Dance performance reveals journey of incarceration to redemption

The Emmy-winning “Orange is the New Black” has given viewers a glimpse into prison life. The Netflix hit is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir about the year she spent behind bars.

Charlotte-based dancer, choreographer and teacher Martha Connerton is preparing to tell the stories of women who served time in Charlotte and are now forging new lives for themselves. And she’s doing it through a May 2 dance performance at the Gantt Center called “Moving Stories/Changing Lives.”

Connerton, founding director of Kinetic Works, contacted Changed Choices, a Charlotte nonprofit that helps women transition out of prison, to ask if any former inmates would share their stories. Four women volunteered to allow art to imitate their lives.

The women told their stories around Connerton’s dining room table for more than two hours. Connerton picked up on their mannerisms – “movement motifs,” she calls them – and incorporated them into her choreography. Their conversations created what she calls an “organic set of building blocks.” The choreography may be hers, but it originated with the former inmates.

They talked about growing up; getting in trouble; being arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned; and then getting a second chance.

One woman served 16 years for armed robbery and kidnapping. Another was a drug addict and habitual felon. But Connerton views these women not as ex-convicts – but as humans. And she wants audiences to, as well.

She got a $5,000 grant from the Arts & Science Council, a $2,500 grant from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Community Foundation and private donations to create a dance that engaged people in the making of art who aren’t typically part of the process.

Others also influenced the choreography. Connerton staged open rehearsals in February and March – when the dance was a work in progress. Audiences got to comment and help shape the piece.

It was a challenge to put the free-flowing, nonlinear stories into a linear form. But Connerton had to for the audience to follow the story arc that goes from childhood to incarceration to redemption.

Work schedules haven’t allowed the dancers to meet the women they’re portraying. Yet Connerton says they feel a responsibility to the women whose stories they’re telling.

And one of those stories changed unexpectedly. One of the women died of lung cancer without knowing she had it. “Her family said they wanted us to continue to tell her story,” Connerton said. “Sharon’s story is elemental to the piece. She was a rebellious child who had gotten to a great place in her life.”

Karen Kovach, executive director of Changed Choices, said, “Sharon told me there was a lot of healing that came from revisiting the past. It’s good to remember where you came from and to be reminded of your inner strength and the faithfulness of God.”

Few of us can relate to being locked up. But all of us can relate to making mistakes and being offered grace. Connerton hopes to start a conversation about how we perceive and treat the formerly incarcerated.

“If I just met these women without knowing their past, I’d never have had any idea they’d been in prison,” Connerton said.

And that’s part of the point. Acceptance, forgiveness, allowing a fellow human being a shot at a new life – all of this is built, layer by layer, into the performance.

All the women Changed Choices works with are resilient, Kovach said. “They’ve survived multiple traumas,” she said. “Incarceration is just one of the more recent ones.”

“Many of them want to share their stories,” she said. “We all want to know that the hard things we go weren’t for nothing – that they have a greater purpose.”

Connerton hopes to take the show to community centers and middle and high schools. In fact, she designed it to require minimal staging or lighting. After the debut at the Gantt Center, the company plans to do this show “on linoleum floors and under fluorescent lights,” Connerton said.

Harsh, fluorescent lighting may be appropriate for such an unvarnished portrait. Connerton is telling these tough stories candidly and in a celebration of second chances.

Orange isn’t the new black, as it happens. Freedom is.

This story was originally published April 29, 2015 at 10:47 AM with the headline "Dance performance reveals journey of incarceration to redemption."