Crip Drifts are methods for moving through the world as a disabled artist living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing in a world that is likewise disabled, compromised, thriving in complexity. Crip Drifts are also some of the motors of Petra’s eco soma investigations.

Disability Culture Eco Arts – A Michigan Spring Tour April 25-May 5 2025

Michigan people, join Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers for our drifting explorations of trees, mining sites and other earth depths, rivers and lakes:

April 27, noon: Crip Drift at Chippewa Nature Center, Midland, part of Creative360’s A Literary Affair programming, April 25-27, 400 S Badour Rd, Midland, MI 48640

Join performance artists and writers Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit for a gentle engagement with the trees at the Chippewa Nature Center. We will go on a 30-minute dream journey near the visitor center, and move meditatively, respectfully, and playfully in response to and with the trees, air, ground and land that surround and support us. No experience is necessary; all are welcome. You are welcome to participate or to witness. Bring writing materials if you wish to join a free-writing session afterward.

April 29, 2pm: Riparian Haunts, Dead River/Lake Superior meeting place at Clark Lambros Beach Park, Marquette

Join us at the meeting of river and lake where we will practice noticing through movement, writing, and site play. We’ll tune into internal and external water, currents, and flows, sharing attention and care with each other and the land. No experience is necessary; all are welcome.

May 3, 1pm and 3pm: Crip Drifts at A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum, 1404 Sharon Ave, Houghton, MI 49931

Join performance artists and poets Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit in a gentle engagement with mineral specimens in the museum’s collection. In these short sessions, will go on a dream journey with a particular mineral, and move meditatively, respectfully, and playfully in response to the earth that supports us. No experience is necessary; all are welcome. You are welcome to participate or to witness.

May 4, 2pm: Riparian Haunts at Anna River Fishing Pier, 1008 E Munising Ave, Munising, MI 49862

Join us at the pier where we will practice noticing through movement, writing, and site play. We’ll tune into internal and external water, currents, and flows, sharing attention and care with each other and the land. No experience is necessary; all are welcome.

Registration: please email Petra at petra@umich.edu to register and to let us know of access requirements.

More on Crip Drifting!

Example of a live in-door Crip Drift: Venice,  a 2-min excerpt from the Opening Performance of the Venice International Performance Art Festival, December 2024

In this performance, we connected ourselves to the lagoon swirling around the Palazzo site, in touch with time, with one another, with humans and more-than-humans that have lived on this site. We asked ourselves: how can we drench ourselves in all the waters? 120 audience members/participants became one large connected crystal, permeable together, drifting and dreaming in this place toward the future of the lagoon and its salts.

One of the dissemination methods of this work is through videodance, a medium Petra has explored since the late 1990s. The videodance work that emerges from Turtle Disco/The Olimpias is low-budget/low-tech, community driven, and celebrates co-presence for people who cannot be in long rehearsals, can't commit to long production arcs, or specific touring schedules.

2024 Published Crip Drifts Videos

The 2024/5 Crip Drifts are supported by an Anonymous Was a Woman/NYFA Environmental Arts Grant. Thank you for the support!

Crip Tree Poem, 3.35 mins, 2024

A video poem engagement with an Aleppo Pine in the harbor of Cassis, France; a crip drift, with attention to mobility, disability, interdependence, temporality, pulse and sun song. This videopoem won the Juror's Award of the 2024 WEAD, the Women Eco Artists Dialog, annual exhibit.

(published in Denver Quarterly’s online site: https://fivesquarterly.com/petra-kuppers/)

Skins. A Crip Drift in Leadville, Colorado. 3.23 mins, 2024

In this videopoem, two humans and a tree dance, feel, see and explore together in Leadville, Colorado, a 10,000-foot-high city and Superfund site surrounded by high piles of mining waste that sit upon the water supply.

This video emerged out of a crip drift, a sensing/being/in space, in a psychogeographical exploration, shifting in the slow timeframes of remediation and toxin transformation. Stephanie, a mad activist, electro-shock survivor, poet and dancer, and Petra, a scooter user living with chronic pain, used gentle, accessible dance and poetry to explore the city of Leadville in Colorado. They danced with mining equipment outside the National Mining Hall of Fame, with closed-down mining entrances, and near the turquoise acidic tailing ponds of Climax, a giant molybdenum mine in the mountains. They use the touch/view chiasm of video to record this dance with an aspen tree.

(Published in Unearthed, the literary journal of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry: https://unearthedesf.com/skins-crip-drift-leadville-petra-kuppers/)

A Huron River Séance: Psychogeographic Performances by the River With Turtle Disco, 3.23 mins, 2024

This video poem documents a Crip Drift by the Huron River, in Ann Arbor, part of a historical investigation into local soils, materials, historical change, toxic loads and reclamations.

For these sessions, local people came together with Petra Kuppers to engage in psychogeography: to drift on the land and by the water, to let ourselves be shifted and shaped by the energies we found.

In this video, we found ourselves responding to the PFAS (eternal chemical elements) that waft like a plume beneath Ann Arbor, and that threaten our ground water, as well as by the memories of the toxic loads the Huron River carried over time and into all our futures. Along the river, we danced and touched soil, water, and memory.

Published through the Ann Arbor Public Library Bicentennial site:

https://aadl.org/huronriverseance

Part of the same query, Psychogeographic Performances by the River With Turtle Disco: Crip Drifts in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti, with full audio description:

Ypsilanti, Michigan: Green Bone Child, 3.25, 2024

https://vimeo.com/990936234/0cde037f5b?share=copy

A crip drift at the Huron River with a poem from Diver Beneath the Street (ecopoetry/true crime collection). Performers: Marc Arthur and Charli Brissey, the river and found footage glimpses of its creatures. Dir/edit: Petra Kuppers/The Olimpias Disability Culture Production 2024

Audio Description link: https://soundcloud.com/petra-kuppers/green-bone-child-video-poem-audio-description

Expanded Cinema and Crip Drifting

One aspect of these cinematic Crip Drift works is an interest in expanded cinema and access: from virtual reality/immersion work to alternative presentation models and audiencing for film dance (for an early example of this kind of crip/tech work, see this report on a collaboration with SMARTlab at Central St. Martins, UK and the Center for Advanced Technology, NYU:  Sirens, 2003). 

In performance-based public presentations of the Crip Drift series (and in her Crip/Mad Archive Dances experimental documentary, 2024), Petra explores methods for engaging with the screen/embodiment limit. She does so in a number of different ways: 

1.  in a studio, dancing with the video beam, throwing shadows to allow spectators to break the cinematic stillness and to become active participants in score-based filmed performances. 

2. exploring the trance intimacy of small (home) screens: laptops, zoom squares, the aloneness and alternative intensity of glitchy digital touch.

2023 Crip Drifts: Collaborations with Kym McDaniel

In 2023, Petra collaborated with fellow disabled dance artist and film maker Kym McDaniel on three videos that present different facets of these (extra)terrestrial crip drifts. Below, find information about these three videos and their screening sites.

Screening Histories/Festivals

In addition to the official screenings below, all three movies had various showings at artist residencies, Turtle Disco events, the Co-Dreaming symposium, class visits, and more - thank you to everybody who has helped us make these films by giving feedback and allowing us to grow.

On a Wheelchair Ramp in the Middle of Nowhere

Rogue Dance – Raleigh, NC

Spark Micro-Short Film Festival – Buffalo, NY

Pittsburgh International Dance Film Festival – Pittsburgh, PA

IMARP - Imagens em Movimento Videodança – São Paulo, BR

Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival – Los Angeles, CA

Pebbles Underground Film Festival – Toronto, CAN

Constructed Site Dance Film Festival – online & in person / Pittsburgh, PA

Disability Culture & Videodances – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Touching Time: Minnahanonck/Roosevelt Island

Feminist Border Arts Festival – Las Cruces, NM

Moonplay Cinema – Minneapolis, MN

Wicklow Screendance Lab – Wicklow, IE

Together Disability Film Festival – London, UK

Traces Film Festival – Northwestern University; Evanston, IL

The Film Collective Short Film Festival – [online], Bensalem, PA

International Portrait Film Festival – Sofia, BG

EXPS/SLC: Disability Currents  – Salt Lake City, UT

Becoming Fossil

Official Selection at Ann Arbor Film Festival – Ann Arbor, MI

Crip'd Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments at Root Division – San Francisco, CA

The Portland EcoFIlm Festival – Portland, OR

Together Disability Film Festival – London, UK

Gallery Installation at DigiLabAiR | Emergencies of the Contemporary at Venice International Performance Art Week – Venice, Italy

Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival – Gainesville, FL

Shapeshifters Cinema – Oakland, CA

Frome International Climate Film Festival – Frome, UK

International Ecoperformance Film Festival

o   Montfleuri sur Mer, Pinamar, AR

o   Cine Satyros Bijou, São Paulo, BR

o   National Center for Dance Bucharest, Bucharest, RO

o   Brown Arts Institute, Providence, RI

Multiplié Dance Film Festival, Trondheim, Norway