Petra Kuppers

Performances in hospices, on beaches and at the memory of slavery medicine, cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the United States, communal poetry among mental health system survivors, Butoh dancers and in video installations; Deleuzoguattarian aesthetics and playful rhizomes.

Performance scholar and community artist Petra Kuppers engages these sites and practices as laboratories of experimental disability culture. Here, the possibility of new forms of embodiment, engagement and community take shape at the intersection of the past and the emerging future, in an embodied poetics that brings together movement, touch and language. Disability culture appears as a process, not a static definition, and offers seeds for artful justice work towards respect, love and an enrichment of the everyday.

This book presents a senior practitioner's/critic's exploration of creative community processes sustained over more than a decade, and models the connections between arts-based research and research-based arts.

Literary Nonfiction. Political Science. Edited by community artist, scholar, and dancer Petra Kuppers (author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge and Community Performance: An Introduction), the book opens with Arnieville, a Californian protest camp of disability, homelessness, and poverty activists. From there, a series of enactments welcome trespass and incursion in the name of survival. Amy Sara Carroll on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS phone that uses poetry to lead the disoriented and thirsty to water caches and safety sites in the US-Mexican borderlands. Devora Neumark on washing Tali Goodfriend's hands in Lebanese olive oil outside the hotel where Colin Powell speaks to the Jewish National Fund, hands gliding over one another in the middle of an angry public protest. Christian Nagler on writing an experimental novel while conducting an oral history of agricultural labor practices and migration patterns at the site of the Panamerican Highway in El Salvador. Georgina Kleege on touch and blindness as she discusses Katherine Sherwood's paintings of magic and the human brain, paintings that Sherwood began after her stroke ten years ago. Eleni Stecopoulos on the healing quest as research and the complexities of cultural appropriation. Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto on the collaborative connections of breath, body, pause, pain, and form. SOMATIC ENGAGEMENT is an exploration of how relation and support play out in breaths, steps, and touch.

A DVD, with three performance videos, available for free for teachers, artists, activists and others who build disability culture.

Journey To The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2011, 8 mins)
http://youtu.be/no-ZohJxWZE
Social somatics, social sculpture: a participatory performance focused on the Peter Eisenman Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, located in Berlin. The disabled people of Germany sued for access to the site, and lost. A ritual action re-imagines a memorial of life.  Filmed at the Movement, Somatics and Writing Symposium, University of Michigan.

Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (2010, 11 mins)
http://youtu.be/IaDaTcw7qsk
Three poetry performances (The Metaphor of Wind in Cripple Poetics, I am Salmon, and At The Gynecologist?s) braid through dances captured at the Tele-Immersion Laboratory, University of California Berkeley.

water burns sun (2009, 7 mins)
http://youtu.be/sMvaf6I_A4U
A Butoh dance sheds light on skin, water, ghosts and the meanings of 'cripple.' Part of The Olimpias? Burning Performance Installations.

How do disabled people experience theatre, as both audience members and performers? How has the institution of theatre responded to disability over time? How can we create new spaces for performance and attend to different communities’ forms of expression?

This insightful and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience.