Disability culture explorations of safety, home, spirituality, queer histories, somatic sensing, at old women’s sanctuaries. Join us for small-scale, site-specific, en-passant asylum performances at the beguinages in Zuienkerke, August 16th, in Bruges on August 17th (both in Belgium) and on August 18th at the Begijnhof, Haarlem (Netherlands). All actions start at 3pm, and will incorporate companionship, physical engagement and writing. They end in sharing bread (or such, gladly subsidized). Led by Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers. If you want to become more formally part of these events, and are around these sites, message me, petra@umich.edu. Feel free to distribute: there’s no real publicity, as we’re mainly engaging with passers-by, asking questions of asylum.
If you’d like a better sense of what might happen, check out this 8 minute documentary about my work, shot inside an Asylum Workshop, created by our local Detroit PBS station, as part of Detroit Performs: http://video.dptv.org/video/2365737793/
We’re also reporting on a different Asylum project week, last year in London, at Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), in the forthcoming issue of Theatre Topics.
Olimpias:
The Olimpias is an artists’ collective, founded in 1996 in Wales during work with mental health system survivors, with artistic director Petra Kuppers. Associates come from across the world, with a current US center. We create collaborative, research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. In these environments, we can explore pride and pain, attention and the transformatory power of touch. The Olimpias is disability-led, and non-disabled allies are always welcome.