Regular public events—performances, community conversations, dance jams, letter-writing gatherings to incarcerated political prisoners and people detained throughout the US by ICE, will unfold across the four-week installation. “This work is abolition in practice. It is about creating spaces where those most impacted by incarceration lead, create, and imagine without apology. It is a love letter, a roadmap, and a refusal to succumb to incapacitation. Let it be received as a portal into lives that are often unseen, into dreams that will not die. Let it unsettle you. Let it inspire you. Let it move you to action. To those still inside, you are the pulse of this project. Your dances are the reason we keep making, keep moving, keep fighting, keep living.” -Romarilyn Ralston, Executive Director UCLA Prison Education Program, formerly incarcerated for more than two decades In 2020, year four of Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ten-year choreographic residency inside a medium security men’s state prison in Southern California, all programming and visitation shut down due to the Covid pandemic. Despite all odds, their dancing collaboration continued, with dances written from bunks under lockdown within lockdown, streaming out through the prison gate. Deeply inspired by the wisdom, knowledge, care, humor and radical thought that was carried forth in those dances. *FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls*, is an invitation to push past state and federal boundaries, bearing witness to the deeply interlinked chains of the prison industrial complex, but through imagined, dreamed, written dances. Dancing Through Prison Walls has spent the last ten years dancing in conversation with people caged within carceral facilities. For this program, they bring these dances into the "free" world as tools for building liberated futures. *FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls,* introduces new dances from incarcerated kin in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Palestine. These contributions expand our understanding of what solidarity can look like: multilingual, transnational, and beautifully entangled. They remind us that the carceral state is global, but so too is our resistance. This work arrives at a time when we are called to reimagine justice, community, and care beyond the boundaries of confinement, city, state, nation. What began in 2020 as a tender response to the onset of the covid pandemic, has grown into an enduring collective ritual and choreography of memory, imagination, and resistance. The term “Freedom Time” is inspired by Dancing Through Prison Walls collaborator, Richard Martinez, who dubbed his dancing time while incarcerated as a time of freedom, of feeling transported outside the prison walls, as if he would walk out of the prison gym and go home for dinner. It also echoes the Black Panthers’ call and demand for a “freedom time,” a radical, present-tense liberation: not someday, but now. Dancing Through Prison Walls’ Sunday Dance Jams also began in 2020, when the community could no longer gather or rehearse in-person. Now, six years later, as they hold their 240th virtual jam, this weekly community tradition continues; rotating DJ’s, sharing updates about their lives, and dancing together in deep community. In April, join the Dancing Through Prison Walls community every Sunday for in-person dancing abolition sessions (pole, quebradita, breaking, salsa), followed by dance jams. Everyone welcome – all ages, all experiences, all abilities. (See schedule below.) FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is a space to dream together, across walls, boundaries, and borders. A space to build a community that defies caging through imagining ways we can move, create, study, and dance together. FREEDOM TIME is supported by 18th Street Arts, the Doan Foundation, and individual donations. **How to experience FREEDOM TIME:** **Abolition library, video screening, and archival installation** Open hours: Monday - Friday 12-5pm + more programming to be added