“Citizen Artists,” the OPEEP dance course taught by Dr. Irvin “Dr. G” Gonzalez during the Spring 2025 semester at London Correctional Institution, has shaped the way I view movement within this prison’s totalizing regulatory spaces. The class also stimulated insights that stretch into the domains of philosophic-political thought. It allowed me to experience devotion intrinsic to dancers and engage with people who are free and not subject to this institution’s authority, which has undoubtedly contributed to my own mind-body well-being. I have memories of misspeaking in class and glimpsing the extent to which I am encultured by my incarceration, only a decade in, and how it may continue to deeper entrench itself in me if I’m not critical in, too, and for myself.
During the first class, Dr. G posed the question, “What is dance?” I recall referring to Jon Berger's Here Is Where We Meet, in which he describes dancing as a way of defying death. Conceptually, and as an amateur painter, this made sense to me, as elements of visual art could easily be translated to the medium of gestural locomotion and kinetic semantics. The compositional structures of music easily translate to corresponding phases and movements of a choreographic composition. Dancing is away to celebrate the given, the immediate, and granted to the human while alive: motion.
I remember the excitement I felt when sharing this view of dancing with the other students. They nodded, and it affirmed the very little thinking towards dancing that I had done up to that point, enshrining it as an almost luxurious mock of everything that was fixed and unmoving and static. “Citizen Artists” helped me to bring this principle to the domains of public space perception, community engagement, socio-cultural and socio-political thought and eventually towards political mobility. Over the course of fifteen weeks, my regard for dancing shifted from a venal veneer to a medium capable of engaging in the spaces of socio-political governance. Dancing, and the study of dancing, can elucidate social issues through the immediacy of the body and the space of prison as an institution.
As a young boy I spent weekends with my grandparents in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico. The difference between infrastructural and commercial buildings on both sides of the border was drastic. This contrast was curious to me because reality was continuous – the same sky covered overhead when crossing the border, after all. But when we were on the Mexican side, I understood economic disparities between countries starkly. Undoubtedly, these experiences afforded me perspective during my incarceration in how I perceived my autonomy and how I moved around and within this space. Grasping the intersectionality of the socio-juridic-politico-economic realities in a prison system, on some level, begs the attention of every incarcerated person.
"This place is a building and edifice before it's a prison," I've often reasoned in conversations with peers when engaging with their vaulted attitudes about some normative aspect of prison culture. "Sure, we're in blues and expected to abide, comply, and obey, and we will. Nevertheless, before these cognitive strictures are recognized, the physical quality of the brick walls, the altitude of the massive structure, the geometric enclosures, and the spaces must be recognized," would be my response. By deconstructing the authoritative yoke to its metaphysical moments, I hoped to bring light to one's attitudes, and the real impact these could have on the nature of this institution. The vision is one which would claim some sort of responsibility to society, even while secluded and remote from it.
In a reading from class, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer,” André Lepecki argues that the attainment of freedom is the "orientation and direction" of politics; that all politics exists for purpose of reaching freedom (that is, within the variegated levels of inter-communal, inter-organizational, inter-institutional and hierarchal society). The dynamics engendered by the hierarchal and structural relations created by these organizations are the results of the kinetics, and the (deontological?) meanings created by their relativity. He also emphasizes the notion of politics as a fragility that must be "(re)discovered and (re)produced," giving it an air of experimentation which requires planning and programming.
Politics and kinetics synthesize in the notion of chorepolitics: political mobilization as a concept in which dancing is equipped to illustrate the idea of collectivity in motion. Through his example of a choreographic performance, Lepecki depicts "command and obedience [as] essentially anti-political to mean that restricted or guided or otherwise centrally guided injunctions which regulate or manipulate or limit the freedom of relativity between political bodies, is anti-political.” Control is the role of the notion of choreopolicing: the regulatory securities of normative circulation within public space. In a word, I gained insights of movement within a place that insists we move accordingly.
