Eco Soma: creative flights of connection that combine bodily, emotional, and imaginative responses. This report engages issues of community, bodily pain, and writing in the context of group somatic experiences. I will articulate eco soma methods, ways of writing/creating at the site of somatic experience in embedded webs. I will report from Turtle Disco, a small disability-led arts space in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. I co-direct Turtle Disco with my wife, Stephanie Heit, a psychiatric system survivor, dancer and poet, in the refunctioned living room of our home, where we curate somatic experiments with fellow queer/crip local folx.
This presentation starts from 17 mins 16 secs.
Related Resources
- Eco Soma — University of Minnesota Press
- Gut Botany: Poems
- Petra Kuppers – website
- Starship Somatics
First Starship Journey
NOTE: This is a general description and not a full transcript. After an intro: we are engaging in an audio meditation, putting on a space suit for protection, feeling the earth beneath your floor, touching it gently, enjoying our beauty, grounding ourself. Then spin! In your body, in your mind, standing or sitting, around your sitzbones or in your imagination, gathering energy. A dance of spinning energy before LAUNCH! Dream, dance in the ecstasy of launch energy, dreaming another world. A two minute dance… Then we go on a space travel jaunt together. We enjoy a ritual of entry into a starship. How does the starship, the kinship, the mothership, the lovership make you welcome? Experience the multiple ways in which the starship welcomes you, and your particular bodymindspirit. If other agree to be touch, feel free to touch them, share weight, launch out in new ways, to someone else, and you might find yourself in a mini-dance, always checking on whether you and they feel good about touch, or exchange of energy. You use earth conventions like a smile, to say hello and to give consent, or maybe you learn new ways of appreciating and honoring presences in the big corridors of the starship. For now, drift over to the plant room of the starship. Enter and be welcomed among the plants. (every day, we visit with a different room in the starship). What plants welcome you? Here is your home soil. Can you smell it? Can you feel it? What land is it? (Recorded live during MELT July 2021)
Presenter
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a wheelchair user, and a community performance artist. Petra grew up in Germany, and grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She teaches at the University of Michigan in performance studies and disability culture, and is also an advisor on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home on Three Fire Confederacy land, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her next academic book is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, University of Minnesota Press, February 2022.
