Ja’Moon Jones in An Approximation of Resilience, Photo courtesy of Alex Ketley
[ID: Ja’Moon Jones, a black man with green pants and long braids, is lunging towards the center of a white pool of downlight, his hair dramatically accentuating the momentum of his body.]
During the years I spent caring for my dying father, I was struck that if he had not had my family he would have been alone in this final transition. From that awareness I became a hospice volunteer and was about to embark on a performance project called Still Witness, which had the intention of exploring our country’s complicated relationship with dying. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, our planet was struck by a global pandemic and I found myself quarantined at home. I still felt the need to work, and this concern around people’s loneliness was still deeply in me. I have also long been concerned about our carceral system, so taking those two together, in the middle of the night I went on the website Write-A-Prisoner and began looking through the profiles. I came across the profile of Bill Clark, an artist and death row inmate who conveyed that his writing practice was the salvation from what he described as a soul-crushing loneliness. For the individuals on death row at San Quentin, they are only allowed out of their 4-foot by 9-foot cells for 12 hours a week. I awkwardly wrote a one-page letter to Bill saying hello, and two weeks later received a beautiful eight-page handwritten letter in response. That began a friendship that has been one of the most impacting of my life, and a collaborative relationship that has changed me immeasurably.
For dance to feel necessary, I need to place my body in direct relationship with the communities I am concerned about. My friendship with Bill has given me a window into incarceration no amount of reading could compare with. At San Quentin, Bill and I met weekly in what can only be described as a glorified dog kennel. We were both locked in a tiny cage for three hours while being circled by guards. San Quentin is also like a medieval castle set against the most beautiful views of the San Francisco Bay, views that the inmates can’t see because the windows have never been cleaned so nearly no light shines through them. Bill has not seen moonlight in the span of his 33 years of incarceration. He also shared that if you care about an article of personal clothing you wash it in your toilet, otherwise it will be stolen by the general population’s laundry service. And despite how horrific death row is, Bill is one of the most beautifully optimistic people I have ever met. He tells me often that this is intentional: to survive in one of the darkest situations anyone could ever be placed in, you have to become a vibrant generator of your own light. He is deeply aware how awful his circumstance is but is radiant as an act of defiance to a country that has deemed his body not even worthy of being lived. It is an example that beauty exists everywhere, even in the forgotten depths of prison.
I feel like societal change is possible when unlikely communities collide. On the surface, Bill and I are certainly unlikely friends, but we have met in a space that feels pretty pure: our shared love of artistic practice. I wanted to expose others to this vibrant space, so I invited Bill to be my guest in a Stanford University class called DanceAcution: Performance Practice, Death Row, and the Evolution of Cultural Reform. In a room filled with student dancers, filmmakers, musicians, writers, animators, directors, and actors, we had a weekly two-hour conversation with Bill. All the students, except for one, had never been directly affected by our carceral system, so the class profoundly influenced their thinking around incarceration and their own individual art-making process. To metaphorically stand with one foot at Stanford and one foot at San Quentin is the kind of collision I find so ripe with the possibility of real change in terms of how communities view each other. The students and Bill bonded deeply with one another, and the final projects felt important because the content underlying the class was so clearly consequential.
Bill and I are now embarking on a new evening-length project called An Approximation of Resilience, which is set to premiere in the spring of 2025 and then tour throughout the country. What interests me in this piece is the interstitial space where what we think we know about something becomes more complicated. We think of prisons as terrible places, and they absolutely are, but I have also seen staggering expressions of love within those walls: children visiting with their fathers, inmates having brief moments to say hello to each other through the bars, or Bill’s 25+ year friendship with fellow inmate and artist Steve Champion. Inequity is statistically rife within our judicial system, and, by extension, as members of society, we each play a part in how the machinations of society function. Many people blind themselves to our inmate population, but this project uses performance as the vehicle to stir an audience’s conscience and make it clear and visible that inmates are truly part of our community family. Things can change when a society cares about all its people, incarcerated or not. Apathy only perpetuates injustice. As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said, “I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.” Our stages are an ideal way to challenge misconceptions, and with Resilience I hope to play a part in bringing a broader awareness to an individual I have come to care very deeply about, and who I believe has transformative knowledge to share.
This article appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of In Dance.
