Inside a Remarkable Dance Program at a California Prison

To dance is to be vulnerable, to feel free. To trust the people around you.

It’s perhaps the least likely art form to show up in a prison, an environment designed around confinement and structure.

Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, recently wrote about an inmate dance program that’s flourishing at the California Institution for Men in Chino, roughly 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Brian spent months reporting on the program’s history and development, and he watched the students put on a graduation ceremony for their class, performing a dance, he writes, that allowed “the men to be seen, and to see themselves, differently.”

After a funding drought in the 2000s, art programs at California prisons have been expanding lately, with programs in all state facilities since 2017. The growth of these efforts reflects a broader national movement away from punishment and toward inmate rehabilitation.

The program that Brian focused on, Embodied Narrative Healing, is unusual even within that shifting framework: It isn’t state-funded, but run by volunteers and supported by private donations. And it’s about dance, which is rarer than visual arts, theater or music in prison art programs.

“It’s such an anomaly, and an accident really, that there is a dance program,” Brian told me. “What all the guys told me is that in their world, touching other people is not allowed, or it’s allowed but it’s violent.”

That means that even things as simple as trust exercises, a mainstay of high school drama classes, become “profound inside of this environment,” he said.

Even more remarkably, the Chino program is taught by Dimitri Chamblas, a highly acclaimed French choreographer. At an event in Los Angeles, he happened to meet Bidhan Chandra Roy, an English professor at Cal State Los Angeles, who had started an organization offering restorative justice art classes at Southern California prisons.

Chamblas was quickly captivated by working with the prisoners, Brian told me, and they by him.

It’s unusual for someone of Chamblas’s stature to teach a prison arts program. At least once, he has stopped in the middle of directing a fashion video in Paris and flown back to Los Angeles so he wouldn’t miss the weekly class at the prison.

“Chamblas knows nothing about prisons or about teaching in prisons, and of course there’s a whole industry of people who specialize in this and all kinds of scholarship,” Brian said. “He just goes in there with this big heart and his postmodern ideas, and they respond to it.”

Where we’re traveling

A growing patchwork of bucolic wineries an hour’s drive south of Silicon Valley.

What we’re recommending

Twenty-four works of fiction to read this summer.

Tell us

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Email me at CAToday@nytimes.com. Please include your name and the city where you live.

And before you go, some good news

When Bruce Richardson saw a man collapse in a parking lot in Los Gatos, he immediately began performing CPR while a bystander called 911. The man survived, had quadruple bypass surgery and is now recovering, Bay Area News Group reports.

For his efforts, Richardson received the Red Cross certificate of extraordinary personal action last month. The honor was particularly meaningful for Richardson, who saw his father die of a heart attack when he was 15 years old.

“That left a big mark on me,” he said.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Soumya

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword.

Briana Scalia and Geordon Wollner contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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