Liberation arts as survival and an engine for imagining new realities

On April 21, 2025, Religion and Public Life hosted the final session of Breaking the Matrix, a five-part series of online conversations on carcerality in the United States. Hussein Rashid, Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life, moderated the discussion, entitled “Liberation Arts,” which featured; Bryonn Bain, Artist, Activist, and Professor of African American Studies and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at UCLA; and Cristal Chanelle Truscott, Founder of Progress Theatre, Creator of SoulWork Method, and Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Graduate Acting and Directing at Northwestern University. The talk was made available in a number of prisons through collaboration with UCLA’s Prison Education Program and Center for Justice.  

For both Bain and Truscott, their personal journeys have been deeply formative for their work in liberation arts. Bain recalled his earliest gigs performing in prisons at just 14 years old, an experience that opened his eyes to the profound impact of art in spaces of incarceration. His activism deepened after his wrongful incarceration during law school, which led him to learn more about cases like that of Nanon Williams. This journey ultimately inspired Walking While Black—a highly read and influential essay exposing the systemic injustices against those wrongfully imprisoned. 

For Truscott, she recalled her family history tied to Juneteenth. Tuscott traces her family back to “ten plus generations deep from Houston and Galveston.” She shared, “I have ancestors who were living in Galveston when Juneteenth was proclaimed, and then I pair that with the fact that I come from a family of either artists or people who really love the arts.” She calls the setting in which she grew up a “cultural conservatory,” where “especially in black communities, historically, artistic training was really robust in terms of its embeddedness in community life — on par with what someone might think of as a conservatory training. It was that immersive. It was that rigorous.”  

This cultural conservatory of her youth contrasted with her formal training, leading to her decision not to participate in the commercial theater showcase at New York University and instead prioritize a more activist-centered performance. She recalls placing the question “How do I create my way to freedom?” at the center of her decisions around art. Doing so led to her founding Progress Theatre as well as her current project Plantation Remix. Plantation Remix focuses on the idea of “performing one’s way to freedom.” It reimagines sites of former plantations as spaces for higher learning and liberation.  

Both speakers presented liberation arts as necessary for survival and resistance under the dehumanizing systems of carcerality. Bain shared the words of one of his incarcerated students pursuing classes in the arts, “Prison is Medusa. If you only focus on this space, it will turn you to stone. I need to focus my attention on something else, so this place doesn’t turn me to stone.” 

Whereas carcerality is about paralysis and invisibility, liberation arts is about presenting the potential for movement and visibility. However, it is not only about visibility, but also humanity—liberation arts humanizes, carcerality dehumanizes. 

Truscott echoed this sentiment of art as survival as well as an engine for imagining new realities: “Freedom is actually the possibility of multiple futures and states that we realize in the pursuit of freedom.” She gave examples of others imagining new futures and unknown freedom despite being in carceral settings, in particular the historical traditions of Black creatives in the plantation system and in today’s contemporary carceral realities. She cited Nina Simone’s definition of freedom as the absence of fear, arguing that the arts serve not just as sites for imagining freedom but also as practices that launch new realities. Art, then, is both imaginative and actionable. 

Both panelists were also inspired by the idea of rehearsal cultivating a balance between imagination and action and thereby presenting liberatory potential. Bain cited being influenced by the method of Theatre of the Oppressed, which argues that “theater is not the revolution—it’s the rehearsal for the revolution.” Truscott expanded on this idea by bringing in the work of Tanya Shields, who conceptualized feminist rehearsal in Black traditions not just as imagination but as aspiration. Truscott explained, “Through the act of rehearsal, you’re actually aspiring towards it because you’re trying to figure out how to make it possible.”  

Truscott and Bain both connected the idea of rehearsal with faith-based practice, pointing to the Black Church on plantations as “one of our first examples of interfaith organizing and community building.” It served as a rehearsal of community across difference that could give rise to enduring Black musical traditions that draw on “faith as a creative practice of thinking beyond what you know, what you have seen, and using it to aspire to make something new.”  

This idea of rehearsing ties into Nina Simone’s idea of freedom as having “no fear.” As Rashid said, “rehearsal is the space where for the first time, people experience no fear . . . It allows you to fail without fear and realize what it is to live that fearless life.” Truscott asserted that “when you rehearse, it strengthens your belief . . . the more you rehearse, the more expansive and bold and fearless your attempt.” 

These rehearsal spaces are also ways to cultivate the liberatory act of storytelling. Truscott offered this to the audience as a central way to start exploring the arts. “Start a daily practice of telling your stories even if they don’t make sense.”  

It is not just the act of storytelling itself, but how we tell stories that holds liberatory potential. Rashid pointed out that it is important to think in terms of the larger “ecosystem,” recognizing that liberation demands interconnected, community-centered efforts, rather than isolated heroism. The way we tell stories through subtle shifts in language can help refocus our efforts to the collective.  

In line with the conversation’s focus on history and whose legacies we are carrying on, Rashid asked the panelists to think of women who have shaped our current moment in relationship to liberation arts. Truscott advocated for honoring and recognizing local, lesser-known female leaders alongside iconic figures like Nina Simone or Toni Morrison. She asserted that how we tell stories about the everyday women has the power to upend the patriarchal systems more than just highlighting famous names. “Start from who you know. Who has impacted your life? . . . Turn a 360 through your own ancestry and your culture.”  

Bain expanded this by highlighting the stories of the incarcerated women with whom he has worked, saying that “every single woman talked about themselves in relationship to their family and community.”  

All agreed that once we start telling stories in a communal manner, we can begin to embody liberation. Bain punctuated this idea by referencing the legacy of Kellis Parker, who used the metaphor of jazz to illustrate the function of true democracy: “If we lived in a true democracy, it would function like a jazz band: every voice is heard.”  

The panel, overwhelmingly, framed freedom as an ongoing, pluralist, creative process rather than a static achievement. Building a liberated future demands daily practices of art, imagination, and solidarity, all of which affirm humanity. This practice has always been essential to liberation. Freedom has to be rooted in communal practice, historical remembrance, and spaces for fearless creativity. As Bain concluded, there is a long tradition of building communities through art:

“Before DEI was a catchphrase, we was in jazz bands. We was in juke joints. We was in choirs. We was doing Boyz II Men. We was doing TLC. We were making music, and in the space of making music and art and culture together, you have to find ways to be a community. That is the small work that we have to do, to then replicate to the larger society.”

Watch the event recording and read the transcription.

Get a sneak peek of Bryonn Bain's Lyrics from Lockdown:

Lyrics from Lockdown, a groundbreaking multimedia production created by theater innovator Bryonn Bain. Exposing the unresolved contradictions between America’s prison system and its democratic ideals, this true story begins with Bain’s wrongful imprisonment while studying law at Harvard. From there, Bain weaves together the voices of more than forty characters into a one-man tour de force. Fusing hip-hop, spoken word, R&B, calypso, and classical music, Lyrics from Lockdown tells a provocative story of racial profiling and wrongful incarceration in a nation imprisoning more people than any other in the world.