Embodying Resistance: A Year of Somatic Practice with PNAP Alumni

Click here for video. Click here for a full transcript of the above video. 

By Shireen Hamza

What kind of embodied knowledge is required to finish a college degree while trapped in a cage with a stranger? I had the privilege of investigating this impossible question for the last year with the alumni of Prison & Neighborhood Arts/Education Project’s (PNAP) University Without Walls degree program: Michael Bell, Reginald BoClair, Raul Dorado, Joseph Dole, Darrell Fair, Antonio “TK” Kendrick, Darnell Lane, Juan Luna, Daniel “DP” Perkins, Marshall Stewart and Eric Watkins. As I write these words, the members of this community have already been dispersed by a sudden transfer process in advance of the imminent closure of Stateville prison in September 2024. They have been moved to other prisons in Illinois, three to six hours away from their loved ones in Chicago. I can only pray that we are one day able to dance together in the same room again.

Here, I offer some reflections on our work together this year. I encourage you to watch the recording of our final session together in May 2024 to hear directly from the alumni. We also provide a transcript of this meeting below.

These eleven PNAP alumni have studied and struggled together at Stateville Prison for roughly a decade; some relationships are even longer. At first, I first taught more traditional courses through PNAP: a global history of science course in fall 2022, then a reading group co-facilitated with Eliza Gonring in summer 2023. I felt that the PNAP classroom was a rare and precious space of connection. Students sacrificed their few hours outside in the yard to spend time with each other in classrooms.

My teaching practices had begun changing in this time, as I deepened my study with dancers in the world of with Contact Improvisation, Ensemble Thinking, and disability dance. Drawing on these practices, and new research by educators, I had started introducing embodied practices into my classrooms. The results were marvelous. I wondered what would emerge from facilitating an embodied exploration with people who had formed deep relationships of trust through making art and discussing scholarly texts together. I wondered if it would even be possible for us to “drop in” to our bodies within this institution of uncertainty, surveillance, and social death. But we found a way. We have danced together, and it has added a luminous new quality to our relationships. As Michael Bell says in the recording, these guys are very serious in other rooms, but here, we were able to have fun.

In the 2023-24 academic year, the alumni have gathered monthly during their study hall to move together within the confines of the prison classroom. I drew on my dance practice to facilitate these sessions. We read the work of somatics practitioners like Prentis Hemphill, Staci Haines and Resmaa Menakem. We shared and theorized the embodied knowledge and somatic practices used by each person to survive decades of incarceration. And we explored themes like balance, disorientation, space, trust, freedom, and love through collective movement. 

Somatics is about feeling, experiencing, and responding. It often refers to movement emphasizing internal physical perception and embodied experience over a visible, external form. The lineage of somatics is often circumscribed to the last two centuries of Euro-American history, but many have now drawn attention to histories of embodied practice all over the world, especially as a means of education, survival, and resistance among oppressed people. BoClair put it quite succinctly: “I’ve been doing somatics for 30 years without calling it that.” This sentiment was echoed by other alumni as well. Prentis Hemphill, a somatics practitioner and writer, visited us over Zoom in April. They explained that reactivity keeps us locked into our responses to our environments, unable to make a different choice. Somatics helps us stay relaxed and responsive, so all possible options are available to us. As one of their teachers said, a relaxed body is the most powerful body. Prentis emphasized that incarcerated people are “among our most important teachers” because they find their ways back into the body in an environment designed to take them out of it.

Carceral environments are constantly stressful. As Darnell put it, incarcerated people are “often on high alert.” As Raul reminds us in the recording, the sounds of the Illinois State Police’s shooting range next to the prison are audible to everyone incarcerated there, who know that they are the potential targets of these shooters. “Our lives are constantly lived under the gun,” as he put it. The power of somatic practices to calm the nervous system was beautifully articulated by many alumni after Prentis facilitated a group practice for us. As Marshall said that day, the intentionality of their words “gave us more control of our bodies,” for example, by inviting us to reflect on leaning back and forward physically, emotionally, and ancestrally. Darrell explained that in an environment of hypermasculinity, “being loose allows love to come in. I equate that to being present.” And as Luna recently wrote, he wished for more people to be able to learn somatic practices, in hopes that “guys could be more at ease.”

Facilitating movement in this environment was a challenge on many levels. In our very first session together, we were abruptly moved from one classroom to another by officers, eventually ending up in a small room with a camera on the wall. We entered the room disgruntled by the loss of precious time together and by the disrespectful nature of these interactions. Most of the room was taken up by a heavy wooden table and plastic chairs. Where could we move? We needed to make both physical and emotional space for ourselves. We stacked all the chairs and began with the small dance, standing still and noticing the minute movements of our bodies, and then with “grazing,” walking around the edges of the room. I adapted language from Ann Cooper Albright’s How to Land. Eventually, as the speed of our circulation around the room increased, I encouraged people to quickly move through openings they saw emerging between two other bodies. This was most possible on the long ends of the room, near the door and the windows. I was gently teased for being mercenary in my movements, darting here and there.

Despite the strangeness of moving together in a new way, and despite the camera on the wall, this activity opened up a deep conversation about the effects of stress on the health of the alumni. Like myself, and perhaps like you, the PNAP alumni felt they did not have enough time and constantly felt the pressure to use their time more effectively. We discussed the layered pressures of incarceration, higher education and organizing, for example, to reinstate parole in Illinois – and how that has affected their health. Marshall, who had studied and worked in medicine, offered us many thoughts on the biology of stress and relaxation. Others were familiar with these concepts from books on trauma like Van der Volk’s The Body Keeps the Score. BoClair said, “I am my own doctor,” sharing the way he prioritized meditation and movement in the few relatively quiet hours available between 3-5 am. Raul shared how he had dreaded “that meditation shit,” and often felt closed off to it because it wasn’t going to help him get out of prison faster. DP, too, shared that while meditating he often felt like he should be doing more important things instead. TK expressed that, since we are all multiple people with fluidity of character, perhaps somatic practices could help us “get out of our own way.” Overall, because many alumni had experienced stress as a serious threat to their health, they articulated an openness to our group praxis and to learning new things.

In our year together, we explored practices that were impossible alone. Those involving touch were the most challenging for the group. I waited many months before introducing touch as an element. Some people decided to opt out of those exercises. In February, I introduced a progression of work in trios. One person would take a turn in the middle, perhaps with his eyes closed, while two people would activate the air around him with snapping, eventually transitioning to tapping up and down his outer arms and legs. Then, the person in the middle shifted weight from their center of gravity, tipping into a small fall broken by the other two, who would put him back on his center. The trio cycled through each role. Eventually, this led into a person falling fully and being caught and lifted aloft by the whole group, before being set down again on their feet. We were even scolded for our exuberance by the students in the classroom next door! These trust falls were one manifestation of a decade of trust building in this community, that Prentis helped us articulate so beautifully as a somatic practice in and of itself.

As Prentis shared with us, liberation begins with emotional safety in relationships. “Without relationships, we don’t heal, and we don’t have power.” They named the alumni’s “technologies of honoring each other,” without which groups fall apart. Prentis has long worked with and theorized “healing justice.” BoClair said “these brothers are my family,” insisting that this is healing justice. Prentis asked the room, “how do you prepare to be family to each other?” Michael Bell said they didn’t prepare for it; they didn’t choose each other. But they have shared things with each other that they’ve never shared with anyone else. “I know if my life is in danger, theirs are too,” he said, emphasizing the importance of trust. “I’ll never have nothing.” Others affirmed this sentiment, sharing that their relationships went deeper than their shared experience of incarceration.

When mayfield brooks visited us in March, these relationships manifested in unprecedented ways through the magic of rhythm and poetry. mayfield is a dancer and somatics practitioner, whose recent work has explored marine biology and the middle passage. Over two weeks, mayfield brought in a passage of bell hooks’ All About Love as well as Assata Shakur’s “Affirmations.” We brought these texts to life together. We circled up and each person read a line of “Affirmations” as they walked across the circle. mayfield reminded us to activate the movement of our voices along with the movement of our bodies. The second time we read the poem, we took up more space sonically and physically. Assata actually got free, mayfield reminded us. Darnell said this poem is the truth of who she was, though the media slandered her and portrayed her as a criminal. “It’s not what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”

After reading bell hooks, mayfield prompted us to write our own definitions of love and walk around the room reading them aloud to ourselves. Then, we refined this writing through movement, developing a gesture to represent one part of our definitions. Each of us came up with one of the following: 

Love is liberating

Love is energizing

Love is my daddy’s drums

Love is connecting with the universe

Love is cutting the cord and letting them go

Love is giving from the heart and expecting nothing in return

Love is removing our biases and seeing others

Love is knowing what you yearn for also belongs to someone else

Love is a thread, so get wrapped up

Putting our words and gestures together, repeating each phrase and gesture back to each other, our movement transformed into a spontaneous performance for the other students, whom we visited in a classroom next door. The recording below starts in the middle of a demonstration of this work, but all agreed, no camera could capture the sparkle of that initial moment.

“This experience could not have come at a better time,” wrote TK earlier this month, “because there is a lot of stress and anxiety with being housed in an institution that’s falling apart, now on the cusp of closing.” This project was supported by Creating the World Anew, a project on religion and mutual aid by Laura McTighe, Dan Vaca and Elayne Oliphant. Their support encouraged me to move forward with this project and to invite Mayfield Brooks into Stateville for these two unforgettable sessions. We also worked with Andrew Suseno and Prentis Hemphill over Zoom. Laura McTighe shared reports created by abolitionist community research projects, to help support our discussions of what research could look like and what we wanted to emerge from this year of work together.

In April, as we discussed what we wanted to come out of this experience, Darrell asked us what helps alleviate the stress of the present. In light of the setbacks Darrell experienced this year in court, this question is all the more poignant. He told us how his relationship with his cellmate was tense before, each person doing their best to not express needs or ask the other for consideration, but these collective practices helped him shift their dynamic. Raul responded that, though organizing is always oriented towards the future, each day here still counts. BoClair shared that his thirty-four years of incarceration had desensitized him to a lot, but while being transported to his last court date, he was deeply affected by the inhumanity of officers towards a young man whom they did not allow to use the bathroom. BoClair described how everyone in the room, strangers until that moment, came together to afford the young man as much dignity and privacy as possible as he tended to his body’s needs. This story recentered the body as the site of carceral oppression and opened up the discussion further. Marshall emphasized that while everyone had their own individual practices, opportunities to move together were made scarce by the institution.

We need more politicized dancers and somatics practitioners to join prison education projects and create spaces for our incarcerated kin to move together and resist the isolation of prisons. We need more movers in the movement to abolish prisons and policing, to help us shake loose the feeling that carceral violence is endless and inevitable. Our project built on the work of artists like Anna Martine Whitehead and Melissa Lorraine who facilitated dance and theater spaces at Stateville. With the support of PNAP, we navigated various institutional pressures to continue to gather, move together, access support, and finally, share and record our work for others. These were among the most transformative dance spaces I have experienced, and I offer my gratitude to the alumni and everyone else who made this work possible.