Focusing on the intersection of disability and artistic expression, this book challenges prevailing notions about disability in performance. Petra Kuppers, an acclaimed artist and theorist, examines how disabled performers confront stereotypes through various mediums including theatre, dance, and installations. By analyzing elements like freak show fantasies and medical theatre, she sheds new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics, highlighting the significance of lived experiences in shaping cultural narratives around disability.
Gut Botany charts my body / language living on indigenous land as a white
settler and traveler, Petra Kuppers writes in the notes of her new poetry
collection. Using a perfect cocktail of surrealist and situationalist
techniques, Kuppers submits to the work and to the land, moving through
ancient fish, wounded bodies, and the space around her.
In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures.0Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived experience and site-specific performance. Kuppers invites us to become moths, sprout gills, listen to our heart's drum, and take starships into crip time. And fantasy is central to these engagements: feeling/sensing monsters, catastrophes, golden lines, heartbeats, injured sharks, dotted salamanders, kissing mammoths, and more. Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel "environments," Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge.0Traditional somatics teach us how to fine-tune our introspective senses and to open up the world of our own bodies, while eco soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the reach between self, others, and the land. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a method that allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others
In this accessible introduction to the study of Disability Arts and Culture,
Petra Kuppers foregrounds themes, artists and theoretical concepts in this
diverse field.
In nineteen wildly imaginative and gemlike tales of reinvention and reclamation, Ice Bar offers us a world resembling our own, uncannily, but with both terrifying and reassuring differences. Kuppers is a writer of rare gifts, one who transports herself and her reader into visionary, complicated, but also utterly plausible places. With her empathy, combined with a piercing insight, we encounter through this work a world refusing to be set aside. Ice Bar's tales, like the best myths, both chill us and warm us as they expose our as-yet unexamined psyches, and reinventing our time, place, and positions in it. This book's insights are offered up by a rare talent, a serious and generous intelligence. These are the stories we have been waiting to read, by the writer we've long needed. Laura Kasischke, author of The Raising and Space, in Chains
A decaying psychogeography unfurls the landscapes of the 1967–69 Michigan
Murders, the 2019 Detroit serial killer, and the COVID-19 lockdown in this
visceral poetry collection. Author, performance artist, and disability culture
activist Petra Kuppers dissects traces of violence in the richness of the soil
while honoring lost community members.
Kniha Divadlo a zdravotné znevýhodnenie je súčasťou edície Divadlo &, ktorá skúma premenlivú interdisciplinárnu energiu divadla a performancie. Publikácia sa zaoberá málo reflektovaným vzťahom medzi umením, konkrétne divadlom, a problematikou zdravotného znevýhodnenia, ktoré sa môže prejavovať rôznymi spôsobmi, ako sú obmedzenia pohybu, deficity v zmyslovom vnímaní či zhoršené kognitívne schopnosti. Autorka sa zameriava na prístup ľudí s postihnutím k divadlu, a to nielen ako divákov, ale aj ako aktívnych účastníkov – hercov, autorov a ďalších. Okrem toho skúma texty svetovej dramatiky od antiky po súčasnosť, v ktorých sa objavujú postavy so zdravotným znevýhodnením, a možnosti ich inscenácie v súčasnosti. Kniha otvára diskusiu o inklúzii a inakostiach, čím narúša hranice medzi "my" a "oni". Týmto spôsobom prispieva k rozširovaniu obzorov nielen v divadle, ale aj v iných oblastiach kultúry a v celospoločenskej diskusii na aktuálne témy.
