The critical potential of dance: Expressivity,affect,and aesthetics

Abstract

This article explores artistic creation as a critical operation in prison, focusing on CORPOEMCADEIA, a contemporary dance project with inmates at Linhó Prison, Portugal. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, and drawing on pragmatic sociology, it examines how dance enables embodied, aesthetic engagement that reconfigures prison experience. Through gestures and movement, critique emerges as a sensitive, situated, and nondiscursive practice that reveals moral and subjective tensions. The article argues that, even under constraint, dance can function as a form of poetic justice and political expression, offering alternative ways of being and relating.

Releasing the verb: Exploring other territories

This article proposes to examine the critical potential of artistic creation through a case study: a contemporary dance project developed in a Portuguese prison. Rather than conceiving art merely as a recreational, occupational, or therapeutic activity, the aim is to understand how, even in contexts of restricted freedom, such as the prison environment, choreographic creation can emerge as a mode of critique. In this sense, critique does not take the form of argumentation but a sensible action that unsettles the institution's normative grammars.

Recent cultural policies increasingly promote art in prisons for therapeutic/rehabilitative aims; this article instead approaches dance as critical engagement (Ehrenberg, 2014; Gardella, 2016; Ogien, 1995; Pattaroni, 2007; Vrancken, 2014). This article suggests a shift away from such instrumentalist interpretations (considered here to be reductive) toward an understanding of dance as a form of critical engagement: that is, as an experience of sensitive, subjective, and political reconfiguration of existence within a space where it is tightly monitored and constrained.

Recent developments in artistic research have further expanded this understanding of corporeality and knowledge-making. Ben Spatz (2024) argues that embodied practice constitutes a site of epistemic production in its own right, where technique and identity intersect with decolonial and intersectional perspectives. This approach reinforces the idea that dance in constrained environments is not merely expressive but also epistemological: it produces situated forms of knowing and being that counter what Spatz calls the “white writing” of institutional rationalities.

The analysis focuses on the CORPOEMCADEIA (CEC) project, a choreographic creation initiative developed between 2019 and 2022 with a group of inmates at the Linhó Prison (LP) in Portugal. ¹ Through regular sessions of bodywork and collective composition, the project sought to establish within the prison an (unlikely) space for expression, experimentation, and subjectivation of a primarily aesthetic nature. The research, based on a qualitative and ethnographically inspired approach, followed this experience over 2 years with the aim of understanding how artistic creation can operate as a critical breach within the prison order.

The sociological relevance of this issue lies in the possibility of rethinking critique beyond traditional models centered on discursive reason or public deliberation. Aligned with the orientations of recent developments in pragmatic sociology, the article seeks to show how contemporary dance can be understood as a form of sensitive and expressive engagement with the world, with others, and with oneself, thus constituting a situated critical operation. By placing corporeality at the center of action, artistic creation challenges the institutionalized modes of visibility and sayability, of sensibility and expressiveness within the prison, reconfiguring the margins of what is possible in the lived experience of the participants.

The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to reflect on critique as a sensitive and embodied operation that emerges in and through aesthetic experience; on the other, to propose a theoretical approach capable of accounting for this nondiscursive dimension of critique, drawing on the model of engagement regimes (Thévenot, 2006, 2007, 2014). The article first outlines the theoretical background, then the methodology and CEC context, and finally the empirical analysis.

Upstream on this river: Rethinking critique through art in prisons

The close association between critical operations and the exercise of reason is a legacy of Enlightenment thought. Within this framework, critique is conceived as a rational, disinterested, and universal operation, carried out by an autonomous individual who emancipates themselves from the bonds of tradition, authority, and emotion through the enlightened use of reason. The individual's capacity to make objective judgments and to articulate arguments based on rational, abstract, and potentially shareable criteria lies at the core of the Enlightenment conception of critique. ² By conceiving the critical individual as an abstract and atomized entity capable of distancing themselves from social, affective, and institutional circumstances in order to judge, this view tends to overlook the concrete conditions and modalities in which critical operations actually take place. Rather than understanding critique as a relational, embodied, and situated act, it is reduced to an idealized gesture of pure rationality.

In this context, sociology has long presented itself as a response to the limitations of the Enlightenment conception of critical reason. Rather than conceiving critique as an abstract and isolated mental exercise, sociological inquiry reveals it to be a social, relational, and contextual operation. Critique does not occur in a normative vacuum; rather, it unfolds within concrete settings, manifesting through a myriad of actions, discourses, and gestures. Consequently, the very notion of justice ceases to be universal and abstract, and comes to be understood within the framework of specific forms of life and differentiated ways of evaluating and interpreting reality.

However, in the effort to challenge Enlightenment ideals, much of sociological theory ended up reserving critical capacity exclusively for social scientists. In the tradition stemming from Marx and continued by the Frankfurt School (Adorno, 2004; Marcuse, 1964), to critique means to unveil, that is, to simultaneously lift the veil that impedes or obstructs critique and to reveal the foundations of such concealment. Individuals, alienated due to their (subconscious) submission to structures of power, are deemed incapable of critically judging the social reality that surrounds them. Ideology and mechanisms of domination remain invisible, disguised as normality or inevitability, which is why critique takes the form of an enlightening operation that exposes what is hidden in practices, discourses, and institutions. The critical task thus relies on the use of conceptual tools to rupture this appearance and restore to the socius its constructed and contestable nature. Only the social sciences, equipped with this theoretical arsenal, are seen as capable of identifying and explaining to individuals their dominated condition, thereby performing a pedagogical role.

Within the specific domain of Sociology, this model finds one of its most influential formulations in the work of Bourdieu (1998, 2002), who describes the mechanisms of social order reproduction as deeply embodied processes that operate beneath the level of individual consciousness. Individuals, by incorporating dispositions in the form of perceptual and practical schemes, (involuntarily) contribute to the perpetuation of the very structures and inequalities that dominate them. Thus, under social illusio, only the sociologist (positioned externally) can render visible what remains hidden.

Despite their notable merits in revealing the symbolic effects of power, these approaches present significant limitations when it comes to accounting for the plurality of critical operations that emerge daily from lived experience. By assuming that individuals are so deeply immersed in social structures that they cannot identify or analyze their own condition or that of others, the capacity for critique becomes monopolized by scientific analysis. Furthermore, by relegating individuals to the role of unconscious accomplices in domination, there is a risk of endorsing a paternalistic and even silencing view of action, allowing little room for apprehending their reflexive capacities and, consequently, the ordinary modalities of judgment and the moral and political dimensions underpinning joint actions (Frega, 2014).

The shift proposed by the pragmatic sociologies of critique, particularly through the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, 1999), fits within this broader landscape. Opposing, on the one hand, the Enlightenment model of a universal and abstract individual, and, on the other, the tradition of critical sociology, these authors start from the epistemological premise that critique is a distributed competence: individuals are capable of making value judgments, assessing situations, and justifying their own actions as well as those of others based on shared repertoires of legitimacy, the so-called orders of worth (cités). In situations of disagreement or conflict, actors draw on distinct normative spheres and their corresponding moral principles to support their positions and formulate criticisms, without the need to withdraw from action or occupy an external position relative to the socius. From this perspective, critique is no longer an operation reserved for scientific analysis but rather understood as an ordinary, situated, and plural practice. The concept of “test” (épreuve) (Chateauraynaud, 2004; Lemieux, 2018) is crucial here, as it shows how social interactions are traversed by moments of trial, challenging both individuals and the principles they invoke (Frega, 2015). Morality is not located in an abstract realm, but is instead anchored in the situated flow of action, becoming particularly visible in forms of justification and judgment. In sum, this approach distributes critical capacity without idealizing individuals, paving the way for conceiving critique as an operation fundamentally rooted in practical experience.

Even when considering contexts of institutionalization—such as prisons, though not exclusively—marked by severe limitations on freedom, there is growing evidence of the existence of critical operations among those under their control. These institutions have long been analyzed as spaces of containment, surveillance, and silencing: both “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961) and “disciplinary institutions” (Foucault, 2018) emphasized the erasure of individuality, the reduction of autonomy, and the production of docile bodies. However, recent studies have challenged this monolithic view, showing that even in highly regulated environments, individuals engage in subtle, situated, and often ambivalent forms of critique. Through refusals, irony, personal narratives, symbolic reinterpretations, or gestures of deviation, individuals living under institutionalization mobilize critical competences that operate on the margins of the visible and the sayable (Crewe, 2005; Cunha, 2014; Rostaing, 2014). In short, pragmatic sociology conceives critique as relational and morally embedded.

In any case, the model of orders of worth presents significant limitations, particularly when faced with nondiscursive forms of critique. Indeed, the proposal developed by Boltanski and Thévenot relies heavily on a conception of critique as public justification, grounded in arguments, moral principles, and references to the common good. The emphasis on linguistic and deliberative dimensions makes it difficult to apprehend critical formats that do not manifest (at least initially) through language or argumentative reason: gestures, silences, emotions, bodily presence, or aesthetic experimentation tend to escape the conceptual tools of the theory of justifications (cités).

These limitations become particularly evident when the aim is to examine artistic activities as potential critical operations carried out by individuals serving prison sentences. Artistic creation—and even more so, contemporary dance—tends to place the body at the center of expressiveness, so that critique is not primarily exercised through rational argumentation, but rather as a sensitive, rhythmic, and aesthetic experience (Resende and Carvalho, 2024). Corporality, presence, and their intensities thus become possible forms of contestation and denunciation that do not fully conform to the model of orders of worth. Art, we argue, unfolds critical formats by momentarily suspending and destabilizing prison habits and codes, not through argument, but through the creation of alternative forms of presence, meaning, and relation. Since what is at stake is a critical engagement with the world through the sensible, through bodily expressivity and aesthetic experience, it becomes necessary to expand the sociological gaze beyond verbal deliberation aimed at preserving the common good.

In this regard, it is not necessary to step outside the domain of pragmatic sociology, since Thévenot (2006) himself expanded the scope of his joint work with Boltanski by proposing the model of regimes of engagement, aimed at capturing the internal plurality and the compositional, situated nature of the course of action. Rather than reducing action to its deliberative form and publicly justified expression, the author distinguishes between different modes of relating to the world, to others, and to oneself, which vary according to the nature of involvement, the types of support mobilized, the degree of reflexivity required, and the normative grammars employed. Thus, critical operations are not exclusive to the public regime of justification but may also emerge within regimes more deeply rooted in experience, such as the “planned regime” and, above all, the “familiarity regime” in which action is anchored in embodied presence.

In this way, it becomes possible to analyze critique not as a discursive formulation, but as a lived experience of misalignment or discomfort, a critical operation rooted in corporeal relations with the world that can be expressed without recourse to verbal language (Breviglieri, 2017). It is also important to note that, in this approach, sensitive corporeality, cognition, and morality are not separate dimensions of existence, but levels within the same continuum. Within the flow of situated action, affectivity, perception, deliberation, and evaluation are intertwined, making any lived experience a potential site of critique (Chateauraynaud, 2017; Quéré, 2020). There is no engagement without the implicit possibility of judgment—that is, the sense that something “doesn’t fit,” “doesn’t make sense,” or “shouldn’t be that way,” even when such judgment does not take the form of argumentation. By recognizing this potential, the model of regimes of engagement enables us to recover critique as an operation immanent to the course of joint and situated action.

This is precisely the approach adopted to analyze critique through artistic creation in the prison context. Contemporary dance does not assert itself as discourse, but as a sensitive gesture that reconfigures presence and meaning. The dancing bodies articulate a judgment about the world they inhabit, not through words, but through intensities, rhythms, and movements that interrogate institutionalized codes (Resende and Carvalho, 2024). Choreographic creation, therefore, opens the space for an ethical and aesthetic mode of engagement in which critique is embodied. In this sense, the model of regimes of engagement—potentially extended through recent proposals, such as the “exploratory regime” (Auray and Vétel, 2013) or the “presence regime” (Brahy, 2014)—proves particularly suitable for grasping these critical forms expressed in and through sensitive experience, where judgment is gesture and gesture, judgment.

This articulation allows us to consider how nondiscursive critique—as enacted in bodily, affective, and aesthetic gestures—can be accommodated within Thévenot's regimes of engagement. While Boltanski and Thévenot's model privileges the discursive justification of worth, the embodied and pre-reflective dimensions of aesthetic engagement may nonetheless hold political significance. Rather than reducing aesthetic critique to a symbolic act devoid of efficacy, this perspective suggests that embodied gestures can operate as political profanations in Agamben's (2007) sense, interrupting the functional order of the prison dispositif and momentarily reclaiming spaces of play and use. Thus, nondiscursive critique appears not as the negation of the political, but as its sensitive and experiential reformulation.

Step by step: The scale, the context, and the rules of observation

The analysis presented in this article draws on data produced during a doctoral research project in Sociology (Carvalho, 2024), conducted through a qualitative methodology with ethnographic inspiration. The article focuses specifically on the CORPOEMCADEIA (CEC) project, a contemporary dance choreographic creation initiative developed with a group of ten incarcerated men at LP. ³ This project was primarily aimed at fostering the artistic and personal development of individuals in conditions of deprivation of liberty, recognizing contemporary dance as a medium for personal and social transformation. The initiative sought to encourage participants to consciously, physically, and expressively explore their creative capacities, promoting the construction of life projects that are freer, more autonomous, and better prepared. Ultimately, the goal was to use art as a tool for subjective emancipation and social autonomy within an environment where bodily expression is routinely monitored and constrained.

The data corpus for this study comprises approximately 120 hours of direct observation conducted during weekly sessions between February 2020 and September 2022, encompassing dance classes, rehearsals, and informal interactions inside Linhó Prison. Field material includes 35 entries in the Field Diary and a series of informal conversations recorded in situ with both inmates and facilitators. The research unfolded over four main phases. The first phase, conducted between February 2020 and April 2020, focused on establishing initial contacts with the Linhó Prison administration, negotiating institutional access, and carrying out preliminary on-site observations. The second phase, from May 2020 to October 2021, corresponded to the core of the research and involved weekly sessions dedicated to movement technique, improvisation, and collective creation with the participating inmates. The third phase took place in November 2021 and culminated in the public presentation of the choreographic work inside the prison, attended by inmates, staff, and external guests. Finally, the fourth phase, between July 2022 and September 2022, consisted of reflexive conversations and informal interviews with both participants and prison staff, aimed at assessing the project's perceived effects and meanings. The group comprised 10 male inmates (voluntary participation), aged 24 to 41; most served medium-term sentences.

The project's activities were carried out between April 2019 and December 2022. ⁴ However, the ethnographic research only began in February 2020. Shortly thereafter, in March of the same year, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, leading to the closure of the prison to external visitors for approximately 14 months. ⁵ In-person activities were only resumed in May 2021 and continued until December 2022. The public premiere of the choreographic piece took place on 10 July 2022, at the Grand Auditorium of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF) in Lisbon. The fieldwork followed the project's activities from the resumption to its conclusion, involving direct observation—both participant and nonparticipant—of the choreographic creation sessions, informal interaction and conversation with participants, and systematic note-taking in a Field Diary, with an emphasis on thick description of situations (Geertz, 2008).

A comprehensive approach and an interpretative epistemology were adopted in an effort to access the participants’ own experiences and perspectives. This aligns with pragmatic orientations that privilege empirical data and the natural contexts of action, emphasizing the importance of attending to the details of situated action (Piette, 1992), the material mediations, and the affective and sensory dimensions involved in the act of dancing (Cefai et al., 2012). In order to understand how contemporary dance operates as a space of subjectivation and sensitive critique within this institutional context, the analytical focus drew on the previously cited model of regimes of engagement. The analysis of discursive and observational data followed an abductive coding process (Lemieux, 2018), alternating between empirical material and theoretical constructs. Field Diary entries and recorded dialogues were coded for instances of moral judgment, affective resonance, and bodily engagement. These emergent codes were iteratively compared with the analytical dimensions of engagement regimes (familiarity, plan, presence, justification, and exploration), allowing a grounded articulation between the empirical narratives and the conceptual elaboration of embodied critique. By advocating for a plurality of ways of relating to the world, to others, and to oneself, this framework made it possible to analyze dance as a situated action that mobilizes expressive competences, attentiveness to the sensible, and forms of exposure that cannot be reduced to discursive or rational logic.

The prison's management consistently expressed strong institutional support for the implementation of the dance initiative, regarding it as an innovative contribution to the cultural and rehabilitative activities of the establishment. However, among the frontline guards (those directly supervising the participants) reactions were more ambivalent and, at times, openly hostile. Some officers perceived the project as an unnecessary privilege granted to inmates or as a potential disruption to the normal disciplinary routines. This divergence between managerial endorsement and custodial skepticism is revealing: it illustrates how institutional support and everyday resistance can coexist, shaping the space within which artistic creation unfolds in prison.

Rehearsing and exploring sensitive and expressive critique in action

The analysis proposed aims to empirically explore how choreographic creation within the CEC project gave rise to critical operations that are situated, embodied, affective, aesthetic, and sensorial in nature, as outlined in the theoretical framework. Drawing on entries recorded in the Field Diary, the aim is to understand how the dancers’ bodies performing within a space of surveillance and containment, such as prison, unfolded hermeneutic, moral, and political displacements through artistic creation. Rather than explicit discourse or argumentative formulations, what was observed were forms of bodily engagement that, through aesthetic reconfigurations, brought to the fore tensions and injustices.

The analysis is structured in two parts. In the first (4.1.), it examines how the dancing body challenges prison normativity and reinvests the space through presence, rhythm, and expressivity. In the second (4.2.), the focus shifts to choreographic creation as a form of critique that is aesthetic in nature, but also political, one that, without resorting to verbal language, appeals to a form of poetic justice through gesture, movement, and presence.

Sensitive body and what sets it in motion

It is well known that in prison, the body is regulated down to the smallest detail: schedules, postures, movements, and gestures are all predefined and codified, shaping inmates’ daily existence and restricting their scope of action. Indeed, the prison space is built upon a normative architecture that is markedly hierarchical, regulating not only bodies but also the gestures, gazes, and presences of those incarcerated. However, the lives of inmates during their sentence are not a uniform or homogeneous blur. It is within this scenario that the CORPOEMCADEIA project emerges, introducing a breach in the linearity of prison life ⁶ : through choreographic creation, regulated bodies can be reactivated as bodies that affect and are affected, bodies that feel, explore, experiment, and express. The experience of dance, though materially inscribed within the prison institution, aesthetically reinvests the normative fabric of prison daily life.

Dance, in a certain sense, functions as a device for sensibly reconfiguring the dancers’ relationship with space and time, with others, and with themselves. Through bodily exercises guided by the project coordinator, Catarina, participants were gradually encouraged to shift away from the disciplinary grammar toward more expressive, playful, and reflective modes of engagement.

In an exercise conducted on 8 February 2021, ⁷ for example, the dancers were invited to explore the room they were in (a meeting room inside the prison where the session was taking place remotely), but one of them immediately said, “I’m afraid of breaking something in the room.” Catarina responded by asking them to move through the space “as if they were well-behaved boys,” imagining they were being watched by the prison's management. After performing the gesture, they were asked to exaggerate it. From the outset, the exercise underscored how deeply behavioral codes are inscribed in the prison space and in the bodies that inhabit it. At the same time, the proposed task aimed to show, through embodied experimentation, how it is possible (even if only temporarily and playfully) to suspend that normativity. The fear of “breaking” something, reveals a body trained to hold back, to avoid disturbing the institutional environment, to fear the possibility of sanction.

However, as the dancers are asked to exaggerate the gesture, rendering it strange, space opens up for them to begin critically questioning, through the body, the norm that governs them. Here, the corporeal dimension of engagement is amplified in order to denaturalize the expected and normative conduct, thereby making explicit the prison codes that regulate action. This process of “making it strange” resonates closely with insights from Queer Theory. As Renate Lorenz (2012) argues, queer artistic practices reveal how deviation and performative disidentification open up zones of freedom within normative structures. The dancers’ exercises of exaggeration and distortion can therefore be read as queer gestures of denaturalization, forms of embodied critique that expose the fragility of what counts as proper, disciplined, or masculine behavior within the hyper-regulated context of prison life.

In light of Thévenot's model, this exercise reveals the internal plurality of artistic creative action and its compositional nature, as we observe the dancers shifting between different regimes of engagement: from the public and normative regime (that of “good behavior”) to one that intensifies bodily presence, rooted in sensitivity and in the aesthetic experimentation of the self and the surrounding spatiality. This is not, it should be noted, about formulating a critique in argumentative terms, but rather about enacting a sensitive displacement that questions the established order through the intensive variation of gesture.

A similar exercise was carried out during the same session. After exploring different ways of moving through the space, the participants were invited to “choose a position on the chair that you know you're not supposed to have in this space.” Many placed their feet on the table. At that moment, Catarina prompted: “Explore that disapproved attitude to develop a dance from there. Use the space!” Critique takes shape not merely through gesture, but intrinsically as gesture, as intensity, as presence.

These bodily exercises establish a productive ambiguity: on the one hand, given their playful nature and the fact that they occur within an activity formally authorized by the prison itself, they remain within the institution's limits; on the other hand, they suggest another way of inhabiting space, more expressive, more grounded in affective experience, and less governed by surveillance (including self-surveillance). At the same time, they confront the dancers with the norms they have internalized and the embodied effects of those norms. As Catarina aptly summarized: “let's see how we can create without compromising ourselves…the focus is on discovering something new in me.” As this illustrates, the critical potential of choreographic creation does not lie in a frontal rupture with the norm, but in opening up a transitional space where it is possible to “play” with the norm, to deform it, dismantle it, and reconfigure it (Breviglieri, 2013). Such playfulness, oscillating between conformity and deviation, evokes what Sacha Kagan (2011, 2022) describes as the artist's “double entrepreneurship in conventions.” According to Kagan, artistic practice simultaneously relies on and transgresses established conventions, generating “spaces of possibility” where social and aesthetic innovation intersect. The CEC project exemplifies this double movement: while formally authorized by the prison institution, it creates micro-environments of experimentation that subtly reconfigure the moral and sensory order of daily life.

Rather than a sharply defined moment, critique reveals itself as a processual and compositional practice, dependent on the concrete situations from which it emerges and which can just as well trigger it as suspend or negate it. Ultimately, dance heightens expressivity and sensitivity, unfolding a way of inhabiting space that is not strictly functional. This process activates a form of critique that is immanent to the course of action: a modality of judgment articulated not through words, but through gesture.

This playful and exploratory relationship with institutional norms also emerged in another exercise conducted on 8 June 2020. ⁸ On that occasion, the dancers were invited to imitate the way a prison officer would sit. The proposal was to “experience the body of the other,” not to reproduce it faithfully, but to feel what it means to inhabit it. After the exercise, the participants’ responses were revealing: “heavy,” “arrogant,” and “closed face.” Later, they repeated the exercise using Catarina's body and that of the psychologist who was also present in the session. In the end, the impressions shared by the dancers were very different: “expressive,” “boneless,” “serene,” and “joyful.” Finally, they were also invited to exaggerate an imitation of themselves. One of them, remarkably, concluded: “I realized I’m no longer that person.”

This moment is pivotal in the analysis proposed here. Through bodily imitation, that is, by varying the way one inhabits the body, it becomes possible to reconfigure one's own mode of self-perception and judgment. Critique, in this case, is not directed at the other, but at one's own subjective constitution. It is a gesture of estrangement from oneself, the revelation of oneself as another (Ricoeur, 2015), exposing one's own malleability. It thus becomes evident that sensitive corporeality, cognition, and moral qualifications are elements of the same continuum: the bodily experience, guided by artistic creation, transforms the perception of self and others, becoming a source of evaluation and judgment.

This continuity between body, thought, and morality, which underpins the possibility of critique through artistic creation, is also evident in an exercise carried out on 2 March 2020. ⁹ In that session, the dancers were asked to imagine themselves as “tubes of air,” allowing a “small ball” to circulate within their bodies, eventually moving like animals. At the end of the exercise, they were to return to the condition of a human being, but while retaining the sensory memory of the animal experience. The gesture of “keeping the animal within” expresses how corporeality can become a site of experimentation that is simultaneously moral and subjective, political and affective (Brahy, 2014). What is retained is not so much a character, but a variation of the self, an intensive modulation of presence. It is not, it should be emphasized, a purely symbolic escape, but rather a concrete transformation of one's relationship with space and with oneself, produced through the aesthetic intensification of gesture, presence, and bodily imagination (Piraud and Pattaroni, 2014).

In sum, through creative bodily challenges such as those described, participants not only confront the normative codes of the prison environment, but also form what might be called a “perspective of their own”: a capacity to perceive, evaluate, and act rooted in practical and sensory experience. The body becomes a subject of variation, of relation, and of judgment; and it is in this articulation between sensing, acting, and evaluating that a critical modality takes shape, one that does not operate simply against the prison system, but from within it and thanks to it, in the interstices of disciplinary everyday life.

Poetic and political justice: Critique without argument, but through gestures in motion

Critique is not made solely through arguments and is no less powerful for it. In contexts marked by strong discursive constraints, the possibility of openly articulating injustice may be severely restricted. In such cases, alternative modalities gain relevance, among them, those grounded in the aesthetic exercise of the body (Bidet, 2007). Contemporary dance constitutes a space of poetic justice (Rancière, 2000): a way of making injustice visible not through formal denunciation or argumentative discourse, but by means of a sensitive reconfiguration of experience.

During the public performance of the show, held in a packed auditorium at the CGF, the dancers took to the stage and, in a carefully rehearsed choreographic gesture, enacted their prison condition. In one particular scene of the choreographic piece, each dancer draws, with chalk on the stage floor, the layout of their cell (the bed, the toilet, the narrow boundaries of the space) and, from there, artistically and abstractly stages their experience of that space: touching the walls, lying down, walking the perimeter. This sequence is powerful not because of words, but because of the silence and the expressiveness of the dancers’ movements and bodily positions. As noted in the field diary:

Each of the dancers performs six bodily poses inside their cell (…). After the six positions, the dancers engage in a gaze exercise, directing their eyes toward the cells of their fellow performers and realizing that all of them are, after all, the same (…). After a few minutes, they naturally come together at the front of the stage and begin a sequence in which they dance as a block, as if the dancers formed a single body. ¹⁰

The cell drawn on the floor with chalk, although abstract due to the choreographic investment it undergoes, acquires an experiential depth that paradoxically, and possibly, renders it more powerful than the actual cell as a critical device. It is a representation that, rather than merely mimicking the prison space, reinvests it in a sensitive, affective, and therefore also reflective manner. It is not merely a metaphor but a material, allegorical device that allows the body to interrogate its boundaries. By inhabiting these imagined (but no less real) cells through slow gestures, touches, movements, and expressive postures, the dancers transform the choreographic space into a site of aesthetic and political experimentation of the prison condition. The distance between the chalk line on the floor and the steel of the actual prison cell does not weaken the critique—it intensifies it: through artistic transformation, the prison ceases to be merely a given and becomes a question, a space to be problematized. The cell becomes a place of inquiry and discovery through other senses and embodied experiences (movements, smells, gazes, and perceptions), surpassing the problematization that typically emerges only from the hardships of daily prison life. To a certain extent, then, the choreographed cell suspends the real cell and enables a critical operation that would not be possible within the strictly physical space of the prison.

It is precisely in the gap between the chalk-drawn cell and the real cell that the possibility of a perhaps more incisive form of critique emerges. This choreography does not overtly debate injustice; it embodies it. What is conveyed to the audience is not the rationality of argumentative critique; instead, injustice is made visible through a critique carried by the weight of bodily, affective, and sensory presence. This is a critical operation enacted with and through the body, yet it still constitutes a (nonpropositional) judgment on the dancers’ (prison) condition. Moreover, the transition from individual gestures to the formation of a collective (“corpo-em-cadeia” as a body chained to other bodies) is not merely a critique of the prison institution, but also of the way it isolates and fragments.

This potential intensification of critique through gesture is also manifested in another sequence rehearsed during the sessions, namely the so-called pointing finger sequence. In earlier exercises, participants were invited to move with their index fingers extended, gently touching one another's bodies in a game of proximity and sensitivity. However, in the public presentation (an informal showing held within the prison facilities and addressed to the institution's staff), that same gesture was reinvested with a different meaning:

At a certain moment, the inmates move closer to the audience and point their fingers directly and deliberately, with serious and tense expressions (…). Then, this pointing gesture gradually dissolves and transforms into something else, through the dance. ¹¹

In this movement, the pointing gesture—normally associated with accusation or blame—becomes choreographed critique. The finger is pointed not to identify culprits, but to implicate the viewer, to return their gaze. It is a silent, nonpropositional, yet moral interpellation: the body accuses without speaking. The subsequent dissolution of the gesture reinforces the actualization of the critique's potential intensity, avoiding hermeneutic closure and opening space for imagination and creative composition. This form of critique bypasses justificatory regimes, operating through embodied presence and shared affect.

The day after the public performance of the choreographic piece at the CGF, the testimonies recorded in conversation with the dancers are revealing. Here are some excerpts:

Bryan: “Many came to see the wretched ones and realized we are more than they thought.”

Joellinton: “I had real, physical proof that my body is imprisoned, but my mind is free.”

Duda: “Even if they were fake, we were true.”

André: “The system uses these projects to look good in the picture.”

Catarina: “You told your story, not through violence, but through vulnerability.” ¹²

When read attentively, it becomes clear that the dancers’ words do not function as explanations but rather as an extension of the aesthetic experience. These words emerge in a moment of shared recognition, where participants express what they felt. And the statement “the body is imprisoned, but the mind is free” captures well what is at stake: dance is capable of opening an interstitial space (Breviglieri, 2013) that connects sensitive exposure within a space of objective containment. It is not, therefore, a programmatic critique, but a visceral one. During a rehearsal session on the eve of an informal performance inside the prison, one of the dancers stated: “let's take this chance to show [the guards and prison staff] that we are people, to claim a few things.” ¹³ Dance here becomes a form of “reclamation”: not in the legal sense, but as a poetic and political gesture that restores to individuals the ability to present themselves beyond their institutionalized identity.

While the inmates’ discursive reflections appeared fragmented, their bodily and emotional responses during and after the performance suggest a latent reflexivity. The postperformance conversations revealed a growing awareness of how artistic creation reconfigured their sense of agency and collective belonging. This delayed, embodied reflexivity may constitute the political aftermath of the aesthetic experience itself, a form of consciousness emerging after, rather than during, performance.

In summary, dance unfolds within itself a form of critique that does not aim to prove, but to show; not to persuade, but to make perceptible; not to argue, but to move. It is a critique enacted through and in the body, requiring no words to be political. Engagement with dance translates into ways of living-together, of sensing the world—including the possibility of judgment. As Joellinton, one of the dancers, says emotionally: “I felt special, I heard my name in the audience. (…) After that moment, having to come back here…” ¹⁴ The contrast between the moment of dance and the return to prison expresses precisely the sense of dissonance that lies at the heart of critique: the awareness that things could and should be otherwise.

Conclusion: Dance as embodied critique and the politics of the sensible

This study has examined how contemporary dance within the CORPOEMCADEIA (CEC) project operated as a form of embodied critique under conditions of incarceration. The findings reveal three key dynamics. First, dance enabled participants to reconfigure their relationship with space, with their own bodies, and with others, through an aesthetic mode of engagement that momentarily suspended the disciplinary logic of the prison. Second, the gestures and choreographic actions enacted by the inmates constituted moral and political acts of recognition, even in the absence of explicit discourse. Third, the institutional framework simultaneously constrained and facilitated these expressions, producing a paradoxical situation in which surveillance and emancipation coexisted. Together, these dynamics show that artistic creation can function as a subtle yet effective mode of social and moral critique within spaces of constrained freedom.

The analysis of choreographic creation demonstrated that dancing bodies can generate alternative formats of visibility and sensitivity that operate as critical devices. These gestures do not merely express emotion but articulate, through aesthetic displacement, implicit judgments about institutional life. The cell drawn on stage, the pointing finger gesture, or the imitation of familiar institutional figures’ bodies are examples of how critique can emerge, not through direct opposition to the norm, but through expressive displacements that reframe prison life in a different key. Through the aesthetic intensification of presence, dancers experiment with and test alternative ways of inhabiting the world (and the prison itself), highlighting the continuous nature of sensitive corporeality, cognition, and morality. Only in this way does judgment based on experience become possible. In this context, dancing is not merely an artistic modality; it is also, and more fundamentally, a precarious yet fertile form of composing the common, of reclaiming dignity and recognition of one's humanity through aesthetic and relational experimentation.

By shifting the focus of critique beyond rational deliberation or argumentative justification, the approach advocated here makes it possible to analyze critique as a skill immanent to experience, grounded in a sensitive and affective relationship with the world. By distinguishing between different regimes of engagement (justification, planned, and familiar), and by considering judgment as the result of a feeling of misalignment, discomfort, or dissonance, this framework opens the way to understanding art (and contemporary dance in particular) as a critical gesture that does not require words to be political. Moreover, recent proposals that expand this theoretical framework, such as the exploratory regime or the presence-based regime, offer promising conceptual tools for analyzing forms of aesthetic action marked by uncertainty, improvisation, and direct exposure to the presence of the other.

Future research may extend this framework to other controlled environments. The study of artistic creation can reveal the existence of spaces of political, sensory, and collective invention that escape the institutional grammar, invite analysis of embodied critical operations across diverse institutional settings. Similarly, the conceptual expansion of the model of regimes of engagement, along with the deepening of still-emerging regimes of action—centered on tentative experimentation, intensive co-presence, and mutual affectation—may offer renewed perspectives for understanding forms of action and critique that unfold at the limits of verbal language.

From a political standpoint, the data presented here call upon public policy to include the arts within its repertoire of intervention strategies. Rather than reducing artistic creation to a logic of productivity and instrumentalization, institutional hygiene, or functional rehabilitation, this article proposes to view art as a mode of situated expression, an experience that restores depth to the sensible and enables the emergence of more livable forms of collective life that accommodate singularity. While not a social panacea, artistic creation constitutes not only a space of enjoyment or catharsis but also an alternative grammar of existence: a way of composing the common and testing forms of freedom even under conditions of incarceration. To conceive art sociologically as a critical operation is a political and moral task: recognizing dancing bodies’ capacity to feel, judge, and transform.