Petra Kuppers
Let's delight in our beautiful bodymindspirits.
Community and Participatory Performances, Disability Culture Dance: An Invitation
Current Participatory Performance Projects (2024)
ongoing classes:
Turtle Disco (somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan/Three Fires Confederacy Territory, co-led with Stephanie Heit, virtual and local events, sign up for the newsletter here)
Starship Somatics, Tuesdays at 11am ET, online through Movement Research
2021/2022/2023 projects:
present/breath (Ypsilanti, Michigan; Frankfort, Michigan; and Evanston, Illinois): drawing and performance in response to the pandemic
Contact: petra@umich.edu
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Creative Writing pages: Here Be Dragons
What is Disability Culture?
Disability culture is a trajectory, a movement, a path rather than a destination: Disability culture is the difference between being alone, isolated, and individuated with a physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory difference that in our society invites discrimination and reinforces that isolation – the difference between all that and being in community. Naming oneself part of a larger group, a social movement or a subject position in modernity can help to focus energy, and to understand that solidarity can be found – precariously, in improvisation, always on the verge of collapse. 2011. Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave. p. 109.
This website is a COVID-era reboot. For projects from Petra's first 30 years of disability culture dance and performance practice, see (now static and extremely 80s looking) The Olimpias site.