Through Site-Specific Spectacle, Aerial Artist Jo Kreiter Is Exposing the Human Toll of the Prison System Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Oct 15 2020

Location: 

San Francisco (Tenderloin District)

"There is a tragic timeliness to Flyaway Productions' Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy. As the nation grapples with systemic racism and police brutality, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, choreographer Jo Kreiter's new aerial work seeks to amplify the call for ending the mass incarceration that disproportionately affects people of color. Meet Us is the second installation in The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time, which uses public art to expose the human toll of incarceration—both the societal effects of normalizing it, and the emotional devastation felt by incarcerated individuals and their families.

To create Meet Us, which will be performed on the facades of co-presenter CounterPulse and the Dahlia Hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, Kreiter collaborated with Rahsaan Thomas, an accomplished writer and co-host of Radiotopia's Pulitzer Prize–finalist podcast Ear Hustle who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison for second-degree murder. Their shared humanity, and by extension the humanity shared by all people on both sides of prison walls, is at the heart of Meet Us."

By Claudia Bauer

External sources: 

https://www.dancemagazine.com/jo-kreiter-2648142227.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltit…
Posted by rmy232 on Mar 3 2021

Staff rating: 

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Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Provides (a useful service)Provides a useful social service.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.
Sustains (change)Support and celebrate change that has already been won and needs to be sustained.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
uses public art to expose the human toll of incarceration—both the societal effects of normalizing it, and the emotional devastation felt by incarcerated individuals and their families.