You can find here information about the Eco Monsters and Somatic Takeovers Symposium (Sept 2021), the EcoSomatics Online Series (Feb-April 2021) and the online EcoSomatics Symposium Sept/Oct 2020, as well as the earlier in-person symposia.

Publication about the EcoSomatics Symposia: EcoSomatics Archive. Jacket2 (2022)

Eco Monsters and Somatic Takeovers Symposium, September 2021, in person, University of Michigan

Participants: Marc Arthur, Biba Bell, Charli Brissey, Stefanie K. Dunning, Cara Hagen, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Kathy Westwater, moira williams

Program, September 16th to 19th 2021:

Opening Ritual: present/breath – saying hello in movement and drawing

Stephanie Heit “Instructions on How to Create a Nest for Your Local Eco Monster,” where we’ll make comfort nest offerings using meditation, drawing, writing, and monster dances

Biba Bell: (para)sites & epiphytes

Petra Kuppers: Starship Somatics: Overwhelm Aesthetics

moira williams: Invoking Aqueous Eco Monster Ancestors – flowing with our Eco Monster bodyminds we’ll invite our ancestors to guide us towards water intimacy via movement, vocalizations, co-witnessing and water writing

Cara Hagan: an intuitive mapping of our space

Charli Brissey “Aggregate Eco-Monster Logic for a Slippery World.” – explore how external variables constitute our internal landscapes and constitutions (food, soil, weather, bacteria, etc), and invite those things to come alive within and among us.

Kathy Westwater: Monster Body, where we will be constructing a dancing body that departs from known and codified ones, entering the domain of the unknown and the monstrous.

Marc Arthur: “The Walled Garden of Monsters in a Titanium Land of Destroyed Forests,” with a large bag of sensory and kinetic objects and costumes

and with Stefanie Dunning, from the rich Black to Nature podcast.

Marc Arthur holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University (2019) and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts-based Social Justice Research and Practice at the University of Michigan where he is studying community-based theatre approaches for decreasing stigma and oppression. His research and teaching interests encompass devised and applied theatre, theatre history, dramatic literature analysis, and directing as they overlap with social work research, queer theory, and critical race studies. His writing and criticism has appeared in edited volumes and journals including Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Bomb Magazine, and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as numerous edited collections. He has also written extensively for Performa Magazine, where he was editor from 2015 – 2017. From 2011 – 2017 he was the Head of Research and Archives at Performa where he organized touring exhibitions, curated programs, led interdisciplinary research projects with a wide range of artists, and spearheaded the acquisition of the Performa collection by NYU’s Fales Library. As an artist and director he creates devised theatre that incorporates methods from dance, painting, and socially engaged art. His work has been presented at theatres and galleries internationally, including the Martha Graham Dance Theater, La MaMa E.T.C., Dixon Place, The Living Theater, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance, the Wild Project, University Settlement, and Chashama in New York City; New Langton Arts and David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco; Moyse Theatre at McGill University, Montreal; Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels; the Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice; Universität der Künste, Berlin; and FRISE, Hamburg.

Biba Bell is a dancer, choreographer, and writer based in Detroit. Her performance work has been shown in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and across the U.S. She was a Kresge Arts in Detroit Live Arts Fellow and a DAAD guest professor of Experimental Performance in Bremen, Germany, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance at Wayne State University. Her research interests include contemporary choreography, experimental and collective performance practice, domesticity and affective labor, public/private space, dance and architecture, and dance in visual art contexts. Bell edited the 2nd issue of Detroit Research Journal /On Dance and was co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence 2014-2016. Her writing has been published in The Drama Review, Dance Research Journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Critical Correspondence, Pastelegram, Performance Research Journal, Sound American Journal, Essay’d, and FRONT. Bell performs as a founding member of the collective Modern Garage Movement (with Jmy James Kidd and Paige Martin, 2005-2011, 2021) and with NYC-based choreographers Maria Hassabi and Walter Dundervill amongst others. Her most recent project, Cities of the Interior, explores ancestral memory and dream architectures and was exhibited at Galerie Camille in Detroit. Of her dancing the New York Times writes “It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild.” Bell earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.

Charli Brissey is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and teacher who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, language, instincts, and ecosystems. Their research integrates studies in choreography, feminist theory, technology, and science. Brissey has been creating performances, installations, experimental videos, and written scholarship for over seventeen years, and has been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues nationally and internationally. https://www.charlibrisseyisananimal.com/

Stefanie K. Dunning is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University. She is a graduate of Spelman College and the University of California, Riverside, and a Ford Fellow. Her first book, Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture, from Indiana University Press, was published in 2009. Her latest project, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture from the University Press of Mississippi was published in April 2021. In addition to her published books, she has been published in African American Review, MELUS, Studies in the Fantastic, and other journals and anthologies. She also has a podcast, called Black to Nature: the podcast, available for listening on all major platforms.

Cara Hagan is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is informed by movement, digital space, words, contemplative practice, and community. Recently, Cara’s work has been presented live at the Performática Festival in Cholula, Mexico, on screen at the Dance on Camera Festival in New York City, and in installation at Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina. Guest residencies include Roehampton University, Thirak India, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, among others. Most recently, Hagan was named the inaugural Community Commissioning Residency Artist for 2021 at the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. A recipient of several awards and grants, Hagan won a “Best Southern States Documentary” award for the short film, Sound and Sole, from the Southern States Indie Fan Film Fest in Biloxi, MS in January 2019. Sound and Sole is now being distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) to public broadcasting stations across the United States. Funding awards include the North Carolina Arts Council, the Forsyth County Arts Council, the Appalachian State University Research Council, the Cucalorus Festival, the Dance Films Association, and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative. Hagan’s written work can be found in a variety of publications including literary journals Collective Terrain, Zocalo, Quill and Parchment, the Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, and Headwaters Journal of Expressive Arts. Scholarly publications can be found in the International Journal of Screendance, the Journal of Sustainability Education, Transmissions Journal of Media Studies, the Journal of Dance Education, and in the book, Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures, edited by Telory D. Arendell and Ruth Barnes. Hagan is editor for the book, Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, published by Routledge. Hagan’s first solo-authored book titled, Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice, is due out in fall 2021 by McFarland Publishing.

Stephanie Heit (she/her/hers) is a queer poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing and contemplative movement practices. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System) was a Nightboat Poetry Prize finalist and explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. Her current project, Psych Murders, is a hybrid memoir poem that traces her body through breathlessness, damage, refusal, and memory loss as she documents her experiences with shock treatment, psych wards, and suicidal ideation personified as a noir character murderer. Her other current manuscript, Every Horizon Turns Liquid, is a poetic inquiry where water is at stake amidst climate change and evolutionary rigors that task the bodies – human, animal, plant, imaginary – that inhabit these biomes and plot escapes. This work emerges out of somatic engagements along the shorelines of Lake Michigan and other real and imaginary locations. Her lifelong love of dance and poetry shapes the workshops and classes she offers along with her training in poetics and contemplative and somatic awareness practices at Naropa University, where she received a BA in InterArts/Dance and MFA in Poetry. Her art and life practices are embedded in her love of movement, water, language, the body, disability culture, different ways of being, and collaboration. She lives on Three Fires Confederacy territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan with her wife and collaborator, Petra Kuppers, where they codirect Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, out of their living room. Website: https://stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com/

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a wheelchair user, and a community performance artist. Petra grew up in Germany, now lives on the land of the Three Fires Confederacy, and grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She teaches at the University of Michigan in performance studies and disability culture, and is also an advisor on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She is also the author of the speculative fiction short story collection Ice Bar (2018). She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She has written academic books in disability culture and community performance, and her next book is the open access Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, University of Minnesota Press, January 2022. She is currently a New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow, working on a project on crip/mad dramaturgies. https://sites.google.com/view/petrakuppers/home

Christina Vega-Westhoff is a poet, translator, aerialist, and teaching artist currently living in Columbia, Missouri. Her work emphasizes collaboration, place-based knowledge, and social justice. Her first book, Suelo Tide Cement, which won the 2017 Nightboat Prize for Poetry, grew out of an interdisciplinary residency with Estudio Nuboso in coastal Veraguas, Panama, focused on learning from and cocreating with soil. Accompanying Suelo Tide Cement is the dancevideopoem “Composta/Compuesto,” a procedural incantation that composts writing from the book through spliced and aerated translation. Her poetry, translations from Spanish, and other writing have appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Words Without Borders, Emergency INDEX, and elsewhere. Vega-Westhoff began studying dance trapeze in 2009 at ZUZI! Dance in Tucson, Arizona, and helped to nurture the artform in Buffalo, New York, where she acted as lead instructor, curriculum designer, and choreographer in aerial arts at The Bird’s Nest Circus Arts and Buffalo Aerial Dance. While living in Buffalo she was involved in interdisciplinary, multi-apparatus performances across the region, including at Silo City, Burchfield Penney Art Center, University at Buffalo, Wasteland Studio, Jim Bush Studios, Riverworks, and Collective Space. She’s taught writing with Just Buffalo Literary Arts, Young Audiences of Western New York, Geneseo Migrant Center, University of Arizona, University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson Pima Arts Council, and various schools and organizations in Missouri, North Carolina, Mexico, and Panama.

Kathy Westwater, “an unconventional choreographer experiencing a surge of recognition” (The New Yorker), has pursued radical dance forms since 1996. Described as “at the limits of the human” (The Brooklyn Rail), her work is founded in an experiential approach to physical invention. It responds to the societal landscape in which it manifests, taking up our most challenging experiences such as pain – including the pain of others – like with the Bessie-nominated Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part (2019). Westwater’s major works have explored the built environments of monuments (Anywhere, 2016) and landfills and parks (PARK, 2009-2013); war and pain (Macho, 2008); intersections of human and animal culture (twisted, tack, broken, 2005); psycho-physical states of fear (Dark Matter, 2002); and interactive virtual environments (The Fortune Cookie Dance, 1999). The Fortune Cookie Dance is cited as one of the earliest interactive virtual dances. Westwater is the first female recipient of Lumberyard’s Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography. She was an inaugural artist-in-residence at Petronio Residency Center in 2018, and an artist-in-residence at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in 2019. Westwater has received commissions from Lumberyard, Temple University, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project. From 2000-2019 she taught at Sarah Lawrence College where she received an MFA. She is currently working on a second cycle of PARK which responds to the Fresh Kills Landfill, once the largest landfill in the world, as it is transformed into a park. The project engages frontline communities who bear the burden of our industrial waste complex.

moira williams is a disabled indigenous artist, curator, organizer and dreamer weaving together cross-disability justice, gatherings, and arts with eco-somatics and queer ecologies. moira believes in “access intimacy”* as an attitude beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act. A lifelong environmentalist, moira’s often co-creative work leads with disability and ecology, approaching culture as something we actively shape together. Their ongoing work with water focuses on “access intimacy”* and water intimacy as ways forward to accessible NYC waterfronts, which led to extended comment deadlines for NYC’s cross-disability community, an accessible public bathroom, plus an online and in-person Disability Cabaret on an accessible boat. moira recently received Santa Fe Arts Institute REVOLUTION, Blue Mountain Center, Disability + DANCE NYC Social Justice Fellowships, and a Disability Futures Fund grant. moira’s recent work has been at Works on Water Triennial, Landscape Research UK, Common Field. UniArts Performance Philosophy Helsinki and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Denmark, and has appeared in The New York Times and A Field Guide to iLANDING.

*“Access intimacy” is “that hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” – Mia Mingus

Spring EcoSomatics Workshop Series, University of Michigan, Feb-April 2021

(headshots of the four presenters)

Welcome to our Spring 2021 ecosomatics workshops at the University of Michigan – a continuation of our three earlier symposia, and a celebration of the EcoSomatics special issue of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts Quarterly (January 2021).

These free online workshops are about an hour long, with a few minutes for engagement afterward, with an emphasis on experiential learning/art practice/community building. Access provisions include live transcription.

The workshop series is organized by EcoSomatics Project Director Petra Kuppers, petra@umich.edu. If you are interested in attending any of them, just send me an email, and I will send out the zoom links nearer the time.

Tomie Hahn: Arousing Sense, an Ecosomatic Workshop, February 23^rd, 3pm EST

Imagine how every choice we make resonates or reverberates into the world. How might our sensory awareness of the time and space we inhabit affect our choices? This workshop dives into this question and offers in-the-moment sensory encounters to spark creativity and insights. The workshop will be contemplative, rejuvenating, definitely uplifting. We will use sensory experiences as a playful sandbox to awaken creativity, to be in our bodies, and to notice time.

Here, ecosomatics ushers forth sensibilities of reverberations through time—sensing bodies, multiple identities, connecting in time with environment, and exploring ecofeminist realms. We will play in the echo-so-o-matic sandbox, reflecting vibrations in the virtual… “Oh, was that you? Or me?”

There will be time to share our encounters and creative scribbles. No experience needed!

What you need to bring to the workshop: a glass of plain water, pen or pencil, paper, and curiosity.

Biography:

Tomie Hahn is an artist-scholar who has devoted her life to the understanding of embodied cultural knowledge. She is a performer of experimental performance art, shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance). Tomie is a transmission specialist; fascinated by how embodied knowledge is transmitted. Her ethnographic research and performance work spans a wide range of area studies and topics including: the senses and transmission, gesture, meditation, okeikogoto (Japanese practice arts), Monster Truck rallies, multiracial identity, issues of display, and relationships of technology and culture. Her work is cited as contributing to the “sensory turn” in scholarly research, specifically her monograph Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (2007) which was awarded the Alan P. Merriam prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Tomie’s forthcoming book, Arousing Sense: Recipes for Workshopping Sensory Experience, is expected in October 2021. Tomie is currently the Interim President of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

March 12, 3pm EST: Aimee Meredith Cox: Embodied Poetics

I will guide us through meditations, free writing, and movement that will serve as our embodied translations of the words of Black women writers (our muses for this session). We might be surprised by how our words, gestures, and ways of holding space will reveal new potentialities for being in this world and manifesting another one. This workshop is accessible to ALL. You will need some method of writing that works for you and comfortable clothing.

Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as an Associate Professor in the departments of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. She earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Vassar College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the editor of the volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018).

April 2: 3pm EST: Meghan Moe Beitiks: Guffaw

Breath is a molecular exchange, a form of communication with the non-human. It is an interconnective force and an essential function for living beings. It has the capacity to shift our relationship to space, and attune us to the workings of our bodies. It’s also weird and funny. Drawing on various mediation practices, acting warm-ups, and comedic approaches, this workshop will explore laughter as a form of breath that is an essential ecological force. We’re gonna get goofy. We’re gonna make funny moments. We’re gonna laugh at each other, and ourselves.

Bio: Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow, a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She exhibited her work at the I-Park Environmental Art Biennale, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the House of Artists in Moscow, and other locations in California, Chicago, Australia and the UK. She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida. www.meghanmoebeitiks.com

April 9, 3pm EST: Edgar Fabián Frías: Intro to Divination Practices for Creatives

This is an interactive workshop meant to help support the initiation, development, and flourishing of ancestral divination techniques within contemporary creative communities. Attendees will learn about divination from a trans-historical perspective and will find ways to weave in (a) personal divination practice(s) into their creative, organizing, educational, and cultural work.

*Optional: Please bring protective amulets, charms, plants, essences, crystals, etc. Bring something to cover your head (a hat, a scarf, a hoodie).

Edgar Fabián Frías is a nonbinary, queer, indigenous (Wixárika) and Brown multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and psychotherapist. They work in photography, video art, sound, sculpture, printed textiles, GIFs, performance, social practice, and community organizing, among other emergent genres. Most recently, they have integrated their diverse practices and collaborative partnerships into the creation of large-scale interactive installations and experiences. Seeking to alter states of awareness through the creation of temporary sanctuaries that act as conduits for respite, empathy, self-reflection, humor, and curiosity.

Recent exhibitions include “Nierika : Santuario Somático” at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon and “Perpetual Flowering” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, California. Their work has been exhibited at Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), ESMoA (El Segundo, CA), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, OK), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN), Performance is Alive (New York, NY), and ArtBo (Bogotá, Colombia), among others. Their work has also recently appeared in The Commons, a public access-style morning show for witches, by witches and as a part of the Many Moons Lunar Planner 2020, created by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener.

Born in East Los Angeles in 1983, Frías received dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from the University of California, Riverside. In 2013, they received an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, with an emphasis on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy. Frías is also a 2022 candidate for an MFA in Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.

These workshops are supported by funds from the Eco-Arts Think-Act Tank from the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the University of Michigan’s Departments of English, Dance, Theatre, Initiative on Disability Studies, Graham Sustainability Institute and the Program in the Environment, in collaboration with the Black Earth Institute.

Online EcoSomatics Symposium, September/October 2020

A CSPA convergence

Engage full-mouthed messy matter and fleshy multispecies engagement across and beyond boundaries. We hope to shape a complex tool-set for living in a changing natural world which impacts people differently, dependent on histories of violence and their attendant environmental effects. The symposium invites creators/critics of performance, movement, somatic training, writing, and visual/social practice related to emergent genres such as solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-arts, and interspecies dialogue, and their relationships to social justice organizing and experimental practice. The academic aims of this project make interventions into disabled futurities (Kafer, 2014), kinship networks (Haraway, 2016), and organizing (brown, 2017), and extend the discussions begun in our Movement, Somatics and Writing symposium (2010) and in the collection Somatic Engagement (Kuppers, ed., Chainlinks, 2011).

The symposium builds on two smaller eco-arts events in April and November 2019, and also includes a forthcoming EcoSomatics issue of the Journal for the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts (2021).

Symposium Timetable – all sessions are via Zoom, and in Eastern Time. We will have live remote captioning for all events. All events marked ‘public’ can be accessed by people outside this fellowship circle. If you want to participate in them, please email petra@umich.edu by September 15th, and we will send you a small pack of symposium readings as preparation.

Tuesday, Sept 22: 2.30pm-4: Syrus Marcus Ware: Embodying Abolition and Dreaming the Future into Being (public)

Saturday, Sept. 26: 3pm Stephanie Heit: Water Bodies States of Mind (public)

4pm Petra Kuppers: Amoeba Dances: Tunneling Open (public)

Sunday, Sept. 27: 2pm DJ Lee: Mask/Face/Breath

3pm Megan Kaminski: Co-Dwelling with Plants

7pm Discussion and Networking

Tuesday, Sept 29: 2.30pm-4 Charli Brissey: Phasing Practice: A Performance-Workshop (public)

Saturday, Oct. 3: 3pm Bronwyn Preece: Collaborative Poetry Writing-(with/and/into)-Creative Response

7pm Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren: Skin-Hearing: Zoom, Bees, and Bamboo (public)

Sunday, Oct 4: 3pm Rania Lee Khalil: Extensions of Earth (public)

7pm Discussion and Networking

Tuesday, Oct 6: 2.30-4 andrea haenggi and urban moss: Pleasure Boundary Layer – bryophyte moss movement & improvisation practice (public)

Description and Workshop Leader Biographies:

Embodying Abolition and Dreaming the Future into Being. This 1.5 hour long workshop will explore key concepts of abolition and will explore new ways of taking care of each other. Be prepared to do some writing/drawing and imagining futures full of love and freedom and justice. We will do some breathing and self reflection exercises to find and to feel and root out where carceral logics and ideas of punishment-to-solve-problems sit in our bodies. We will also explore where abolitionist ideas inhabit our body/minds. Together we will create a soundscape of a freer world using our bodies. We will embody the sounds of a world rooted in liberation and self determination. Please bring paper and drawing/writing materials, and wear comfortable clothing/a movement friendly outfit.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto, a part of the Performance Disability Art Collective, and a PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His on-going curatorial work includes That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019) and BlacknessYes!/Blockorama.

Water Bodies States of Mind. In this hour-long workshop, we will explore and tune into the water in our own bodies, using this element to become aware of, hone, and sometimes shift our states of being. We’ll choose water forms to embody from saliva to oceans through movement, sound, and writing/drawing. Hydrate yourself with this practice that offers bodymind support, care structures, creative inquiry, and fluid intelligence vital to thrive in our changing world. This workshop originates from my personal experience as bipolar and the grounding/altering properties of water. The ability to change energetic/physical/spiritual states and to move or flow between feelings is a resource that water in its many forms models as a way to navigate present/future uncertainties. This practice is offered as a portal to embrace and explore a full range of water and bodymind states, acknowledging that water can be a vehicle and site of violence, ancestral drowning, division as well as an arbiter of connection, buoyancy, joy. Please make a zoom space nest with room to move and rest. Have on hand water and writing/art materials you desire (journal, pen, colored pencils, etc.). Dress in comfy layers to support movement and stillness.

Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing and contemplative movement practices. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. https://stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com/

Amoeba Dances: Tunneling Open. In Amoeba Dances, we listen to and move with 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 use our breath to channel sounds through our body, and respond in movement – tiny or large, whatever is appropriate to us. My practice is born out of experiences of physical pain, and it is designed to be accessible to people who live with (different kinds of) pain. Our breath tunnels link us to new and old worlds, to moments that allow us to experience ourselves in difference, in hope, in joy, toward aliveness. We encounter ourselves and our micro-worlds, response-able to minute shifts, desires, and sensual states. I use this practice as the basis for movement/writing workshops in Turtle Disco, a disability-led somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at UM, faculty on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias, and co-director of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. She is a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute (2018-2021). Her new book project, Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Encounters is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/

Mask/Face/Breath. This experimental workshop explores the mask as vehicle for performance, ritual and ceremony, so-called “illegal” actions, medical purposes, artificial self (Carl Jung famously coined the term “persona,” Latin for “mask”), and, in this time of ecosickness, as political tool and key component for public health and community well-being. We’ll consider the vulnerability of the face with reference to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who says at once: “the skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute”; “the face opens primordial discourse whose first word is obligation,” “the face presents itself, and demands justice,” and “the face is a source from which all meaning appears.” How can we (re)imagine masks/masking to meet the eco-crisis of COVID-19? We’ll perform breath work—with and without masks–honoring the vital role of oxygen and lungs for COVID-19 patients, as well as engage in creative visualization exercises that lead to making our own eco-masks. It would be great if participants could assemble materials like their current mask of choice, recycled paper bags, paints or markers, eco-trash or found items from the natural world, etc., and paper and pen to write with.

DJ Lee is author/editor of eight scholarly books, most recently The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her creative work has appeared in Narrative and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is director of the NEH-funded Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project, and her creative nonfiction work about the wilderness, Remote: A Love Story, is forthcoming from Oregon State University Press.

Co-Dwelling with Plants. In this session we’ll spend time breathing with and listening to our more-than-human neighbors. Informed by plant studies and philosopher Michael Marder’s call to “shed [our] humanist camouflage” and “join plant life in a self-expropriating journey towards the other,” we’ll learn from the plants with which we share space and collaborate with them and each other in this hour-long practice of breath, contemplative practice, and poetry. It would be lovely to set your Zoom-space for this session in proximity to plant life of some sort (whether near a houseplant, close to a window from which you can see plants, or outside amongst plants). It would also be great to have something to write with/on.

Megan Kaminski is a poet, essayist, and Associate Professor in English at the University of Kansas specializing in poetry and poetics, queer ecology, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of two books of poetry, Deep City and Desiring Map, with a third book Gentlewomen forthcoming from Noemi Press this fall. Her public-facing work, in the form of the Prairie Divination Deck (w/ L. Ann Wheeler) and the Ad Astra Writing Project, focuses on helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align their thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. Her work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations. https://www.megankaminski.com

Phasing Practice: A Performance-Workshop .This workshop explores embodied investigations of phasing, or the relationship between the timing of two or more events, within our own bodies and between our Zoom bodies. Common examples of phasing in the world include the rhythms of windshield wipers, traffic lights, moon cycles, and eclipses, and we consistently work with or against a complex matrix of human and nonhuman rhythms, cycles, and patterns. For this workshop we will explore how to hold and maintain rhythms in our bodies and voices while developing strategies to fall in and out of sync with one another, working through the sensations of discomfort and pleasure that can come from both deviating and aligning with others and within ourselves.

Collaborative Poetry Writing-(with/and/into)-Creative Response. This gathering is an invitation to meet and co-create a collaborative and dynamic working space during which we will experiment with collaboratively writing a poem using Zoom — riffing off the ‘exquisite corpse’ model. Participants will engage in moments of movement, of contemplation, and a mixture of creative expressive modalities in response to the writings which are produced. You need have no previous experience with writing poetry to participate — you are simply asked to come with an open mind, willing to dive in and engage in the hilarities of adapting somatics-to/through-screen! Come prepared to engage in making magic together. No materials are necessary….however, you may choose to have drawing materials, instruments, an open space for movement or other artistic modalities that you may wish to respond to the co-created prose.

Bronwyn Preece lives in British Columbia, where is honored to be a guest on the Traditional Territory of the Salish Peoples. She is an improvisational, site-sensitive performance eARThist, author, editor, community-engaged applied theatre practitioner, pioneer of earthBODYment, poetic pirate, avid hiker and boundary-pushing renegade. Her PhD was titled Performing Embodiment: Improvisational Investigations into the Intersections of Ecology and Disability.

Skin-Hearing: Zoom, Bees, and Bamboo. This workshop explores forms and rhythms of skin-hearing (or hearing differently) across Zoom, between sound and captioning, and in relation to the other-than human, such as bees and bamboo, through the collective creation of a set of performance scores. Zoom sets the stage for certain hearing practices—typically connected with sound. Zoom with captioning shifts the “hearing” modality to an auditory-visual one. How can we explore/expand forms of skin-hearing (or hearing differently) available to us? Since I am hard-of-hearing, this workshop is in part a certain type of imaginary one. It relies on the collective exploration of a set of partially not possible exercises, as well as the collective translation processes across our spaces of hearing differently. So, I propose a kind of zoom leap into a vibrational realm as follows: Bees “hear” through a process called vibroacoustics that involves sensing sound vibrations with their whole bodies. We will explore the potential for generating a kinship with the bees and/or our own forms of vibroacoustics. Bamboo, a highly responsive material with complex vibrational potential, activates a different type of touch-sound-air rhythm. We will explore the potential for tuning into bamboo (or another type of wood) as a way of expanding what vibroacoustics might be. From there, we will create a set of performance scores that chart and replay the journey across zoom, zoom-captioning, bees, and bamboo so that we can devise (new?) forms of skin-hearing that can link us across the multiple Zoom spaces. Please bring paper, drawing materials. A space to move. I will provide visual equivalents for us to work with. (Please feel free to collect your own vibrational reference points in response to the above proposed structure.)

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Ph.D., Director, Folded Paper Dance and Theatre (Hong Kong/Seattle), creates work that links heritage, performance and ecology across geographical locations. Her current project, Sounding Bodies: Intermedia in Hong Kong (a Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant, 2020-2021), explores everyday life across urban and natural spaces as well as processes of hearing and seeing differently across diverse local communities. At the Water’s Edge (Maryland Institute College of Art, 2019) on climate change is being expanded into a set of traveling workshops and portable performances in Hong Kong and India. A Fulbright-Nehru Scholar (2017-2018, Kerala), she is also developing her research on Traveling Exchanges into a series of articles and performance projects as well as serving as the inaugural editor of Journal of Performance and Cultural Studies (The Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia).

Extensions of Earth. In this workshop, we take time to experience our embodied connection with our planet. Moving through various layers, fluids and states that exist within our earth and within ourselves, we widen our link with our large living home who sustains us. Combining movement in depth (also known as authentic movement), practices of mindfulness, and non-dominant hand writing/ drawing, we sense and listen for our connection. In this workshop we make space to be with and grieve all that has and is being lost on our earth, across species and ancestors, opening ourselves to new futures. Please wear comfortable, loose fitting clothes, no prior experience necessary.

Rania Lee Khalil works in performance and moving image for live audiences. Her artworks reflect on the beauty and disappearance of indigenous plant, animal and human (culture)s. Her most recent work, the Third World Ecology Trilogy reflects on interconnections between radical African independence movements, ecology and third world feminism. The daughter of Egyptian immigrants to the States, Khalil resided in Cairo, Egypt from 2007 to 2016 and has since returned to Brooklyn NY where she works and lives with her partner and daughter. She is presently completing a practice based doctorate at the University of Arts Helsinki / Theatre Academy and is a member of the part time faculty of the MFA program at Parsons, The New School. www.ranialeekhalil.net

Pleasure Boundary Layer – bryophyte moss movement & improvisation practice. In the tangled history of multispecies life on earth, moss was one of the first plants to make the jump from water to land, approximately 4.7 million years ago. They are still here – we will take slow time to listen to them! Our bodies, cells, fascia, muscles and bones will explore the boundary layer where earth and atmosphere meet, encountering urban moss’s habitat and intelligence, language and presence. We will start with micro-movements and with the breath and touch of our hands to awaken our substrates and move into new territories – becoming vague and firm, moist and patient, sensual and ready. Exploring the range of possibilities in space, attempting connections we have never tried before – Bartenieff Fundamentals Movement and Improvisation are underlying support systems to connect our bodies in motion to moss teachings about waiting, surviving desiccation, and thriving. The 90 minute class will have two breaks of approximately 10-minutes each for ’reflection writing as hydration’ using the shared chat feature to expand each other’s being through written language. To prepare for the class, please take the time to meet a neighborhood moss and attune with them. Go to https://multispecies.care/protocol-summer-01/ and follow the prompt and instructions.

With spontaneous plants as her guides, collaborators and teachers, andrea haenggi (CH/USA) ’s eco-social art and movement practice, Ethnochoreobotanography, uses embodied fieldwork, dance, written poetic scores, and performance to explore multispecies care, labor, feminism, toxicity, land and belonging in the face of man-made climate change to generate new local knowledge, relationships and communication with Others. She is co-founder of the Environmental Performance Agency collective and, as a somatic dance practitioner, is on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Her sensual-bodily-intimate-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans. weedychoreography.com & environmentalperformanceagency.com

The two earlier Think-Act Gatherings and this symposium are supported by the Eco-Arts Think-Act Tank from the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the University of Michigan’s Departments of English, Dance, Theatre, Initiative on Disability Studies, Graham Sustainability Institute and the Program in the Environment, in collaboration with the Black Earth Institute. Symposium co-directors: Catherine Fairfield and Petra Kuppers

Reading Preparation for the Symposium:

Material for Syrus Marcus Ware: Antarctica (from Practices of Hope issue, About Place Journal)

Material for Stephanie Heit (Ecotone essay: Hurricane Poetics and Crip Psychogeographies)

Material for Petra Kuppers: Preface of Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Encounters, forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press (in packet, available by request)

Material for Megan Kaminski: Pussy Toes/Prairie Divination Deck (from Practices of Hope issue, About Place journal) , also material in packet, available by request.

Material for Bronwyn Preece: essay from Journal of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts (in packet, available by request)

Material for Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren: At Water’s Edge/Afro-Asian Futurism (from Practices of Hope issue, About Place journal)

Material for Rania Lee Khalil: essay from Journal of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts (in packet, available by request)

Material for andrea haenggi: moss protocol

Original planning for the EcoSomatics Symposium April 2020, derailed by COVID19, included here for documentation/transparency

Call for Proposals: Ecosomatics, near Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 22-25 2020

This symposium has been COVID-19’ed, of course. We are cancelled. Hopefully, we will grow some new shoots in the Fall – stay tuned for news! A beautiful collection of essays and art from the artists assembled here is forthcoming in the Journal of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts, 2021, special issue on EcoSomatics.

A CSPA convergence

We are inviting contributions to a three-day residential symposium at the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute in Michigan (April 22rd to 25th 2020), funded and supported by the University of Michigan (Departments of English, Dance, Theatre, National Center for Institutional Diversity, Initiative on Disability Studies, Graham Sustainability Institute and the Program in the Environment) in collaboration with the Black Earth Institute.

We are looking for: engagements with Body/World in movement, in touch and sense, in somatic play, technique, repetition and training, in relationship. We welcome full-mouthed messy matter and fleshy multispecies engagement across and beyond boundaries. We hope to shape a complex tool-set for living in a changing natural world which impacts people differently, dependent on histories of violence and their attendant environmental effects.

The symposium invites creators/critics of performance, movement, somatic training, writing, and visual/social practice related to emergent genres such as solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-arts, and interspecies dialogue, and their relationships to social justice organizing and experimental practice. The academic aims of this project make interventions into disabled futurities (Kafer, 2014), kinship networks (Haraway, 2016), and organizing (brown, 2017), and extend the discussions begun in our Movement, Somatics and Writing symposium (2010) and in the collection Somatic Engagement (Kuppers, ed., Chainlinks, 2011).

The symposium hopes to be a training ground and a research site where we figure out how participatory and artistic practices can allow us to feel things and livelinesses differently, and how we can invent new appreciation and embodiment practices for human and other eco-diversities. We will be in praxis together. Thus, we are not looking for papers, finished performances, portfolios, or readings; we plan to experiment. Come and share the excitement of your creative and critical research, and present an (indoor or outdoor) generative workshop, exercise, or technique session based on your passions. Keep in mind that our host is a nature center, environmental education center, and biological field station, and won’t have particular performance technologies. We will provide disability access (please let us know of your needs).

Deadline: August 1st 2019 (participants will be informed of acceptance by September 11^th).

Selected participants have the opportunity to be published in our “Ecosomatics” issue of the Journal of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts.

Participants will receive free room and board at the Institute, and up to $250 as partial reimbursement for travel expenses.

Application Process:

Please send the following to petra@umich.edu and cvfair@umich.edu:

A CV, a sample of your writing (creative, experimental, performative, or critical), and a brief statement about why and how you would like to participate. You can also send URLs etc. for performance or visual arts material.

We are looking forward to hearing from you,

Catherine Fairfield and Petra Kuppers (Symposium Directors)

November 2019:

Confirmed Participants:

Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. In all of her work, she enjoys exploring the seamlessness of dance, ethnography, pedagogy, and the the politics and poetics of writing in making community across the boundaries of institutional spaces and disciplinary mandates.

Angela Hume, assistant professor of English and creative writing at University of Minnesota, Morris, is currently at work on a critical book about poets’ and poetry’s relationship to radical women’s and LGBTQ+ health movements. Her full-length poetry book is Middle Time (Omnidawn, 2016) and a new chapbook, Meat Habitats (DoubleCross), will be out in 2019.

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Ph.D., Director, Folded Paper Dance and Theatre (Hong Kong/Seattle), creates work that links heritage, performance and ecology across geographical locations. Her recent work, At the Water’s Edge (Maryland Institute College of Art) on climate change will be expanded into a set of traveling workshops and portable performances in Hong Kong and India. A Fulbright-Nehru Scholar (2017-2018, Kerala), she is currently developing her research on Traveling Exchanges into a series of articles and performance projects as well as serving as the inaugural editor of Journal of Performance and Cultural Studies (The Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia). Kanta cannot join us due to disruptions because of coronavirus. We will reschedule her visit for a fourth Eco-Arts meeting in Fall 2020.

Symposium Fellows:

Megan Milks writes experimental prose and criticism. Their current fiction projects explore queer environments, cross-species exchange, and fantasy as a tool for imagining new forms of intimacy and embodiment. Their first book, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, an exploration of queer/trans adolescence through an array of narrative genres, won the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Award and was named a Lambda Literary finalist. Milks is also the recipient of the 2019 Lotos Foundation Prize in Fiction Writing. Their work as editor includes The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011-2013 and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. They have published criticism in 4Columns and other venues, and currently teach writing at The New School.

Edgar Fabián Frías (they/them) is a nonbinary, queer, indigenous (Wixárika) and Latinx interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and somatic psychotherapist. Their work traverses academic, social, historical, and relational planes, building bridges and weaving webs. Their work has been shown at The Gilcrease Museum, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Vincent Price Art Museum, Human Resources, Machine Project, SOMArts, ESMoA, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Recess Gallery, Pieter Performance Space, and PAM Residencies. Frías is currently participating in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Local Participants:

Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. https://stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com/

Conference Directors:

Catherine Fairfield is a PhD candidate in English & Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her BA in English at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include environmental humanities, feminist theory, and experiential education. Her dissertation explores the role of literature in how we learn to sustain, care for, and survive with our material environments. When not writing or teaching, Catherine likes to learn about the world through bird-watching and sketching her dog, Gracie.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UM, faculty on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias, and co-director of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. She is a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute (2018-2020), and a 2019/2020 Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at UM’s Institute for the Humanities, with her new book project, “Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Experiments.” https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/

Eco-Arts Think/Act Tank: 2019 Gatherings

All events are part of the Eco Arts Think/Act Tank, dir. Petra Kuppers, funded by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, University of Michigan, with support from the Black Earth Institute. ASL is provided at Friday evening show, all spaces are wheelchair accessible, please contact organizer for any other access needs (by November 10th).

(image from previous showing)

Image: Sunaura Taylor: Self-Portrait with Manatee, as seen in DiPietra’s performance The Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio (image description: two figures hovering in a color field, both with hanging circular appendages. One is grey and looks like a manatee, one is a human figure with breasts)

Images from Ypsilanti performance night:

Amber DiPietra in motion, in a bathing suit and on her scooter, in front of hanging legs/fins from Sunaura Taylor‘s manatee/human image, projected behind her.

Bree Gant with her water altar, in a movement position, leg lifted, with multiple jars and a small sailing ship on her altar, a garland of painted mussels in her hand.

Program Overview (see below for more info)
All events are free (for all but the Friday night performance, please register at petra@umich.edu)

Thursday November 21^st

11-12.30 Turtle Disco Goes Jurassic. A Playshop with Petra Kuppers. Natural History Museum, University of Michigan

6-8, Contemplative Dance and Writing Practice with Stephanie Heit,
Riverside Arts Studio 2, 76 N Huron St, Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197

Friday November 22^nd

11.30-12.30: Paper Workshop, Ypsilanti Public Library, Michigan Avenue, Ypsilanti
Sarah Ensor and Petra Kuppers

2-4.30, Sound Wandering Workshop with Rebecca Caines, Regina, Canada
Dance Studio, Riverside Arts Center, Ypsilanti

6-8, Riverside Arts Center Gallery, Ypsilanti
Gallery Visit, Way Opens Exhibit (for a review/description, see here), a disability arts and culture exhibition with Performances (performances start at 6.30 in the Off Center space, Riverside Arts Center, with ASL interpretation):

Bree Gant, Detroit: Otherlogue. A performance exploring the relationship between ritual and mental health for Black womenfolx

Amber DiPietra, Florida: The Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio. Humans, manatees, embodiment, somatics, disability, sensual labor

Saturday November 23rd

2-4: Paper Workshop
Turtle Disco, Ypsilanti
Stephanie Heit (poetry), Amber DiPietra (hybrid memoir/essay), Charli Brissey (dance writing) and Catherine Fairfield (academic chapter)

Friday night performers: Bree Gant and Amber DiPietra

More Information about our sessions:

11-12.30 Turtle Disco Goes Jurassic. A Playshop with Petra Kuppers. Natural History Museum, University of Michigan

In this session, Petra will lead physical engagements with space and time around dinosaurs and mastodons.

Thursday, 6-8, Contemplative Dance and Writing Practice with Stephanie Heit
Riverside Arts Studio, Studio 2, Ypsilanti

In this practice, we will create a laboratory of delight: move together and apart in improvisational play, awaken the senses through freewrites, witness the breath in meditation, tend to self and community. Take a mini-retreat with this practice to cultivate creative self-care and inquiry.

No experience necessary, all bodyminds welcome, disability culture friendly. Bring writing/art materials you desire (journal, pen, colored pencils, etc.). Dress in layers to support movement and stillness.

Friday 11.30-12.30: Paper Workshop, Ypsilanti Public Library, Michigan Avenue, Ypsilanti: Sarah Ensor and Petra Kuppers

In this session, Sarah Ensor and Petra Kuppers will share manuscripts-in-progress. Sarah’s piece will be from “Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity,” and Petra will workshop the opening of The Sturgeon, a disability-culture focused speculative work set along the St. Lawrence Waterway.

Friday, 2-4.30, Sound Wandering with Rebecca Caines
Riverside Arts Studio, Dance Studio, Ypsilanti

This workshop will investigate the notion of “Wandering” as a critical and creative practice, with a focus on environmental listening and sounding. Wandering is a concept that includes dreaming, private thoughts and intimacies, and indicates public practices of movement through controlled and controlling spaces. The challenge for scholars, artists, and humans, is how to support wandering practices that exceed, elude, and resist inscription and control.

Drawing from theoretical and creative practice in acoustic ecology and sound walking, disability performance, community performance, site-specific performance and critical studies in improvisation, this practice-based research asks wanderers to find ways to entangle their listening bodies in the environment. It aims to find ways to query how we can balance the discovery of lived experiences with impulses to surveil and control, and queries the embodiment of power, exclusion, and difference as it is read in public spaces. In particular it asks how wandering might reconnect us to each other and the land in a time of climate emergency.

Participants should be ready to move through an accessible indoor and outdoor space, and will be invited to share their experiences of the spaces (and their own remembered places) through physical movement and listening exercises, touching and sounding objects and landscape, creation and projection of image and text onto the landscape with handheld projectors, and group discussion.

Caines will also share work-in-progress research on her current sound wandering project in Whitehorse, Canada, and the wider national project “MultiPLAY” that brings improvising artists and communities together through digital play.

Friday, 6-8, Riverside Arts Center, Ypsilanti

Gallery Visit to the Ways Open Exhibit, a disability arts and culture exhibition
with performances by Amber DiPietra and Bree Gant, (performances start at 6.30 in the Off Center space, Riverside Arts Center):

Bree Gant: Otherlogue is a suite of performances and installations exploring the relationship between ritual and mental health for Black womenfolx, in both public and private spaces.

Amber DiPietra: The Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio
Can theater be experienced as bodywork? Will it be liberatory, for both the manatees and us, to return to and remain at sea level? In the Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio, diverse bodies and abilities float into social and ecological sculptures.

The piece draws on the work of physically integrated dance companies like Heidi Latsky Dance of NYC and Karen Peterson Dancers of Miami; performance art groups such as The Olimpias Collective and Sins Invalid; Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present”, and many others in the disability culture movement and somatic arts fields. Painter and animals rights activist Sunaura Taylor’s oil on canvas, “Self-Portrait with Manatee” made the piece ekphrastically possible.

Saturday, 2-4: Paper Workshop:
Turtle Disco, College Heights, Ypsilanti
Stephanie Heit (poetry), Amber DiPietra (essay/memoir), Charli Brissey (dance/hybrid writing) and Catherine Fairfield (academic chapter)

Biographies:

Dr. Rebecca Caines is Associate Professor in Creative Technologies, in Interdisciplinary Programs in the Faculty of MAP at the University of Regina. Her artistic practice, teaching and written research crosses between community-engaged art, creative technologies (including sound art, new media, and augmentation), contemporary performance and improvisation, and site-specific art practices. Her recent practice-based research projects include Community Sound [e]Scapes: Northern Ontario, a collaborative sound art, video and new media project in remote First Nations communities. She has completed large-scale community-based sound art, performance, and interdisciplinary art projects in Australia, Northern Ireland, Canada, China and the Netherlands, and she has her work published in journals such as Performance Research, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and M/C: Journal of Media and Culture. The anthology she co-edited with Ajay Heble, entitled Spontaneous Acts: The Improvisation Studies Reader, was published by Routledge in 2015. She has just completed a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and is currently working on a new book on improvisation, community, and creative technologies, for Temple University Press, for the new book series entitled “Insubordinate Spaces.”

Amber DiPietra is a bodyworker, somatic sex educator, poet, performance artist, and community organizer. Her one-woman show, the “Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio” premiered at the Tampa International Fringe Festival in 2018. In 2013, she founded the Tampa Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. Her book Waveform, with collaborator Denise Leto, came out in 2011. You can find other writing by Amber in Beauty Is a Verb: the New Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), Somatic Engagement (Chain Links Press), and in various online journals. Follow her projects on thebodypoetik.com

Sarah Ensor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on two book projects, Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment, which considers how the figure of the spinster – and a spinsterly literary aesthetic – can help both to identify and to remedy the theoretical impasses that divide queer theory from ecocriticism, and Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity, which takes a range of queer practices characterized by temporariness and provisionality as inspiration for a model of environmental care that brackets questions of longevity and allows us to glimpse the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.

Catherine Fairfield is a PhD candidate in English & Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her BA in English at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include environmental humanities, feminist theory, and experiential education. Her dissertation explores the role of literature in how we learn to sustain, care for, and survive with our material environments.

Bree Gant is a Detroit bred multidisciplinary artist and photographer reimagining African diasporan visual culture. After graduating from Howard University in 2011 with a BA in Film, she returned home and began shooting the underground art and hip hop scenes. Gant’s street style blogging with Rock City Lookbook led to pop up activations at the Detroit Design Festival ‘14 and Allied Media Conference 2014-16. In 2016, Gant received a Detroit Narrative Agency Seed Grant to produce a webseries about riding the bus, and won a Knight Arts Challenge Matching Grant to produce a suite of dance concept videos. Gant is currently a Teaching Artist in Residence with Detroit Future Schools.

Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. Poetry from her current project Psych Murders, a hybrid memoir poem, appears in the Zoeglossia disability poetry anthology, We Are Not Your Metaphor (Squares and Rebels, 2019) and in Bombay Gin, Anomaly, In Corpore Sano, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a community arts space, with her partner and collaborator, Petra Kuppers.

Petra Kuppers is an internationally active disability culture activist, a community performance artist, Artistic Director of The Olimpias performance research collective, and a Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Petra grounds her work in site-specific performance and disability culture methods. She has written academic books on disability arts, dance and somatic poetics, and medicine and performance, and she is currently working on Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Experiments. Her Community Performance: An Introduction (originally 2007, reissued in 2nd edition in 2019) is a foundational text in the field. Her creative books include the queer/crip speculative short story collection Ice Bar (2018), and the forthcoming ecopoetry collection Gut Botany (2020). She is a fellow of the Black Earth Institute, an ecopoetic community that re-forges the links between art and spirit, earth and society.

Intensive 1: April 2019

Think/Act/Tank/Eco/Arts: Embodiment and Environmental Art Practice

Funded by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, University of Michigan

This Think-Act Tank lies at the conjunction of queer ecopoetics, disability studies, critical race studies, indigenous studies, and environmental studies. The group wants to learn from each other about disability cultural methods, indigenous art and world making, African-American performance approaches, and more. Together, they want to shape a complex tool-set to approach living in a changing natural world which impacts people differently, dependent on histories of violence and their attendant environmental effects. How do our different thinking and acting methods prepare us for change, and how can we teach about these methods together?

(paper and workshop descriptions below)

Contact: Lead Faculty Petra Kuppers, petra@umich.edu

Tuesday April 9^th

All Tuesday events at Turtle Disco, Ypsilanti

Paper workshops 4 – 5.30, Paper Discussion, with Catherine Fairfield (UM English/WS PhD student), Charli Brissey (UM Dance Department faculty) and Petra Kuppers (UM English/WS faculty).

Contemplative Movement & Writing Practice, led by Stephanie Heit, 6-8 pm

Wednesday, April 10^th

Generative Poetry Workshop 10-11.15 am, Arboretum Reader Center, Burnham House, with Queer/Feminist/Eco/Arts class. Special guest: poet Denise Leto

Ecopoetics: Public Reading, 11.30-12.45, Arboretum Reader Center, Burnham House, featured reader Denise Leto, with Stephanie Heit, Samantha Adams, Katarina Bishop, and Sally Clegg.

Two hour-long Movement Workshops 4.30 – 7.00: 2415 Walgreen, North Campus:

Grounding and Shaping with Sound and Movement with Anita Gonzalez and

Improvisation for Precarious Times with Charli Brissey

Think/Act/Tank/Eco/Arts: Embodiment and Environmental Art Practice

Paper Descriptions:

Catherine Fairfield:

This paper is drawn from my dissertation and will be presented at the Animal Remains Conference at the University of Sheffield. I explore three contemporary North American novels by women writers in which more-than-human beings (butterflies, a plastic bag, and a spaceship) make unexpected migrations to non-native habitats. My readings ask how the writers intervene into the discourse of environmental crisis that is riddled with uncertainty by putting non-traditional knowledge practices and embodied experience in conversation with scientific debates.

Charli Brissey:

In this paper Charli Brissey will share excerpts from a current manuscript titled “Dancing at the End of the World: Choreographies of Time and Uncertainty.” This experimental text integrates personal anecdote, speculative fiction, and engagement with discourse in new materialisms and transgender theory to interrogate the ways in which bodily and environmental constitutions are co-produced through on-going entanglements of matter, form, language, and affect.

Petra Kuppers:

Petra will share an excerpt from her forthcoming poetry book, Gut Botany, which describes the experiences of a disabled white settler woman as she communes with insects, mushrooms and celluloid, in courtrooms, pubs, and discos. And she will share “Salamander Love,” flash fiction about crips outside, from her new hybrid work, What Would the Octopus Do?

Workshop Descriptions:

Contemplative Movement & Writing Practice with Stephanie Heit

Improvisation for Precarious Times with Charli Brissey

In this workshop we will work through individual and collective movement scores to research the ways in which we negotiate power structures, uncertainty, anxiety, habits, desire, nervousness, and excitement all at the same time. Through embodied thinking we will examine how to collectively sustain our practice when the infrastructure we are relying on begins to fail, break down, or transform completely.

Grounding and Shaping with Sound and Movement with Anita Gonzalez

Gonzalez considers how the earth initiates and dictates movement, forcing resistance and imparting memory. Working with paradigms of indigenous connections to soil and sovereignty, we will move with and against the groundedness of gravity and explore how forced migrations away from the earth sculpt movements within several cultural contexts.

Biographies

Charli Brissey is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and teacher who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, language, instincts, and ecosystems. Their research integrates studies in choreography, feminist theory, technology, and science. Brissey has been creating performances, installations, experimental videos, and written scholarship for over seventeen years, and has been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues nationally and internationally.

Anita Gonzalez (Ph.D. U of Wisconsin, 1997) is Professor of Theatre and Interim Chair of the Department of Dance at the University of Michigan where she also leads the Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies minor. She directs, devises and writes dance theatre works. Her performance research and publication interests are in the way in which performance reveals histories and identities in the Americas and in transnational contexts. She views theatrical practice as a laboratory for artists and audiences to explore new ways of interacting and considering world issues at a personal level. Gonzalez is co-editor of the new Dance in Dialogue series at Bloomsbury Press. She edited Black Performance Theory with Tommy DeFrantz and her monograph Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality is the result of a research fellowship in “Race, Politics, and Performance” at University of Texas at Austin. Her recent essays about maritime performance have been published in Theatre Research International and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater.

Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She is bipolar and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System 2017), explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. In her forthcoming chapbook, Water Margins (ReStory Nation 2019), water is at stake amidst climate change.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and Professor of English and Women’s Studies, with dry appointments in the schools of Art and Design, and Theatre and Dance. She is also the Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias, and currently a poetry fellow of the Black Earth Institute. Her academic books include Somatic Engagement, Find a Strange and Twisted Shape: Disability Culture and Community Performance, and The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Arts.

This Think/Act/Tank’s outside guest: Denise Leto

Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, writer, editor and dance dramaturge. Most recently she collaborated on the dance performance Bluets #1-40 which premiered at the University of Santa Cruz and the Joseph Good Theater in San Francisco. She wrote the poetry book for the multigenre performance Your Body is Not a Shark exploring feminist embodiment and disability poetics (North Beach Press). She is currently collaborating on a site-writing and ecopoetic work entitled “The Baylands Poetry Project.” Her poems are forthcoming in Quarterly West.

Leto writes about her current research in the Bay Area:

“My site-writing, poetry, visual art and practice-based research project—partly in collaboration with the poet and musician Pat Reed—involves an extensive exploration of the San Francisco Bay in relation to margins and shorelines, ideas of loss and emergence, notions of accessibility and inaccessibility within a framework of ecopoetics and disability poetics. I want the new work to subvert ideas of the pristine outdoors, mystical art manifestations, perceptions of corporeal risk, and the oft seen triumphalist image of disabled bodies in nature.

I engage with various bayland geographies: wildlife preserves, marshlands, ports, peninsulas, landfills, marinas, nature studies centers, and public access within modes of artistic connection/disconnection in relation to diminishing habitat, urban interdependency, environmental destruction and restoration, gentrification, via intersectionality and questioning mobility. Surrounding the largest estuary in western North America, I will focus on relatively remote, infrequently traveled areas juxtaposed with popular, congested places.

Within a matter of scale: the largess of climate change and the minutiae of a single mudflat are of concern. In working directly with the baylands: reeds, shells, kelp, litter, driftwood, etc., I navigate open space and enclosure. Tides and meteorological events are as much a part of the necessary reading as are books and maps. Writing and poetic experiments with close engagement to the found objects in these various locations unfold with chance and choice. Awareness of the beautiful and contentious surroundings highlights the formative social and political issues.

The continued impact of human activity further devastates spaces that are already devastated. The medicalization and commodification of the disabled body moving in space and time encounters the mechanization and privatization of land and sea bodies moving in relation to organic structure, artifice and zyborgic permutations. In my project, definitions of constructed nature and “wild” nature intersect with and critique definitions of constructed bodies and “pure” bodies. Further, ideas of disability as an “otherness” in opposition to nature and accessibility as a bestowed offering occludes multiple ways of being with and working in land and waterscapes.”

About Think-Act Tanks, NCID:
“Think-Act Tanks comprise a new and innovative initiative that brings together diversity scholars to address some of the most pressing social issues in our society. By mobilizing multi-disciplinary, -institutional, and -generational collaborative research teams, Think-Act Tanks seek to advance diversity scholarship that has a public impact.”

Earlier 2018/19 Think-Act Tank Eco Arts Guests included Margaret Noodin, Meghan Moe Beitkins, DJ Lee.

Recent Publications

About Petra

Gut Botany

Ice Bar: Queer/Crip Speculative Stories

Asylum Stories

EcoSomatics Symposia

Practices of Hope Reading Series

Painting Practice

Events