(Extra)Terrestrial Crip Drifts: Dance Videos
Crip Drifts are methods for moving through the world as a disabled artist living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing in a world that is likewise disabled, compromised, thriving in complexity. Crip Drifts are also some of the motors of Petra’s eco soma investigations.
Crip Drift Description:
Join in a Crip Drift: a gentle engagement with site either indoors or outdoors (depending on the weather). We will go on a dream journey and move meditatively, respectfully, and playfully in response with and to the urban architecture, air, ground and land that surrounds and supports us. No experience is necessary; all are welcome. You are welcome to participate or to witness.
One of the dissemination methods of this work is through videodance, a medium Petra has explored since the late 1990s. The videodance work that emerges from Turtle Disco/The Olimpias is low-budget/low-tech, community driven, and celebrates co-presence for people who cannot be in long rehearsals, can't commit to long production arcs, or specific touring schedules.
2024 Published Crip Drifts Videos
The 2024 Crip Drifts were supported by an Anonymous Was a Woman/NYFA Environmental Arts Grant. Thank you for the support!
Crip Tree Poem, 3.35 mins, 2024
A video poem engagement with an Aleppo Pine in the harbor of Cassis, France; a crip drift, with attention to mobility, disability, interdependence, temporality, pulse and sun song. This videopoem won the Juror's Award of the 2024 WEAD, the Women Eco Artists Dialog, annual exhibit.
(published in Denver Quarterly’s online site: https://fivesquarterly.com/petra-kuppers/)
Tree bark, peeling, with the words "Crip Tree Poem"
Skins. A Crip Drift in Leadville, Colorado. 3.23 mins, 2024
In this videopoem, two humans and a tree dance, feel, see and explore together in Leadville, Colorado, a 10,000-foot-high city and Superfund site surrounded by high piles of mining waste that sit upon the water supply.
This video emerged out of a crip drift, a sensing/being/in space, in a psychogeographical exploration, shifting in the slow timeframes of remediation and toxin transformation. Stephanie, a mad activist, electro-shock survivor, poet and dancer, and Petra, a scooter user living with chronic pain, used gentle, accessible dance and poetry to explore the city of Leadville in Colorado. They danced with mining equipment outside the National Mining Hall of Fame, with closed-down mining entrances, and near the turquoise acidic tailing ponds of Climax, a giant molybdenum mine in the mountains. They use the touch/view chiasm of video to record this dance with an aspen tree.
(Published in Unearthed, the literary journal of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry: https://unearthedesf.com/skins-crip-drift-leadville-petra-kuppers/)
Two hands, one wearing a ring that has an industrial bolt in the middle, touching the eye wound of an Aspen tree, and the words 'gold coiling' in the caption.
A Huron River Séance: Psychogeographic Performances by the River With Turtle Disco, 3.23 mins, 2024
This video poem documents a Crip Drift by the Huron River, in Ann Arbor, part of a historical investigation into local soils, materials, historical change, toxic loads and reclamations.
For these sessions, local people came together with Petra Kuppers to engage in psychogeography: to drift on the land and by the water, to let ourselves be shifted and shaped by the energies we found.
In this video, we found ourselves responding to the PFAS (eternal chemical elements) that waft like a plume beneath Ann Arbor, and that threaten our ground water, as well as by the memories of the toxic loads the Huron River carried over time and into all our futures. Along the river, we danced and touched soil, water, and memory.
Published through the Ann Arbor Public Library Bicentennial site:
A light-skinned person is kneeling on a wooden pier, hand in the water, ripples drifting outward. The words "entangle with sticky water" on the screen.
Part of the same query, Psychogeographic Performances by the River With Turtle Disco: Crip Drifts in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti, with full audio description:
Ypsilanti, Michigan: Green Bone Child, 3.25, 2024
https://vimeo.com/990936234/0cde037f5b?share=copy
A crip drift at the Huron River with a poem from Diver Beneath the Street (ecopoetry/true crime collection). Performers: Marc Arthur and Charli Brissey, the river and found footage glimpses of its creatures. Dir/edit: Petra Kuppers/The Olimpias Disability Culture Production 2024
Audio Description link: https://soundcloud.com/petra-kuppers/green-bone-child-video-poem-audio-description
A person standing in the flowing river, next to a flowering plant. The words "to dissolve" on the screen.
Expanded Cinema and Crip Drifting
One aspect of these cinematic Crip Drift works is an interest in expanded cinema and access: from virtual reality/immersion work to alternative presentation models and audiencing for film dance (for an early example of this kind of crip/tech work, see this report on a collaboration with SMARTlab at Central St. Martins, UK and the Center for Advanced Technology, NYU: Sirens, 2003).
In performance-based public presentations of the Crip Drift series (and in her Crip/Mad Archive Dances experimental documentary, 2024), Petra explores methods for engaging with the screen/embodiment limit. She does so in a number of different ways:
in a studio, dancing with the video beam, throwing shadows to allow spectators to break the cinematic stillness and to become active participants in score-based filmed performances.
exploring the trance intimacy of small (home) screens: laptops, zoom squares, the aloneness and alternative intensity of glitchy digital touch.
2023 Crip Drifts: Collaborations with Kym McDaniel
In 2023, Petra collaborated with fellow disabled dance artist and film maker Kym McDaniel on three videos that present different facets of these (extra)terrestrial crip drifts. Below, find information about these three videos and their screening sites.
Still Photo: A person in an icy landscape mounts the edge of a wheelchair ramp, cane and red barrier rail framing an orange down coat, cloudy skies.
On a Wheelchair Ramp in the Middle of Nowhere
On a Wheelchair Ramp in the Middle of Nowhere
Video, 2:17min, 2023
On a giant wheelchair ramp in somewhere Utah, two disabled dancers meet for a brief improvisation encounter. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan, for the Speculative Embodiment Working Group. A collaboration between Petra Kuppers & Kym McDaniel.
Still photo: Three people extend hands, touching with hand brace and gloves, a quirky smile, trees and mobility devices.
Link to 1 minute long trailer:
https://vimeo.com/833155532
Touching Time: Minnahanonck/Roosevelt Island
Video, 10:10min, 2023
Direction: Petra Kuppers // Camera, Edit, Sound: Kym McDaniel // Performers: Amy Ackerman, Stephanie Heit, Desiree Mwalimu, Mikel Mwalimu-Banks, Marina “Heron” Tsaplina, Petra Kuppers, and moira williams
A diverse cohort of disability artists in Lenape (Lenapehoking) Terrority (what is now known as New York City) come together for site-specific movement sketches on Minnahanonck (Roosevelt Island), a historical site of hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. Moving amongst ghosts of the past, the artists seek to reclaim geographic and ableist narratives of abuse and dysfunction. Nature, sculpture, and the water are collaborators as they move throughout the island, acknowledging the land and envisioning inclusive futures. Touching Time: Minnahanonck/Roosevelt Island was commissioned as part of the Disability History Handbook for the National Park Service (NPS), itself a collaborative venture between the NPS and the National Council on Public History (NCP). The video will be part of the digital version of the Handbook.
Thank you to: The Disability History Handbook Project, the National Park Service, the National Council on Public History, the Speculative Embodiment Working Group/ University of Michigan Arts Initiative, Dance/USA Fellowship, University of Utah Professional Development Fund
Still Photo: A 360 camera shot: a new earth in a future dawn, a dancer's arms extend outward/sidewards, trees and other movers huddle close. Emergence.
Link to 1-minute long trailer:
https://vimeo.com/867573691
Becoming Fossil
Becoming Fossil
Video, 13:20min, 2023
Direction: Petra Kuppers // Edit and Sound: Kym McDaniel // Camera: Petra Kuppers, John Campbell and Kym McDaniel // Additional Sound: Rebecca Caines // Performers: Rebecca Caines, John Campbell, Charli Brissey, Amy Ackerman, Stephanie Heit, Desiree Mwalimu-Banks, Mikel Mwalimu-Banks, Petra Kuppers, Kym McDaniel, Marina "Heron” Tsaplina, and moira Williams
Becoming Fossil invites viewers to become time travelers through kaleidoscopic sensations of touch and elemental change. Join in and travel backward and forward in time around our small precious planet. Ride the waves of climate emergencies, and experience both extinction and resiliency in human and more-than-human touches.Realized as part of DigiLabAiR “ON CLIMATE EMERGENCY”, digital artist-in-residence curated by Verena Stenke (EntrAxis e.V.) Co-funded by the European Union / Creative Europe Program and PAV Performance Art Video.
Additional thanks to: The School of Art, Media, Performance and Design, York University; Minor Research / Creation Fund; The Speculative Embodiment Working Group, University of Michigan Arts Initiative; ArtsEngine Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Grant Award, University of Michigan; Duderstadt Video Studio, University of Michigan, College of Fine Arts Development Fund, University of Utah
Multiple hands on wood growthlines, fossils and naked human bodies merging, 360 camera work: an earth globe, overlayed with the solarized face of a dancer, arms reaching out into hair (from Becoming Fossil)
Screening Histories/Festivals
In addition to the official screenings below, all three movies had various showings at artist residencies, Turtle Disco events, the Co-Dreaming symposium, class visits, and more - thank you to everybody who has helped us make these films by giving feedback and allowing us to grow.
On a Wheelchair Ramp in the Middle of Nowhere
Rogue Dance – Raleigh, NC
Spark Micro-Short Film Festival – Buffalo, NY
Pittsburgh International Dance Film Festival – Pittsburgh, PA
IMARP - Imagens em Movimento Videodança – São Paulo, BR
Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival – Los Angeles, CA
Pebbles Underground Film Festival – Toronto, CAN
Constructed Site Dance Film Festival – online & in person / Pittsburgh, PA
Disability Culture & Videodances – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Touching Time: Minnahanonck/Roosevelt Island
Feminist Border Arts Festival – Las Cruces, NM
Moonplay Cinema – Minneapolis, MN
Wicklow Screendance Lab – Wicklow, IE
Together Disability Film Festival – London, UK
Traces Film Festival – Northwestern University; Evanston, IL
The Film Collective Short Film Festival – [online], Bensalem, PA
International Portrait Film Festival – Sofia, BG
EXPS/SLC: Disability Currents – Salt Lake City, UT
Becoming Fossil
Official Selection at Ann Arbor Film Festival – Ann Arbor, MI
Crip'd Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments at Root Division – San Francisco, CA
The Portland EcoFIlm Festival – Portland, OR
Together Disability Film Festival – London, UK
Gallery Installation at DigiLabAiR | Emergencies of the Contemporary at Venice International Performance Art Week – Venice, Italy
Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival – Gainesville, FL
Shapeshifters Cinema – Oakland, CA
Frome International Climate Film Festival – Frome, UK
International Ecoperformance Film Festival
o Montfleuri sur Mer, Pinamar, AR
o Cine Satyros Bijou, São Paulo, BR
o National Center for Dance Bucharest, Bucharest, RO
o Brown Arts Institute, Providence, RI
Multiplié Dance Film Festival, Trondheim, Norway