Petra Kuppers’ 2022 book Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters is a “poetic field guide to witnessing community performance, offering a substantive revision of arts-based methods” (Lori M. Esposito). Join Petra for a talk in which she trains a disability culture lens onto contemporary performance, investigating co-experienced embodiment in unequally distributed power fields. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a bodymindspirit method that opens toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others. Using both video examples and gentle participatory observations, let’s explore together what this can mean for us as witnesses of our own lives.

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), won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. In 2022, she was named a Dance/USA Fellow. Petra is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.