Art + Education No. 15- Petra Kuppers: Eco Soma Methods and Media Arts

Art + Edcuation No.15
Sunday August 25, 2024
4:00pm-5:30pm PST
How do disabled and mad people use eco-arts/eco-soma approaches to survive, dance, and insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain, and find and embrace worlds of environmental connection, joy, spirit? In this talk, Petra Kuppers will share eco-media and dance-video approaches to disability culture. We will go on a meditative journey together, and view a few video clips, before opening into a discussion of disability and eco-arts.
Petra will discuss the approaches of three projects: Starship Somatics, the Crip/Mad Archive Dances, and Planting Disabled Futures. She will also discuss eco soma methods - how we can tune with our somatic sensations and with our environmental embedment, in creative and delicious complexity?
Starship Somatics is a community dance modality Petra Kuppers developed during the early days of the COVID pandemic as part of the Turtle Disco programming, looking for a way to create online environments for accessible, disability-culture-focused somatic creative movement.
The Crip/Mad Archive Dances address disabled and mad presences in asylum spaces and in dance archives through participatory performances grounded in disability culture.
Planting Disabled Future explores virtual/extended reality (VR/XR) technologies with disabled choreographers/film-makers/dancers, to ask questions about access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play. We play with VR/XR techniques in community performance settings to create an immersive experience that offers audiences opportunities to move with visualizations of future plants, engaging communally in delicious movement rituals.
Bio
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, 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 (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil (Wayne State University Press, 2024). She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
Petra Kuppers/The Olimpias Media Works
Open Access: Eco Soma book - www.upress.umn...
Earth Stories (9 mins, 2000)
• olimpias earth stories...
Starship Somatics (with Charli Brissey, 2022)
www.poetryfoun...
Touching Time: Minnahanonck/Roosevelt Island (10 min, 2023)
vimeo.com/8629...
Becoming Fossil (13 min, 2023)
vimeo.com/8795...
Crip/Mad Archive Dances (35 mins, 2024)
vimeo.com/9188...
Planting Disabled Futures - Huntington Gardens (2024)
vimeo.com/9537...
Crip Cave/Planting Disabled Futures - VR work, promo/design concept
vimeo.com/9999...