Episode #14: The Open Tent: Sondra Loring on Dance Making, Stewarding Land, and Prison Abolitionism
Description
In this first episode of the spring 2025 season, I talk with dance-artist Sondra Loring about our work together in the ‘90s initiating and running the New York Improvisation Festival, and about Sondra’s work now as a dance maker, a teacher, a prison abolitionist, and a steward of land in the Hudson Valley. We talk about “knowledge” vs. practice in Jewish traditions, the intimacy of knowing a person through movement, Fred Moten’s language, Yoshiko Chuma’s Living Room Projects, prison abolitionists Dean Spade and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, the anarchist Peter Kropotikin, Sondra’s new dances and her work teaching dance in prisons. What does it mean to be “on the land” in the context of settler colonialism? What is the mutual in mutual aid? How do we find ourselves “at home”?
People, orgs. and texts and videos mentioned and discussed
The New York Improvisation Festival (now Movement Research Festival)
Fred Moten, “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain” in The Universal Machine (Duke UP, 2018)
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During the Crisis (and the Next), (Verso. 2020)
Dean Space and Reina Gossett (video) “Prison Abolition”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Geographies of Racial Capitalism, by Kenton Card
United States
