Photographs taken at the Ocean Dreams/Mni Owanca Tanka Woihanbla performance. Image credit: Shandra Fleming
Sanctuary Spaces and Embodied Sovereignty: Dancing Ocean Dreams Through Prison Walls
Tria Blu Wakpa, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA
Ocean Dreams/Mni Owanca Tanka Woihanbla is a performance embodying a dance written inside the South Dakota State Penitentiary by Oglala Lakota elder, activist, artist, and writer George Blue Bird. The dance is a collaboration among George; dance practitioner, curator, and scholar, Tria Blu Wakpa; and Dancing Through Prison Walls’ artistic facilitator/director, choregrapher Suchi Branfman.
George grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and has served over four decades of a life sentence on occupied Lakota lands. Although George has never journeyed to the Pacific Ocean, he has asked that the many drawings and paintings he has created travel to where he currently cannot. Thus, performing Ocean Dreams/Mni Owanca Tanka Woihanbla, encircled by his artwork and next to the Pacific Ocean, fulfills his request to “take [his artwork] to the ocean and say [his] name.”
This dance honors tribal people imprisoned everywhere in the world.
Read >> WIP 15: Creation, Colonization, Transmission, Reclamation (Published March 26, 2025)
