Helping to break the cycle of oppression, exploitation, violence, and sexual abuse.
Dragon Medicine is currently exploring partnerships with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, and Planting Justice to address the profoundly negative impact of the prison industrial complex systems on women, transgender people, and disadvantaged communities, including but not limited to exploitation, criminalization, institutional violence, sexual assault, lack of medical care, and retaliation.
Many of these people's lives have been impacted by poverty, incarceration, foster care, child welfare system, immigration, social services, and other systems and institutions that perpetuate the cycle of oppression, exploitation, violence and abuse. In the prisons, they are forgotten.
We are proposing free Meditation/Energy Healing programs for formerly and currently incarcerated women, men, and trans people of all genders to create safe, sacred spaces where people can learn energy management tools to clear their systems of violence and trauma, where their voices and stories can be shared, and where they can heal and (re)empower themselves.
The Peace Tour was co-produced in collaboration with Dance Brigade's Artistic Director Krissy Keefer and traveled to 7 cities with 27 artists in January 2025.
The highlight of Dance Brigade’s 50th Anniversary Celebration Season was the creation, performance, and touring of A Woman’s Song for Peace – a new dance theater work featuring original, live music by iconic musician and activist Holly Near, seminal queer feminist singer-songwriter Ferron, and groundbreaking Afro-Caribbean jazz artist Christelle Durandy, intertwined with Dance Brigade’s fierce, nuanced choreography and signature melding of styles with Hip Hop, Modern, Salsa, and Taiko – utilizing these storytelling components to convey a larger narrative about social justice and liberation.
A Woman’s Song for Peace is Dance Brigade’s contribution to the current political and social dialogue around peace, war, and foreign policy in our society and in the world. We bear witness to wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and a culture/rhetoric of war and violence in our own society and at our Southern border. As we move through an intense and divisive Presidential election cycle in which these issues are front and center, we argue about specific details of foreign policy – and it’s easy to forget that we all share a basic desire for peace.
A Woman’s Song for Peace aims to reorient our audiences towards this priority, helping us remember our shared humanity. We believe that this collaboration can unify and activate people, and we offer our artistic response – a creative cry for peace – as a gift to our communities, an aid for individual and collective healing and transformation, and a vision for a way forward.
