Not Alone: Movement for Mercy
By Tamara Johnson
November 11, 2025
The piece begins with a fleeting hint of a child’s laughter, immediately replaced by clanging, slamming, and yelling. A dancer lies on her side in the center of the stage, her back to the audience. One by one, other dancers close in, placing themselves tightly around her. Looking down or ahead, they do not acknowledge the person they surround.
The first movement in this year’s Movement for Mercy is titled “6×8.” This is the space, in square footage, delineated by the placement of the dancers’ bodies around the body on the floor.
It is the size of a solitary confinement cell.
Keshet Dance Company and Center for the Arts has been working with incarcerated youth for 29 years. The M3 (Movement + Mentorship=Metamorphosis) Program brings teaching artists to adjudication facilities to collaborate with students on the inside. Keshet dancers act as movement ambassadors on local and national stages to bring the voices, stories, and choreography of young people impacted by the justice system to light. “The program is always growing and evolving,’ says Keshet Founder and Artistic Director Shira Greenberg, depending on the people involved and the issues they choose to center. This year, Keshet collaborated with Los Angeles-based juvenile justice groups Arts for Healing and Justice Network (AHJN) and Project Knucklehead. Dr. Amir Whitaker, Project Knucklehead’s Founder and Director and human rights advocate, helped focus the theme of solitary confinement.
It hits hard.
The dancers who form the walls begin to march an unforgiving pathway defining the cell. Their rhythmic footsteps and claps imply the disorienting passage of time with no reference points. The dancer on the floor, Elysia Pope, rises. She reaches out between the bodies, tries to lean on them, is pushed away. Still, no one looks at her. As her franticness and exhaustion gain intensity, a voice states facts.
“According to the United Nations, the United States uses solitary confinement more than any country in the world.”
“Each year over 80,000 people in the United States are placed in solitary confinement.”
“Children who are incarcerated are 19 times more likely to kill themselves in isolation.”
“A 2019 report by the ACLU found that the state of New Mexico is number 5 in the nation when it comes to the use of solitary confinement.”
A pause, then poetry. Some of the poems are written by incarcerated dancers–children—with whom Movement for Mercy is co-created. Some are written by formerly incarcerated artists, Keshet teaching artists, or professional poets. One is written by a father. “My child lives in a concrete box. Sometimes shackles bind her. Pregnant, alone. And the paradox? No one is trying to find her.”
“Why didn’t I get mercy?” asks a poem by one of the students from inside the system. That poem was written the week of the show’s premiere. “There is a student right now who just created that,” emphasizes Pope, Director of Arts and Justice Initiatives at Keshet Dance and Center for the Arts.
With poetry and music comes an energetic and choreographic shift from isolation into more nuanced expressions and patterns. The dances explore the resilience and creative, complex humanity of the children on the inside. Contact and partnering work emerge. It asks the question: who is supporting whom? Is it the youth supporting each other, each of their inner selves supporting themselves? Maybe it’s the arts supporting the kids. It is also the kids supporting the arts by sharing their vulnerability and the urgency of their experiences in this work.
“It was like feeling one of my reports come to life,” says Dr. Whitaker, who participates in this year’s performance as a dancer as well as an advocate. That experience translates to the audience, too. The immediacy of the bodies moving in space together—colliding, falling, lifting each other up, and just breathing—is a conduit between the incarcerated dancers who co-created the work and anyone who sees it. Throughout the collaboration, Greenberg notes, the artists are aware of the difference—and power—of creating movement as someone in or out of confinement. The choreographic choice over which arm to move, for instance, isn’t “just” a creative decision. It is an act of body autonomy. The kids on the inside can see themselves not as prisoners, but as dancers.
The piece closes with a reinterpretation of “6×8.” This time the dancers all look at the body curled up on the floor as the statistics are repeated. Then they look at the audience, demanding that you look too.
Amongst students of Keshet’s M3 program, there is a very low to little recidivism rate among its participants. This work works. But “Movement for Mercy is never finished,” says Greenberg. “Ideally, there will be no more ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ for juveniles. There will only be art making on the outside in community.”
Keshet encourages audiences to visit Unlock the Box, which advocates for ending solitary confinement, and the ACLU-NM to take action. “We are at a critical point when it comes to the justice system,” Greenberg reminds us. If you want to lend your efforts to being part of the solution, seeing this program and then really thinking about it is a great start.
Upcoming Performances of Movement for Mercy:
Saturday, November 15th | 7:00 pm
Los Angeles Premiere at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd in Los Angeles
Tickets are free. Learn more here.
Sunday December 7th | 2:00 pm
ASNMSU Center for the Arts
1000 E University Ave, Las Cruces, NM 88003
Ticket link coming soon!