Website: https://newyorklivearts.org/event/inside-our-skins/

Admission: Public

Event Description: Tabula Rasa Dance Theater’s minimalistic, explosive, and provocative work is performed by a diverse company of 12 dancers, from 9 different countries. 

Felipe Escalante’s choreography, which incorporates elements from a variety of dance techniques, embraces the human body, in all its pain, beauty, poetry, and ugliness. With powerful lines and designs that extends through space and time, his work generates unexpected transformations of the body.

“Inside Our Skins” addresses the injustices of mass incarceration and calls attention to the still legal practice of forced labor, permitted under the 13th Amendment’s exception—which allows for slavery “as a punishment for crime.”

This dance piece will evoke both historical and present-day experiences of the incarcerated. Torture and other means of brutal control are explored. Escalante’s work also examines, through movement and theatrical gesture, the psychological conditions and mental health disorders endemic to the prison population.

Tabula Rasa Dance Theater hopes to expand the possibilities for creativity across all fields and to elevate the standards of art. Escalante believes choreography must elicit powerful and sometimes difficult emotional responses and transcend time and place.