west coast contact improvisation JAM
Petra Kuppers
Intensive Teacher
Intensive Description
Join an exploration of where CI can lead us to when we open ourselves to energies, sensitivities, and ethics beyond the muscular. Let’s dream of new worlds in hard times, where we touch (not just) with our skins, but also with voice, energy, attention, through consent-based practices that allow for a wide variety of sensoria.
We will mix gentle, disability culture accessible CI exercises with dream journeys and imaginative, speculative somatic practices that include ambient music, humming, writing, and doodling. In this interarts approach to CI, you can explore your personal sensorium and let your imagination fly as we encounter one another and the wider world. Requirements for participation are curiosity and openness – you do not need stamina or agility. Instead, we will finetune our senses together and become aware of our environment - the touch of a plant, the sensation of sun in contact with our skin, the weight of a gaze upon us, the history of walls, the openings we can make together.
Biography
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist who uses disability culture methods, somatics, performance, visual art, media, and speculative poetry to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Visionary Trailblazer Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for her life-long work in community performance. She leads the Olimpias, an association of international disability culture artists, and co-directs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, out of their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, she's been running weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research. She returns to teach at WCCIF after 15 years.