Flyaway Productions

Join us and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) community on MLK Day, Jan 18th at 4PM. Flyaway’s Jo Kreiter and Laura Elaine Ellis will be in Conversation with Visual Literacy Artist Jasmine Brown.

Flyaway is proud of this collaboration with Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and Prison RenaissanceA unique art exhibition, one pushing the idea that society needs to take a new look at mass incarceration.

In 2020, we actualized two important activist contributions this year. We built a multi-racial coalition with artists and activists locally and across the country in service of decarceration. We are proud to have co-created an art show of incarcerated artists from San Quentin Prison and co-hosted a panel discussion on Black and Jewish voices against mass incarceration with Museum of African Diaspora, Prison Renaissance, and Bend the Arc Jewish Action. Moving forward with The ...Decarceration Trilogy, Flyaway embraces prison abolition as a moral stance. Our third installment in the Trilogy, The Apparatus of Repair brings focus to uncomfortable territorythe need for accountability for violence and violence against women, with the recognition that prison does not inherently curb violence. With your help, we make a difference. We drive awareness about the issue of incarceration. We invite spectacle, dialogue, and invention. On this last day of a hard year, please DONATE. http://flyawayproductions.com/donate/ - Credits: 1) Photo by Fred Elmes of Clarissa Dyas in The Wait Room - New York, 2019 2) Art by Phillip Ansar Anthony Davis' Mother of Civilization for Museum of African Diaspora's Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice from Prison, 2020

Grateful that our collaboration with Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and Prison Renaissance is mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle!

Check out excerpts from: Flyaway Productions, in partnership with Essie Justice Group present The Wait Room... A site-specific dance honoring women with incarcerated loved ones. Choreographer & Director: Jo Kreiter Dancers: Bianca Cabrera, Clarissa Dyas, Laura Elaine Ellis, Sonsherée Giles, MaryStarr Hope, Megan Lowe Composer: Pamela Z Set Designer: Sean Riley Lighting Designer: Jack Beuttler Costume Designer: Jamielyn Duggan Video by: Rapt Productions

Rahsaan had to shift his Freedom Fund to a new platform. Please re-donate if you already made a donation. Or donate for the first time. This is what decareration can look like.

"A prison may or may not be humane, but it will always be dehumanizing." - Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, 1/31/20 Mass incarceration is the lynchpin of American racism and Flyaway is committed to its abolition. With your help we are fighting back by literally shouting from the rooftops. ... Donate to support The Decarceration Trilogy today! https://flyawayproductions.com/donate/ Credits: 1 & 3) Photos by Lenka Sluneckova Photography of Sonsherée Giles, Megan Lowe, & Keon Saghari for The Women's Building, 2017; 2) Jo Kreiter in "Flat Roof, Steep Hill", 2020

This innovative and collaborative video project goes live tomorrow! See Flyaway's Jo Kreiter in action, alongside 15 fabulous international aerial artists, dancing during this time of uncertainty and social chaos. Thanks Zaccho Dance Theatre for bringing us together!

View from the roof where we plan to dance in 2022. Thanks UC Hastings Law for inviting us to dance on your walls again!

Check out this review of our digital art show, "Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice from Prison." "Curated in collaboration with Rashaan 'New York' Thomas and 'apparatus-based' dance company Flyaway Productions, 'Meet Us Quickly' spotlights work by artists serving time at San Quentin State Prison." - Maddy Clifford, 48 Hills

Tomorrow, Flyaway's Jo Kreiter is talking on a panel about political circus! Check out: Creating Political Circus Shows: A Panel Saturday, October 17th, 12pm Noon (Pacific Time)... Panelists: - Jennifer Miller, Circus Amok (Moderator) - Oriana Lee, Wise Fool New Mexico - John Highkin, Fern Street Circus - Lissa McLeod, WEBS Circus - Jo Kreiter, Flyaway Productions Whatever the topic, these directors and producers wrestle with bringing timely issues to audiences to evoke social change, melding storytelling, activism, and circus arts. In this panel, you'll hear from leaders of five different US performance creation companies about their experiences making political performances using circus arts. Panelists will share about themselves, their organizations, and their art; answer questions about their processes and challenges; and there will also be time for attendees to pose their own questions to the panelists! Registration information can be found at 2020 Virtual American Circus Educators Conference. Photo by Austin Forbord of Megan Lowe in "The Right to Be Believed" - 2017

"In 2018, Jo put out a call for a Black change-maker interested in engaging with a Jewish artist about racial justice and prison abolition. Rahsaan responded. In the more than 2 years we’ve been in collaboration, we’ve written 45 letters, sat down together over vending machine meals in San Quentin’s visiting room twice, and shared over 100 phone calls. We are different from each other. Black and White, Muslim and Jewish (though our religious practices are only lightly etched), Male and Female. Incarcerated and Free. Writer and Choreographer." Check out some thoughts on the process of co-creating "Meet Us Quickly with Your Mercy" in Life as a Modern Dancer. https://blog.lifeasamoderndancer.com//on-the-creation-of-m

Check out Flyaway in Dance Magazine! Aerial artist Jo Kreiter takes on racism and mass incarceration, using site-specific spectacle to expose the human toll of our prison system. - Claudia Bauer

Filming Mercy...Flyaway is moved by the dancers for bringing their magic to this work. We are grateful to costumer Jamielyn Duggan and filmmaker Lindsay Gauthier for their support. - Photos by: Jamielyn Duggan and Jo Kreiter Dancers: Helen Wicks, Megan Lowe, Sandia Sexton, Maddy Lawder, Bianca Cabrera Videographer: Lindsay Gauthier

Join us today at 5:30pm (PST)! Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Flyaway Productions, Prison Renaissance, and Bend the Arc Jewish Action will be discussing: - Where do anti-Blackness and anti-Semitism intersect, both historically and currently? - How has white supremacy been fueled by both these practices? - How can Black and Jewish activism work together to address systemic racial oppression through the criminal justice system and mass incarceration?

Next Thursday at 5:30pm (PST)! Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Flyaway Productions, Prison Renaissance, and Bend the Arc Jewish Action are bringing together prominent Black and Jewish change makers. This panel discussion will amplify their voices, and the call for racial justice via an end to mass incarceration.

Flyaway is grateful to Essie Justice Group for producing this vital report on the intersection of COVID-19 and Incarceration.

Continuing the work of creating "Meet Us Quickly with Your Mercy." Dancers in Video: Clarissa Dyas & Laura Elaine Ellis Music by: Jewlia Eisenberg/Charming Hostess with Jeremiah Lockwood Filmed & Edited by: Megan Lowe

Flyaway congratulates the activists and policy makers who have worked to see the Racial Justice Act passed in CA and head to the Governor’s Desk!

PREPARING MERCY We gather 4 days a week. We gather in 2 ‘s and 3’s. Never more. We are masked. Even for a drink of water, we leave the room to take the mask off and sip. It’s a different kind of ritual, creating during a pandemic. It’s not possible to dwell in the creative empathy that frames the best days of rehearsal. You can’t look up and across the space to a dancer on a wall doing something profound, then go back to your own making. This isn’t happening right now. We are... gathered in the studio and we are still in isolation. As company dancers and a choreographic director, we are not really soloists. We don't like to create alone. But the safety demands of Covid protocols make aloneness necessary. Still. We are thrilled to have somewhere to go every day where we can invert, invent, conjure. Where the structure of a day includes making something unpredictable happen. Where there are at least a couple of dancers to weave movement and meaning together within a conceptual frame. Where we laugh, bang our shins, cuss, talk things over, trick gravity, and try to repeat the crazy thing we just made happen a minute ago. We dance while the NBA cancels its games in protest. We dance while our collaborator at San Quentin Prison gets sick with Covid, then gets better. We dance as police shoot a Black man 7 times and a 17-year-old White nationalist commits a public execution via machine gun. We dance in preparation for when we can perform in public again. We dance as radical empathy. We dance to broaden the path toward justice, as Black rebellion calls us in. . . . Fred Elmes of The Wait Room rehearsals, New York - 2019 Bianca Cabrera, Laura Elaine Ellis, Clarissa Dyas

Check out this great opportunity!