Dance To Be Free: A Dance Program For Incarcerated Women

Dance can be a tool to help anybody come out of their shell or get them through hard times. Dance To Be Free is a company founded by Lucy Wallace to help incarcerated women deal will mental illness, including PTSD and complex trauma. Wallace began her life training to be a ballet dancer. However, she quit ballet and became a psychology major. Now, she goes to prisons across the country to teach inmates the wonders of dance.

A typical class is an hour long with playful music. The music can be anything from Nicki Minaj to Taylor Swift to Eminem, and all of the inmates love it. Within the classes, she teaches every kind of dance imaginable. She teaches lyrical, hip hop, jazz, and many other movement exercises. She does yoga, breathing, and stretching. Her main goal is to teach the inmates ways to cope with the PTSD and trauma they have experienced.

Wallace has no background in jail none of her family has ever been and neither had she, so at first, she was very hesitant. She started by making videos of classes and then sending them to jails to be played for the inmates. Eventually, Wallace began to feel like she wasn’t doing enough. That is when she stepped into jail to teach a class for the first time in 2014.

She started at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. The inmates loved it, so Wallace decided more inmates needed this to help them get through their time in prison. She thinks dance is so much about empowerment for the women, “The thing that's really potent about dancing is it brings back control to your body, whether you've been pinned down or unable to run away or violated. When you dance, you're in control. That's so huge for healing.” While Wallace didn’t originally plan to create a company or travel the country teaching inmates, Now, Dance To Be Free has been in 8 different states and has a large staff of formerly incarcerated students. Wallace also has a teacher training program for people who want to teach at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, while Wallace is away teaching in other prisons.

The idea of helping people get through trauma with dance is a very new, rapidly growing form of therapy. It is for people wanting therapy or trying to get over mental trauma, but who don’t work well sitting down one-on-one with a therapist. Dance To Be Free is trying to do this for prisoners. If you want to get involved and help them, you can donate tohttps://dancetobefree.org/shop/.

By Ben Schleifer