Sarah Dahnke’s Dances for Solidarity is an ongoing, community-based performance choreographed by incarcerated people in solitary confinement, borrowing from the personal narratives of 50 people in prison in Texas and Louisiana.

In 2015, New York-based choreographer and cultural activist Sarah Dahnke initiated a collaborative project aiming to reaffirm the humanity of incarcerated individuals in solitary confinement and to reconnect them with the world outside through dance and letter-writing. Supported by Culture Push’s Fellowship for Utopian Practice, Dahnke, alongside a group of dancers, choreographers, and artists, began by devising a ten-part body-mind movement sequence they later shared with people in prison through mail correspondence, inviting them to reinterpret and perform it on their own. Many responded by adding their own movements, at times creating entirely new dance phrases that Dahnke and her team have incorporated into performances outside of prison—thus transgressing the prison system’s complete segregation from society. Click here to read the full article.