Amoeba Dances

In Amoeba Dance workshops, we move with and listen to sounds we are making with our own breath, in our own home, while being comfortable on a mat on the floor (or in a similar comfortable position for yourself and your particular bodymind).

Our practice is informed by Pauline Oliveros' deep listening work, by Continuum Movement, and by Olimpias disability culture practices. We will use our breath to channel sounds through our body, paying attention to the images and sensations that come up. This practice is the basis for some of the movement/writing workshops in Turtle Disco, a disability-led somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

This work is a self- and communal-care resource for creativity, rhythmic attunement, bodylove and pain management, and low-key dropping in, a way to support ourselves as artful disabled people in a discriminatory world.

Part of Turtle Disco's regular line-up.

Here is an image we often use as an entry way in our sessions, from someone I wish to honor by drawing him into our chosen lineage: Martín Ramírez's tunnel imagery, curved lines aligned close to one another to signify tunnels, a locomotive drawn into the depth, tunnels that vanish into the valley shadows. I introduce him in relation to 'crip adaptability:' he, an outsider Mexican artist incarcerated in an asylum in California, used materials he could find, including the linings of drawers and bread bags.