Disability Culture and Community Performance

Find a Strange and Twisted Shape Petra Kuppers

PETRA KUPPERS is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, and she teaches in Performance Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. Her previous books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007). Performances in hospices, on beaches and at the memory of slavery medicine, cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the United States, communal poetry among mental health system survivors, Butoh dancers and in video installations; Deleuzoguattarian aesthetics and playful rhizomes. Performance scholar and community artist Petra Kuppers engages these sites and practices as laboratories of experimental disability culture. Here, the possibility of new forms of embodiment, engagement and community take shape at the intersection of the past and the emerging future, in an embodied poetics that brings together movement, touch and language. Disability culture appears as a process, not a static definition, and offers seeds for artful justice work towards respect, love and an enrichment of the everyday. This book presents a senior practitioner's/critic's exploration of creative community processes sustained over more than a decade, and models the connections between arts-based research and research-based arts.

Hardback 12 Jul 2011 9780230298279 55.00

Contents: List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: MAKING A HOME Landscaping: Spacings Dancing Stories about Home: A Community Dance Residency in a Hospice in New Zealand Community Arts and Practices: Improvising Being-Together PART II: RHIZOMES/CONNECTIONS Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch Burning Butoh: Self/Community Rhizome: Choreography of a Moving Self Rhizome: Collaboration Rhizome: Beyond Story, Community Performance and Somatic Poetics PART III: MEMORY TOUCH Introduction: Desirous History Performing Anarcha Remembering Anarcha The Anarcha Project Performative Lecture The Anarcha Project: A Process Report PART IV: SENSUAL HISTORY AND MYTH-MAKING Introduction Tiresian Journeys Teaching Disability Culture: Reflections on Tiresias in the Classroom Epilogue Bibliography Index

Reviews: 'In this book, Petra Kuppers one of the most dynamic thinkers in the field of disability culture, disability arts and community arts today provides a rigourous, sophisticated and strikingly poetic series of mediations on the processes, pleasures and challenges of working in this field. Drawing on examples of the way her own arts based investigations have evolved across a variety of sites, contexts and countries over the past decade, Kuppers positions disability culture as a continual process of negotiation in which people experiment with new ways of relating to the languages, cultures and histories that frame and inform their experiences. Emphasising the need to access the feelings, flows and energies that exist within and between dominant formations of community, Kuppers advocates for a rhizomatic model of practice in which personal, cultural and political histories come together in singular, specific and provisional ways to allow new formations albeit at times fleetingly to emerge. Thoughtful, thought-provoking and accessible, this book will be of compelling interest not just to scholars of disability culture, but to a whole new generation of scholars looking to use arts practice as a laboratory in which identity, community and culture can be creatively re-imaged and re-imagined. ' - Bree Hadley, Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

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