Thursday, October 12

• 5-6pm Petra Kuppers & Diverse Disability Networks: Wheelchair Procession along Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, (we will start from The Sanctuary for Independent Media @ 3361 6th Ave. and journey to Freedom Square at the intersection of 6th Ave & 101st St.)
• 6-7pm Community meal
• 7-9pm Petra Kuppers, Dream Performance/Workshop, the Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave.

In this two sessions, Petra will take participants on journeys: in the first, on a literal journey, as we will walk the trail and engage in a number of easy 7-minute improvised dances together. Our dances might develop from touching a leaf, or from letting fingertips rest on the soil.

In The Sanctuary, Petra will use the inspiration from the trail procession to improvise a movement meditation that connects us to the land and its histories and futures. You can engage this meditation in stillness, lying on the floor or sitting in a chair, or you can dance freely in space – your choice. Bring comfy clothes, and maybe a blanket. If accessible to you, also bring writing or drawing material, so we can have a harvesting session after the dream journey, for you to chronicle your experience.

This workshop is a development from Petra’s Starship Somatics classes – a modality she developed during the lockdown of COVID. Starship Somatics engage our bodymindspirits as portals, as trance-mobiles that honor pasts and jet us toward speculative futures, among the stars or deep into the earth, in flux and transformation.

This event is preceded by a presentation by Kuppers on October 11 at EMPAC. Kuppers’s Troy engagement is a collaboration with EMPAC and iEAR Presents! and is made possible in part by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.Co-sponsored with Deep Listening/ ISATMA (Assistive Technologies for Music and Art Symposium)Conference; the Independent Living Center of the Hudson Valley; NATURE Lab/ People’s Health Sanctuary.

Bio:

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library, and won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. In 2022, she was named a Dance/USA Fellow, and in 2023, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Petra is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with Stephanie Heit. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. www.petrakuppers.com