DDP Talks To Shira Greenberg (Founding Artistic Director)
Keshet Dance Company
Keshet Dance Company has been teaching dance inside New Mexico’s pre- and post-adjudication facilities for the past 28 years. How was the need for this program determined in your community?
In 1997, we were invited by the facility (the state juvenile prison located in Albuquerque) to provide an 8-week course, 1 dance class per week for incarcerated girls at the prison. Through this 8-week course, and the relationships developed with the young girls in that program, it became clear that 1 hour per week was deeply inefficient to properly support the needs of these young people. Following the completion of that initial 8-week program, we secured funding and approval to continue our visits. We quickly evolved our programming to multiple visits per week, and – with multiple units on site – expanded from just the girls’ units to both girls’ and boys’ units. The direction of program growth was (and continues to be) guided by the youth participants, addressing their current challenges on the inside, and helping to prepare them for upcoming challenges upon release and reintegration.
Keshet’s M3 (Movement + Mentorship = Metamorphasis) program uses concepts of mentorship with at-risk youth to involve them in the arts, build self-esteem and augment literacy, conflict resolution and social skills. M3 works with incarcerated youth at the Youth Diagnostic and Development Center. What research was involved in developing this specific curriculum (M3) and how has it evolved over time?
The curriculum really started to take shape as we worked collaboratively with the students on particular challenges they were facing inside. A key challenge they identified was the structure and delivery of their academic curriculum (the juvenile prison includes a high school on-site within the facility for incarcerated youth). Our students were feeling frustrated and unsupported in their high school within the prison, and we began to explore how we could center dance in the re-invigoration of their curriculum and their opportunities for success. We worked closely with the academic teachers and school leadership at the prison to understand their perspectives on the academic goals of their students. We then utilized their textbooks to generate a movement-based curriculum that taught the subject matter of their various courses. We focused on math, literacy, and science from their academic courses, and wove in a separate curriculum focusing on conflict resolution, mapped from a course my father was teaching (he is a retired district court judge and current mediator…he was working on developing a conflict resolution course for judges/attorneys at the same time I was developing the M3 curriculum and it merged well!). As we began to implement this movement-based academic and conflict resolution curriculum, we began seeing incredible strides from the students in their grades as well as a decrease in negative incidents within the facility. As these successes grew, we were shifted from a program in the general facility (technically “after school”) to a credited class within the school day inside of the high school setting. This accelerated the impact of our M3 curriculum, and we began formally tracking statistics – averaging 28% increase in academic test scores for 98% of our students within a semester; and a 20% decrease in negative incident reports for participating students within the facility (as compared with those who were not enrolled in our programming).
The next major evolution of the M3 Program was the expansion from inside programming to outside programming, continuing our support of our students upon parole and reintegration. This has led to the creation of Keshet’s Apprenticeship Program, called IDEAs (Inquiry and Discovery through Education and the Arts), offering paid internships for youth leaving incarceration, keeping them connected to their Keshet teaching faculty through programming at Keshet Center for the Arts, and supporting them in their next steps, whether that be as an artist, pursuing higher education, exploration of other fields of study or work, etc.
This continued M3 evolution process opened our eyes to some of the legal and structural gaps in services and resources for the system-impacted youth in our community, and led us into the world of juvenile justice policy, in an effort to provide more effective support for our young students/artists as they are released from prison. Over the years, our post-release M3 Programming further evolved to address detention alternative resources, in an effort to prevent youth from entering the prison system in the first place. This is an ongoing effort, which continues today. So in essence we are playing both a short game and long game – 1) immediate need efforts, centering the art of dance in support of youth who are currently incarcerated and/or in the post-release phase; 2) long-term preventative policy options – working on early intervention and detention alternatives through policy, programming, research, and community partnerships.
Movement for Mercy examines the US juvenile justice systems by having “currently incarcerated dancers and choreographers utilize the Keshet artists on the outside as “movement ambassadors,” bringing their voice and vision to audiences.” Can you describe the process of this collaborative art-making? How is it shared with and presented to the larger community?
Keshet teaching faculty work with the artists on the inside to develop their choreography, then bring their ideas, vision, and movement vocabulary to the dancers on the “outside” to be rehearsed and developed. Each stage of rehearsal and development is then brought back to the artists on the inside for review, redirection, clarifications, approval, continued choreographic development, etc, and the process repeats continuously until the choreographer/s on the inside feel satisfied with the final work/s. It mirrors a traditional rehearsal process, except the feedback loop between dancers and choreographers takes a longer period of time.
Once created, various works in progress are shared with the broader “outside” community. This ranges from traditional dance audiences to targeted audiences of legislators and others in the juvenile justice ecosystem. To date, our sharing has been more informal via works-in-progress, and short segments brought to legislative bodies, juvenile justice subcommittees, etc. Thanks to recent funding via the New England Foundation for the Arts’ (NEFA) National Dance Project Award, Keshet will be formalizing this production, with a preview performance in Albuquerque and a premiere in Los Angeles (Spring 2025) in partnership with the Arts for Healing and Justice Network in Los Angeles. The momentum and impact of this project have led to an expanded roster of partners including the ACLU, Unlock the Box, and Project Knucklehead. Following the premiere in Spring 2025, we are looking forward to continuing to share this work with audiences and lawmakers across the US.
An additional track of sharing includes a presentation of this work in the University/College setting and we are excited to explore these opportunities more following the premiere of Movement for Mercy. Prior to the pandemic, Keshet experimented with a more informal inter-departmental residency between the law school and the dance department at CU Boulder, which was quite powerful and led to a student moving to ABQ to join the faculty and work in the M3 program for a number of years. We are excited to continue and evolve this model with other interested higher education institutions.
This project is heavily goal-based with the primary intentions being to “amplify the voices of collaborating artists,” to “bring awareness to juvenile justice issues,” and to “support justice reform policy platforms.” How do you track the effectiveness of this program in each of these areas? Since its inception, what are some concrete examples of this initiative’s positive impact?
Since inception a few major shifts have occurred:
- Keshet was successful in amending a policy restricting youth from connecting with mentors established on the “inside” once they were released. Keshet is now one of 2 organizations within the State allowed to continue mentorship relationships with students from inside to outside. This is a critical factor in the long-term success of our students/artists, and a key factor in preventing recidivism.
- Collective impact from multiple public and private partners working together has led to New Mexico’s juvenile prison population being reduced significantly. Data gathered from the NM State Legislature shows that between fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2022, referrals of youth into the Juvenile Justice System dropped by 76.4%, this is partially due to the fact that over the past 15 years, the state’s Children, Youth, and Families Department (CYFD) has worked on shifting from a philosophy of punishment to one of rehabilitation. While this is not a fully realized philosophy yet, it has affected some policies and procedures.
- Multiple success stories from the M3 students themselves! Former students who now are leading successful lives, many of whom have their own children enrolled in Keshet classes within our broader community programming on the “outside” and remain deeply involved in the Keshet community.
- Invitations from various legislative bodies to bring Movement for Mercy and information about the M3 Program to their communities, and the centering of system-impacted voices in these conversations.
- Active productive partnerships within multiple County, State, and National cohorts working within juvenile justice reform, both arts-based cohorts and cohorts in which the lens of the arts provides an important reframing of humanization of data and a centering of creativity and community in policy making. For instance, New Mexico’s Children’s Code has not been updated in over 30 years. Keshet is the only arts-based voice on the Task Force to re-write the Children’s Code which oversees all juvenile justice policies for the State of New Mexico.
People's Summit, Photo by Midia Ninja