Ice Bar collects a number of stories set in and around asylums, institutions, sites of stricture and sanctuary. These stories, as well as a range of prose-poems, emerged out of The Asylum project, a performance series I co-led with Stephanie Heit.
One of these stories appeared with the New Zealand/Aotearoa based journal Capricious, ‘Grave Weed,’ in January 2017, as part of a special issue on plants.
One of these stories was published in the Sycamore Review in late 2016, ‘Painting the Asylum Garden.’
The first one of these stories was The Nursing Home, set in Hawai’i, written in first draft at Windward College on Oahu, published in Wordgathering.
In 2021/2022, the Asylum Stories led to a new performance piece: the Crip/Mad Archive Dances. You can find a video and an academic text here.
The Asylum Project also led to a range of other academic/poetics publications:
‘Queer Spiritual Drifting: Not At Home In The Beguinage.’ Performance Research 23:7, special issue: On Drifting, 89-94 (2018)
Petra Kuppers: ‘Invited Hauntings in Site-Specific Performance and Poetry: The Asylum Project.’ RIDE: Journal for Applied Theatre and Performance. 23:3, 438-453 (2018)
‘Mad Methodologies and Community Performance: The Asylum Project’ (An essay hosted by Petra Kuppers, with Stephanie Heit, April Sizemore-Barber, and VK Preston) Theatre Topics, 26: 2 (2016) 221-237.
“Hurricane Poetics and Crip Psychogeographies.” (co-authored with Stephanie Heit) Ecotone 27 (2019)
‘Blood Compost: The Asylum Project.’ P-Queue. No. 15: 47-58 (2018)
Ice Bar: Queer/Crip Speculative Stories
Petra Kuppers 