Next week, The Olimpias are at UC Berkeley! Join us for a Planting Disabled Futures extravaganza, with a public performance on January 14 and small sharing parties on the 15 and 16 of January, all at the Disability Cultural Community Center.
Our crip intimacy virtual reality/community performance installation invites you into a world of healing plants cultivated by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing. Come, try out a headset, hold a plushy critter, and become entangled with the ways we as disabled people honor and engage with plant elders.
In the Planting Disabled Futures project, we use live performance approaches and virtual reality (and other) technologies to share environmental connection and energy, creaturely liveliness and ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain.
In the development of the Virtual Reality (VR) components of the project, we ask: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?
January 14th (Wednesday) 5-7pm (Disability Cultural Community Center) Public Performance with Projections, Dream Journey and Sharing Ritual. This public performance has optional (and minimal) use of the VR headsets: explore our world in multiple different ways.
January 15th and 16th, Thursday and Friday, (Disability Cultural Community Center) 1.5 hour sign up slots, up to 6 people per “house party.” Each person will have an opportunity to explore our tree world in the VR headset with visual-forward and audio-forward options available. This event is designed as a low-key hang-out taking place in a supportive environment. ASL will be available for the house party on the 15th at 4pm (more might be possible, depending on availability – just ask us).
The VR environment includes close captions and audio descriptions. Non-AV opportunities for participation are also available (if you do not wish to use a headset).
Sign-up for all events here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EjvcH01ZFKgtPNE4lvNVkEk2YR87LauONTIgNPqG9mk
Image Description: UC Berkeley Residency poster – public performances January 14-16. Poster with stills from Planting Disabled Futures installations, with back projections of trees, mushrooms, people with headsets, Petra on her scooter.
Participating Project Members from The Olimpias:
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a German disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and she uses somatics, performance, media, and speculative poetry to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her Crip/Mad Archive Dances, an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists Film Award of the international Together! Disability Film Festival in 2024. 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-runs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, dancer and poet Stephanie Heit, out of their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She runs weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research. Petra is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. She directs the Planting Disabled Futures Project as part of a Just Tech Fellowship. website: www.petrakuppers.com
Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white neuroqueer psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary performance artist from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). They are currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan where they direct The Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series that explores mad embodiment in and beyond archives. Their written and creative projects have been featured in Theatre Topics (2019), QT Voices (2022), and the forthcoming issue of Liminalities. She is the dramaturg of the Planting Disabled Futures Project.
website: www.madmemoryproject.com
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory where she is a white settler in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her practices explore the seams of movement, language, and mental health difference often within site-specific inquiries involving water. She is bipolar, a mad activist, a shock/psych system survivor, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). She works as an access doula for the Planting Disabled Futures project. Website: https://stephanie-heit.com/
petra.kuppers