In this special participatory performance, disability culture activist Petra Kuppers and her guests invite audiences to search archives for disabled and mad dancers. The event will take place using movement, storytelling, and divinatory methods to explore connections to disabled dance ancestors. Gestural memories ground the experience in old and new lineages, help to honor chosen family, and offer embodied transmissions of knowledge. Participants can choose their level of engagement, including being a witness with no need to move if not desired. The session is grounded in disability culture values. Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. In 2022, she was named a Dance/USA Fellow. Kuppers is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Registration required.
New York City, NY; NYC