Each three-week Casa Uno Artist Residency Program ends with the artists presenting their work before invited guests who live in Atenas. Recently I asked a friend to help me set up and clean up for these events. For one presentation she had a conflict and suggested that her daughter could help instead, and that is how I met Raya and learned of a shared interest in the arts.
As Raya and I chatted, I mentioned how meaningful the work was that the dance company I had directed(Avodah Dance Ensemble) had done with women in prison. This resonated with Raya, as two weeks earlier while in San Francisco, she had seen a performance called “If I Give You My Sorrows: Women Exposing Prison through Dance.” She promised to have her mom give me the program and an accompanying poetry zine, The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry.
The program and zine of poetry fascinated me and made me want to learn more about the project, especially Jo Kreiter, the Artistic Director of the dance company. The performance that Raya saw is part of a larger project of Flyaway Productions.
I learned that Jo Kreiter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and the Guggenheim Foundation website provided excellent information.
Jo Kreiter is a San Francisco-based choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. Through dance she engages imagination, physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. She founded Flyaway Productions in 1996. Flyaway is an apparatus-based dance company that explores the range and power of female physicality. Flyaway creates dances on both architectural and fabricated steel objects, with dancers suspended anywhere from 2 to 100 feet in the air. The company uses the artistry of spinning, flying, and exquisite suspension to engage political issues and to articulate the experiences of unseen women.
In the program that Raya shared, Kreiter states: “Our work is politically driven, site-specific, and off the ground. Flyaway’s tools include coalition building, an intersectional feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity.”
In the Director’s Note, Kreiter recounts: “I became a woman with an incarcerated loved one. I therefore know a lot about men’s prisons. I’ve sat in the waiting rooms of half a dozen men’s prisons around the country both visiting my loved one and working with activist men doing the radical work of prison systems change from the inside.”
For the past eight years, Jo Kreiter has turned her attention to incarcerated women, and I very much agree with her that they are “the most overlooked and under-resourced people living behind bars.” She reports that according to the Sentencing Project, “between 1980 and 2021, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 525% with the rate of imprisonment for Black women over 15% higher than for white women.” A TED talk that I did with Aine in 2015 shares similar statistics and describes our experience of working with women in jail in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The zine The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry was motivated by the prompt, “How is your bed an antidote?” It is a repeat collaboration between Flyaway Productions, Empowerment Avenue, and Museum of the African Diaspora which focused on the experiences of women from the nation’s largest prison for women – Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. It was curated from the prison by Chantell-Jeannette Black and Tomiekia Johnson.
The format of the zine is unique with a transcribed poem on the left page and a scanned original document handwritten with artwork on the right side.
A visit to Flyaway Productions’ website surprised me with the following notice:
Flyaway is proud to share the entire performance of IF I GIVE YOU MY SORROWS. Folks often ask us if we can share a whole show with them, so here you go. Let us know what you think!
While I couldn’t see the performance in person, I did watch the entire 55 minutes at home, and you can too. Here’s the link: https://vimeo.com/1062523185
I highly recommend watching the performance, as it is an exciting example of a well-constructed dance piece that stays focused on its theme, with variety – using words, diverse music, and solos, duets, trios, quartets to an ending quintet. Some of the choreography is on the ground; other times a bed is floated in the air with the dancer or dancers interacting. The 55-minute piece constantly changes how the beds are used, from the opening small bed held by a dancer, to hanging beds — sometimes horizontal and other times vertical. The dancers are excellent. We hear the voices of the four poets often with key phrases repeated.
Thank you, Flyaway Productions, for making it possible for those who don’t live in the San Francisco area to be able to see the artistically filmed performance. And thank you, Raya, for sharing the program and poetry zine with me.
