With support from the California Arts Council, FLYAWAY PRODUCTIONS will create FREEDOM COMES WHEN ONE WALKS THROUGH IT, a dance-based public art project connecting public libraries -designed to freely nourish people, and prisons -designed for punishment and isolation.
FREEDOM COMES will be created in coalition with Empowerment Avenue, incarcerated writer April Harris, and composer Kalyn Harewood. It will explore testimony from currently incarcerated women regarding their specific paths to freedom via commutation, parole, 1170 resentencing, appeals, legislation (like the Racial Justice Act), activism, and art creation. It will uplift their struggle and honor how the soul gets free.
The project will culminate in multiple aerial performances in/on SF Library branches starting in 2026. This is Flyaway Productions’ eighth project with systems-impacted people and second collaboration with women behind the walls.
PERFORM: We make dances that are site-specific, off the ground, and justice-driven. We perform in unlikely places, activating the sides of buildings above bleak city streets. Discarded needles; unhoused bodies lining sidewalks. This is where we create. Our site-specific dances impact neighborhoods because they unfold at the very place where conflict lives. For us, a building is a witness. It holds the complexity of a neighborhood’s history in its “hands,” I-beams, or concrete walls. Our tools include coalition building, an intersectional feminist lens, and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. From 2017-2023, Flyaway created The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. We continue to create new work centering incarcerated artists and exploring prison systems change.
TEACH: We offer year-round classes to adults, teens, and youth. We offer GIRLFLY, a Youth Art & Activism Program, integrating dance-making and activism. Our training with youth offers some remedy for the ways women and girls/GNC youth remain underserved in public culture as a whole. We also offer teaching residencies that link social justice content, school curriculum, and movement innovation, where your young artists are our collaborators.
ADVOCATE: We provide a bridge between the arts, gender justice, racial justice, and everyday life. We are constantly developing new forms for community engagement and coalition building with activists and non-arts partners.
COLLABORATE: We have worked with Bay Area Dance Artists Bianca Cabrera, Quinn Dior, Clarissa Dyas, Laura Elaine Ellis, Sonsherée Giles, MaryStarr Hope, Megan Lowe, Jhia Jackson, Saharla Vetch and natalya shoaf. We also work in collaboration with designer Sean Riley, rigger Dave Freitag, and over a dozen women/nonbinary composers, including Pamela Z, Madlines, Jewlia Eisenberg, Carla Kihlstedt, Van Anh Vo, Melanie DeMore, and Theresa Wong.

