Disability Arts & Culture Gathering: Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Turtle Disco, and Riverside Arts Center, Michigan

Join us for a weekend of disability culture arts-based research and community building, centered on twin inquiries of environmental and interspecies gentleness, and on mad memory and archival intermedial/technological play. 

October 31-November 3 2024

All public events either outdoors or masked, free

October 31, Thursday, 2-5pm: Matthaei Botanical Gardens, University of Michigan

Crip Drifts: Tree Engagements

Provisional Program (respectful and ideally plant-engaged Halloween costumes are welcome):

Welcome Invitation/Access Doula: moira williams

Contributions and performances by:

Kyle Whyte: Introduction to the Local Tree World

Petra Kuppers: Crip Drift (2.30pm and 4.30pm)

Ashwini Bhasi: Sasya Keralam: Visual poems of transplanted beings

Angela Schöpke Gonzalez: Bananabodies

Biba Bell and Christopher Woolfolk: Tree dances: becoming epiphyte

November 1, Friday: Turtle Disco, Ypsilanti (this is a much smaller, intimate event, for people who are part of the whole gathering)

5.00pm Thin Veils: Creative Sharing

Cynthia Ling Lee: crip time/moss time, video

moira williams: Carrying Breath Between Ancestors, video 

Workshops:

Orchid Tierney: Future Flora

Marc Arthur: Viral Drifting through Geologic Time

7pm: [Fireside] Crip Hangout Time 

Dance, Poems, Writing, Art Offerings by Gaya Lakshmi, Kate Tsuruharatani, Mitali Khanna Sharma, Liz Orvis, Stephanie Glazier, Gwynneth Van Laven, Planting Disabled Futures presentation

November 2, Saturday: 

PLEASE NOTE:

This virtual workshop is now happening on November 12th, at 5.30 ET (virtual): activist portrait drawing presentation/workshop + Flowers While We Are Living video with Syrus Marcus Ware

Hopefully, this will also allow us to extend our gathering energies beyond the US election period, into new futures.

NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE for Saturday and Sunday, and CHANGE of time on Saturday!

11am-1pm: Riverside Arts Center, 76 N Huron St, Ypsilanti, MI 48197

Opening Poem by Nazifa Islam

Mad Conductors Participatory Performance with Stephanie Heit & Alexis Riley 

Visual Art Slide by Jennifer Lickers 

Crip/Mad Archive Dances Screening with Petra Kuppers and many more 

November 3, Sunday, 11am-12.30pm: Riverside Arts Center, 76 N Huron St, Ypsilanti, MI 48197

Workshop "dancing st. elizabeth's" with Alexis Riley and Ali Pappa (documented by moira williams)

We are happy to welcome people joining from elsewhere. All Gathering events unspool in crip time, with rest and relaxation practices built in, from fireside hang-outs to watercolor/drawing playtime. For the smaller, in-between happenings, we ask for COVID tests and communally agreed masking procedures.

Please be in touch about any access provisions you require (ideally by October 15th for timely booking): petra@umich.edu.

Workshop/Performance Descriptions (so far):

Crip Drift with Petra Kuppers

Join in a gentle engagement with trees either indoors or outdoors (depending on the weather). We will go on a dream journey and move meditatively, respectfully, and playfully in response to trees that surround us and support us. Crip drifts are methods for moving through the world as disabled people living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing in a world that is likewise disabled, compromised, thriving in complexity. No experience is necessary, all are welcome. You are welcome to participate or to witness. This performance is part of a wider journey where the collaborators connect with disability organizations and environmental organizations to bring people together around specific trees in wildlands, urban landscapes, and nature centers, and where each visit culminates in a communal embodied dream journey/crip drift.

Bananabodies with Angela Schöpke Gonzalez is the third work in a series of investigations about the relationships between Cavendish bananas and a woman, and explores what it means to be in the performer's bananabody with chronic illness/disability.

Tree dances: becoming epiphyte with Biba Bell and Chris

Let’s become epiphyte. Let’s invite the outside in. Let’s collaborate amongst our non- and more-than-human companions. Let’s experiment with new modes of being, scaling to the tune of arboreal liveness. Epiphytes (air-plants who live in trees) offer a choreo-poetic figure who co-mingles with/in forest collectivity, and a mode of addressing one’s relationship to site distinct from parasitical properties of interruption, extraction, and noise. Where does this dance land? And, how does this dance land where? If, dancing in a forest and there is no one around, does it make a sound? 

Becoming epiphyte is a performance project led by the desire to re-frame theatrical conventions focused on the dancer to include a more-than-human forest scene, to excavate the charged nature of site, which, not unlike the body, enacts social projects of remembering and forgetting, of cultivation and wildness, of access and resistance. Calling upon a history of tree and forest defenders, tree-sitters, activists, and artists, we dance to remember their teachings.

Crip Time, Moss Time with Cynthia Ling Lee

A Dance Film. Reveling in micro-movement and lingering in moss-time, this dance film embodies gratitude to moss as beloved elder, as teacher of lessons in crip survivance: celebrate smallness. Practice patience. Grow only when there is enough resource. Nestle in the warmth and safety of the boundary layer. Survive in the most unexpected places.

Future Flora with Orchid Tierney

If Mad—with a capital M—signals a communal experience, then this guided workshop will take a Mad journey into the strange worlds of future flora, future thinking, and future bodies of liberation. Participants are invited to explore, communicate, and write poetry with plants, nature, and each other to explore expressions of future flora life in order to reimagine what is possible in the now.  Together, we will listen to what flora can teach us about collective spirits and agency as a form of community building in language. Bring your body-minds as we communicate with the green beings around us or just join us in quiet reflection.  

Viral Drifting through Geologic Time with Marc Arthur

Participants are invited to explore the rhythms of viral time, occupying the long temporality of ancient entities that appeared shortly after the first cellular life forms emerged while considering their relation to plant and rock life. Protozoan, fritillary, and sedimented are words that may capture the experience of this workshop. Objects will be available for participants to play and merge with.

Mad Conductors with Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley

Join us for a participatory performance that explores memory, remembering, and forgetting. How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? We'll explore improvisational scores that invite us to investigate and play through writing, movement, doodling, sound, and other mediums we invent. You are welcome to witness and/or to participate to whatever level you wish. We will work together to create a supportive space to tend ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.

Mad Conductors is a collaborative performance project directed by Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley that arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric medication brain zaps. It is an exploration of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being. What happens when energy is transferred? Who or what conducts the ensemble? What resources do mad ancestors and archives offer?

Crip/Mad Archive Dances with Petra Kuppers (and many others)

A screening of an experimental documentary with the same title. 35 mins, dir. Petra Kuppers, 2024. How do disabled and mad people survive, dance, insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain? This experimental documentary charts disability culture archives and embodied gestures of survival and creative expression. It draws on community with human and non-human others: media clips as performance gifts, archival footage from dance archives, environmental embedment and grounding in trees, water, desert and lakes. Together, we dance, and spring our binds. Please note: This experimental documentary shares instances of medical incarceration including insulin violence. It offers survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation. The film is fully subtitled in English. A full audio-description track is available on SoundCloud. The documentary uses “crip,” and “mad” as in-group signifiers, aware of stigma and histories.

dancing st. elizabeth’s workshop with Alexis Riley and Ali Pappa (with moira williams documenting)

Come immerse yourself in the archives of disability art! Together, we’ll explore “The Rorschach Ballet,” a dance piece created by disabled people held at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in 1957. After witnessing a video of the dance, we will then work together to create an improvised performance of our own, using our bodies and movements to play with projections of shadow and light. We’ll conclude with some time for quiet writing, doodling, and shared reflection.

This workshop is open to all. No previous experience or skill required. 

Bios (so far):

Organizers:

Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a shock/psych system survivor, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), invites readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. Website: https://stephanie-heit.com

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is German queer cis disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, 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 (2022, open access, winner of the ATHE 2024 book prize with distinction for Innovative Achievement). She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a current Just Tech Fellow, with her Planting Disabled Futures virtual reality project.

www.petrakuppers.com

Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white disabled psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary artist-scholar from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia).  Grounded in disability culture and rooted in feminist praxis, their work blends practice as research and applied theatre methods to center mad bodies as sources of pleasure, connection, and care. Her current performance series, The Mad Memory Project, applies this focus to the archives and spaces of medical incarceration. Recent writing and creative projects have been featured in Theatre Topics (2019), QT Voices (2022), Liminalities (2024). Alexis is currently a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan.

Special Guests:

Choreographer and scholar, Cynthia Ling Lee instigates queer, feminist-of-color, and crip interventions in the field of experimental performance. Trained in US postmodern dance and North Indian classical kathak, she is committed to intimate collaborative relationships and foregrounding marginalized voices and aesthetics. Her current work researches the intersections between dance, disability, and chronic illness. Cynthia is a member of the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based coalition of artists of color trained in South Asian dance whose work triangulates between art-making, activism, and theory. https://www.cynthialinglee.com/

Ali Pappa is an Austin-based musician, improviser, and arts administrator. They are a neurodivergent, disabled, trans non-binary person of color, and are naturally drawn to creating and performing works that reflect these lived experiences. These days, Ali leans into crip-time, focusing on his health, healing from burnout, and taking projects and collaborative experiences at a pace more in line with his values as a disabled anticapitalist. Their collaboration with Alexis Riley received a B. Iden Payne award for the University of Texas at Austin's kin song: ode to disability ancestors, a virtual performance ritual.

Syrus Marcus Ware (he/him) is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Syrus is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University. Using drawing, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist Culture. Syrus is also co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of the National Arts Centre. Syrus is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter- Canada and the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism. 

moira williams (they/them) is a disabled artist, disability cultural activist, access doula, curator and dreamer of Lenni Lenape, Kickapoo and Sami descent. Their porous ways of celebrating and being in relationship with their Indigenous and disabled ancestors, with the land and with their constellation of disabilities centers abundance rather than scarcity. moira’s ongoing co-creativity with water and people, unsettles ableist and ecological boundaries between bodies by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an expansion of Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy.” They do this as a way to open relational ways of being and thinking that include our bodymind-spirits, multispecies and mutual empathy. https://www.moira670.com/

Participants:

Noor Al-Samarrai is a poet and performer investigating the confluence between place and memory, and pursuing her MFA at University of Michigan. Since 2016, she has gathered oral histories with Iraqis in diaspora for a book-in-progress about the emotional cartography of Baghdad. Her first book, EL CERRITO (Inside the Castle, 2018) was recognized by the Arab American Book Awards, and Jonas Mekas called it “about the best piece of literature I have read in a long time.” 

Marc Arthur (he/him) is a research-based artist, writer, and educator whose current body of work investigates political encounters around the AIDS pandemic. His practice blends theatre, dance, and other forms to build new social and cultural worlds. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

https://marc-arthur.com/

Biba Bell is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and writer based in Detroit. Her current work focuses on arboreal relations through the lens of what she theorizes as epiphytic choreographies. She has danced for Walter Dundervill and Maria Hassabi, among others, and she earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University.

bibabell.com

Ashwini Bhasi is a bioinformatician and interdisciplinary artist from Kerala, India. Her hybrid work merges scientific data, poetry and visual art to explore the lived experience of chronic illness, trauma and disability. Her recent work can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Redivider, Frontier Poetry, RHINO and Honey Literary. MUSTH, the winner of the 2020 CutBank chapbook contest, is her first poetry collection.

Slade Billew is a physical theatre artist, fight and intimacy director, and somatic researcher. They are Associate Professor of Acting and Movement at Stephen F. Austin State University. Slade’s creative work explores collaborative creation practices in non-traditional spaces. They practice Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints and serve as a pedagogical consultant to the Six Viewpoints Institute. Their scholarship explores sports science, somatic practices, and martial arts as applied to acting pedagogy.

Danielle Blunt (she/they) is a disabled sex worker, artist, community organizer, public health researcher, and the co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, a collective of sex workers and accomplices working at the intersection of technology and social justice to interrupt state surveillance and violence facilitated by technology. Blunt is a 2023-2025 Social Science Research Council Just Tech Fellow and a Senior Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. She is working on a poetry collection about anesthesia, amnesia, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Stephanie Glazier’s manuscript Of Fish & Country was a finalist in the 2024 National Poetry Series, as well as in prizes at Arlie, Persea, Milkweed, and Perugia. Her poems and critical prose have appeared in the AlaskaQuarterly Review and Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and in Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations (Palgrave 2018).  She served as the poetry editor of Gertrude until the sunset of the journal in 2021. She lives and works in Detroit. 

Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Smartish Pace, The Rumpus, and Beloit Poetry Journal among other publications. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University.

Mitali Khanna Sharma (she/her) is a multimedia poet, dancer, educator, farmer, and graduate student at the University of Michigan. Mita's work draws from critical geography, medical humanities, and science/technology studies to trace entanglements of food, biodiversity, power, and care. A collection of her poems on mysticism, territories, and holy/hole-y bodies, Reliquary Bestiary, was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press this year. As a dancer, she is interested in both sharpness and softness, as well as experimenting with ways of performing while chronically ill.

Gaya Lakshmi (they/them) is a dancer, community healer, and facilitator in their second year of the Environmental Justice Master's program at The School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan. Gaya's work braids dance, gender studies, and political ecology with the goal of making visible the gendered technologies of caste oppression in India and the diaspora. As a healer and facilitator, they are deeply interested in building knowledge on culturally relevant practices of transformative justice, with a focus on somatic healing and generative conflict. 

Jennifer Lickers (she/they) is a visual artist and an enrolled band member of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory with ties to both Detroit, Michigan and Six Nations, Ontario. She grew up in the Detroit area and ended up in foster care at age 12. Later In life, after reconnecting with her First Nations family, she learned of her grandmother's placement in Canada’s residential school system and started finding parallels between her grandmother's past and her own experience in institutional group homes. She teaches drawing classes at Washtenaw Community College and Jackson College.

Laura Murphy, PhD, (she/her) is an expert on inclusive engineering design, supporting development of technology by centering disabled perspectives at every step in design processes. She consults with teams in academia, non-profits, and industry to help engineers think more strategically about the people impacted by design decisions. She also teaches graduate courses on equity-centered engineering and project-based design at the University of Michigan.

Liz Orvis is a Michigan writer and mental health advocate who lives with Bipolar 1, and who recently published her first book, I Can Do Hard Things, to support people with serious mental illness, and to make changes in legislation that will benefit people just like her. She is a participant in the Mad Conductors Project.

Nicolas Shannon Savard, PhD (they/them) is a queer-trans, neurodivergent-mad multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator whose work lives at the intersections of queer-feminist and disability performance; community-engaged artmaking; and consent-based, social justice-informed pedagogy. They are the host of Gender Euphoria, the Podcast, a series produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons. Since 2018, they have been touring their autobiographical solo shows, Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome and Un/Packing: A choose-your-own gender adventure, to colleges and fringe festivals across the Midwest.

Angela Schöpke Gonzalez (she/her) is a performance artist, choreographer, and researcher. She has developed works for the stage, public spaces, film, and opera at venues including HERE Arts Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Centro Nacional de la Cultura de Costa Rica, and others. Angela is completing a PhD in Information Science at the University of Michigan on how computing professionals and arts professionals can work together to mitigate algorithmic harm.

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar, whose interests extend from crip ecologies, Mad studies, critical plant studies, and Anglophone poetry. From Aotearoa New Zealand, her chapbook looking at the Tiny: Mad Lichen on the surfaces of reading connects lichens to Mad reading practices—an idea she extends in her current manuscript-in-progress, which links mental difference to the eco-poems of canonical figures, such as William, Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell. Tierney is a board member of Zoeglossia, a community of poets with disabilities, and a garden enthusiast. 

Kate Tsuruharatani (she/they) is a transgender dance artist and educator from Osaka, Japan & NYC. From Broadway to the Metropolitan Opera, her artistry is rooted in abundance, prioritizing softness and sensitivity over accumulation and virtuosity. Currently pursuing an MFA in Dance at the University of Michigan, she seeks to bring her voice and perspectives, supported by her Dhamma practice rooted in the Burmese Buddhist tradition.

Gwynneth VanLaven (she/they) is a multimedia artist, therapist-in-training, and disability justice activist. VanLaven received a BA from Knox College and MFA from George Mason University in Critical Art Practice. VanLaven taught at the School of Art at George Mason University until relocating to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gwynneth is now studying at the University of Michigan for a Master of Social Work. VanLaven also creates and leads for InterPlay (Body Wisdom, Inc.) and DanceAbility Detroit (Detroit Disability Power), inclusive forms of mind-body connection.

Kyle Whyte is the George Willis Pack Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Christopher Woolfolk Born and raised in Detroit, MI, Chris’ journey into the world of dance began at Wayne State University, where he switched from an engineering major to a dance education major and earned his Bachelor of Science in Dance Education. Mr. Woolfolk continues to explore opportunities to expand his artistic palette as he recently broke onto acting in a hit Afro futuristic Techno Choreopoem entitled Salt City created and written by Detroit poetry legend Jessica Care Moore and directed by Kadogo. Together with Ta’Rajee Omar, he co-founded the groundbreaking (Re)Claim Series, an innovative training platform delving into the multifaceted realms of identity, culture, and art and its importance and correlations to life.

With thanks:

The Crip Drift program is presented with support from an Environmental Arts Grant from Anonymous Was a Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts.

Mad Conductors and dancing st. elizabeth is presented through generous funding from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance's Research, Catalyze, Innovate grant.  

The symposium as a whole is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Surdna Foundation.