They Don't Care About Us - PRISON DANCERS

The 2012 New York Musical Theatre Festival  (NYMF) will feature PRISON DANCER: THE MUSICAL.  The said musical is scheduled to be staged for 6 performances at The Theater at St. Clements (423 W. 46th Street) from 20 to 28th July 2012.  You can visit http://www.nymf.org/prisondancer for more details.  You can also check out their web musical version in YouTube.  Visit http://www.prisondancer.com for more information.  I feel that their web musical deserves more views.  So, go ahead and check it out.

PRISON DANCER: THE MUSICAL is inspired by the YouTube viral video in 2007 of real-life prisoners in the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) maximum-security prison of the Philippines.  The inmates danced to Michael Jackson's THRILLER.   This is their first video, the inmates marching and dancing in unison, which was  uploaded in YouTube that went viral and picked-up by almost every news organization around the world including CNN and Time Magazine.  It was so popular that in 2010, the choreographer of Michael Jackson, Travis Payne, went to the Philippines and created a special dance number with the prisoners and two of Michael Jackson's top dancers, Daniel Celebre and Dres Reid.  The choreographed dance number of They Don't Care About Us was intended to be included in the "THIS IS IT" DVD of Michael Jackson.

If you haven't seen the 2007 Thriller video, the start of it all, watch it here:

Here is the 2010 They Don't Care About Us video.  Enjoy:

The state of other prisons and detention centers in the Philippines are so unlike that of CPRDC.  Prisoners are thrown in like sardines in cramped up cells.  Inmates suffer communicable diseases that should have otherwise been controlled.  These are just some of the problems that the government seemed to have given so little attention to.  Is it true that "we don't care about them"?  These are convicts who have committed crimes against people, and some crimes may have been heinous.  But they are also people.  Would it be so bad to leave their dignity alone?  After all, they are already serving their sentences.