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

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.