The Olimpias Performances Research Projects
2008
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The Olimpias Performances Research Projects 2008 |
1. The new Olimpias show is up and running, and open for people to come and join: Burning. Read about the invitation. US workshops in August/September 08, and again in January/February/March/April 09
2. Our new poetry book is out! Cripple Poetics: A Love Story. by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus. With photos by Lisa Steichmann. More excerpts. FAQs. Amazon link.
Next readings/workshops/performances:
October 5th, University of Hawaii, Manoa. Poetry as Performance workshop.
Most performances this year will have elements of our book in them, like this Butoh one below , or our recent performance as part of the Disability Pride Arts and Culture Festival in Portland, Oregon; and a Disability Dance fest with Axis and Dandelion in Oakland.
Olimpias at BUTOH San Francisco Benefit, May 31st
Check out our new videopoem on YouTube, Disabled Lilacs
Tiresias Project: Disability and Erotics
The Tiresias DVD is out. Contact us if you would like a free copy.
Tiresias received the Pamela K. Walker award at Superfest 2008!
Tiresias Community Performance
Feburary 20th, Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, University of Michigan
A collaboration with the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living, funded by the Ginsberg Center.
With collaborators:
Eli Clare
Kathy Coleman
Tim Householder
Neil Marcus
Petra Kuppers
Lisa Steichmann
As part of the 2008 Michigan Tiresias, we are running workshops at the AACIL from the 23rd of January onwards. If you are interested in participating, contact us.
Sample of a 2007 Tiresisas event:
Invitation: please join us for Tiresian Rites, in a circle at UC Berkeley, Saturday, 4th of August, 12 noon. We’ll look for depth together, for celebration, exploration, and sharing.
can you bare your body/soul
can you become visible
where do you take your place among humans
do you dare show your self
your hearts desire
your gaze
your intent
your longing
your physicality
your poetic
your thought
your mind
Please bring yourself, your art/life, and food to share in our picnic!
More details:
Our Saturday will be part of the Tiresias Project by The Olimpias, a national disability culture series (www.umich.edu/~petra). In the Tiresias project, we explore issues of disability and erotics. The figure of Tiresias penetrates Greek drama - the hermaphroditic shape shifter who has lived both as a man, as Zeus's priest, and as a woman, as a prostitute of great renown.
Tiresias is a crip art project - and much more than that. In our project, we take Tiresias out of the background fabric of history. Now Tiresias and his disability, her undecidable bodily status, the malleability of his body, gender, her tri-pedal step and his blind/seeing eyes become the focal point of disability cultural work.
What does it mean to find empowerment through a trickster figure? At the heart of our project are images, sounds and words of seduction: an erotics of encounter with disability’s non-binary difference which problematises conventional notions of disabled people as tragic, sexless or deficient.
In the past months, we’ve had performance and photography sessions in a theatre in Michigan, and an exploration of naked bodies and natural environments in Rhode Island. For our Berkeley stop, we would like to investigate the moment of becoming naked, of opening. In our circle in a public space, we invite you to step into the middle and show us something of yourself: physically, poetically, in thought, spirit or body. We will spin our circle, see what happens as we move from vanity to being, from fear to joy and back again. Lisa, our photographer, will make images of these moments of disclosure, but none of these photos will be shared with the public without your express permission, after you’ve been send jpgs of them. You can participate and decide not to have any images of your performances released. We are interested in these moments of decision, not (only) in the photographic products. To give you a sense of previous Tiresias explorations (of nudity), we have put three of our images up online, at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~petra/tiresias2.htm. For our Saturday circle, there is no expectation of nudity, although we’ll support any and all expressions of ‘becoming naked,’ or supporting others in doing so.
Please join us! If you would like to read more about Tiresias, and our ideas about him/her, please email us.
Neil Marcus
Lisa Steichmann
Petra Kuppers
2008: A number of Anarcha publications are out: a DVD, a website with the journal Liminalities and more! Let us know if you want a copy of the DVD.
The Anarcha Project has received funding through a grant from the The Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar, sponsored by The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; The Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs; The Office of the Vice President for Research; and The Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
Campus residencies in Ann Arbor and Detroit: December 2006
Anarcha Research Symposium : April 4/5 2007, University of Michigan
Anarcha Installation: Sedimentations Conference, May 2007
Davidson College, North Carolina (February 2007)
University of California, Berkeley (March 2007)
University of Washington, Seattle (May 2007)
Miami University. Ohio (February 2008)
Anarcha in Montgomery, Alabama
The Olimpias are using performative research methods to engage intersections between black history and disability history.
Remembering Anarcha
Sunday, 14th May 2006, 5-7
Free
Theatre, Taylor Center
Auburn University Montgomery
Black history, disability
studies and performance scholars work on
remembering Montgomery women Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.
Come and join us for a discussion of Anarcha and J. Marion Sims, the
gynecologist who used slave women as experimental subjects while he
was searching for a cure for fistula.
We would love to hear from you what you know about this story, what it
means to you, how you remember it locally, how the local sites are
marked. And we would love to tell you how we go about using
movement, words and visuals to connect Anarcha's story to disability
history and black history.
Petra Kuppers (Associate
Professor, English, Theatre, Women's Studies, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor)
Anita Gonzalez (Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance, State
University of New York – New Paltz)
Carrie Sandahl (Associate Professor in the School of Theatre at Florida
State University, Tallahassee)
OLD(er) NEWS
Art Projects in New Zealand, July 2005-Februrary 2006
community arts projects at the Otago Community Hospice, Dance with a Difference sessions particularly open to people who experience pain and discomfort, disability culture history performance work with former residents of institutions at the Truby King Reserve (grounds of the former Seacliff Hospital), Story/Movement exchanges at public libraries and community centers.
For a description of the whole Coastal Mapping project, got to the communityarts.net site, and this article.
- Perishable Theatre, Empire Street, Providence, June 18th 2005, 6-8, free entry
- Gallery Presentation: Sarah Doyle Gallery, Brown University, 26 Benevolent Street, Providence, April 30th - May 6th 2005
Reception: May 6th, 6-8 - All are welcome!
The artworks we create through dance, writing, sculptural work and photography focus on a re-vision of the scar: on our bodies' ability to change and grow, to connect to the environment in unfamiliar ways, and to emerge as new landscapes.
(Amy's Scar, The Olimpias, 2005)
(manipulated photograph from Scar Tissue workshop session, photographer Martha Kuhlman, 2005)
We all leave marks in our environment - some of these marks are direct, like
tracks in the snow, earth, grass, sand and water, some more
subtle. Our presence, our limbs, wheels and crutches, our way of being influence
the landscape.
Through community arts workshops, we will explore some of the differences with
which disabled people enrich our wider social world.
We move differently, we inhabit our world differently. Our differences present
another view of the world, and of wha.t it means to lead a fulfilled life -
and our shared world is richer for these different perspectives.
What: The TRACKS Project: A digital photo/poetry exhibition
Where: The Sarah Doyle Gallery, 26 Benevolent Street, Providence
When: April 30th - May 6th, 2005
Artist's Reception: May 6th, 6-8
Where: Women's Center at Bryant University
Bryant Center, 3rd Floor, 1150 Douglas Pike, Smithfield
When: November 30 through January 15, 2004
Gallery Hours are Monday through Friday, 9am - 5pm
Opening & Artist Reception: 4pm, Tuesday, November 30, 2004
VSA arts of Rhode Island and The Olimpias are presenting The TRACKS Project:
A digital photo/poem exhibition featuring artwork that celebrates Rhode Island's
disability culture and provides new visual perspectives on the connections between
landscape art and access.
'This exhibit of extraordinarily compelling works are the realized images of
a group of 17 community artists, from over a dozen RI cities and towns, coming
together to explore themes and motifs of what it means to have a disability.
At a series of workshops held in numerous Rhode Island locations - ranging from
Burrillville's Community Center, to Middletown's Norman Bird Sanctuary, through
Warwick's Goddard Park and stretching down to Westerly's Misquamicut Beach -
they crossed Rhode Island through all seasons. They explored their world through
dance, photography, earth art, and creative writing to construct this unique
body of visual and written work.'
- Olimpias Approaches in New Mexico: DEATH POEM RISING
sponsored by CFA PLACE Program & VSA North Fourth Art Center
Creative Research & Community Practice
for CFA Students from ALL Disciplines
with visiting artists
Eiko & Koma (Butoh Performers)
& Petra Kuppers (Community Performer)
Saturday & Sunday
APRIL 9th & 10th 2005
EVENT SERIES:
DELICIOUS MOVEMENT - Sat., April 9 10:00-12:00
Carlisle Gym - South Arena, University of New Mexico
Free & Open to the Public
DEATH POEM - Sat., April 9 7:30-9:30p
Reception following with Q&A from Eiko & Koma
South Broadway Cultural Center
RISING: An Evolving Community Performance - Sun., April 10
Drop-In any time between 12:00 and 5:00
Free & Open to the Public
Rio
Grande Nature Center
- The Olimpias in New Zealand
Olimpias Director Petra Kuppers receives Inaugural Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. She will take up her position in July 2005, and will lead performance workshops in cancer settings. She hopes to research approaches to healing, movement and disability culture in European-derived, Asian-derived and Maori communities on New Zealand's South Island.
Further Information about Caroline Plummer, the young woman whose vision of the power of dance has made the fellowship possible.
Information about Petra's talk at Dance Canopy Auckland, New Zealand, July 2005
- The Olimpias at the Chicago Women's Performance Art Festival 2004
October 24th, Links Hall, Chicago, 8 pm
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren and Petra Kuppers present: A Bare Bone Tune
Tunnels and scars, tissue and membranes--these are the bodily materials and bodily sites that occupy space in this performance by two disabled performance artists. Bony protrusions and proliferating tissue emerge in sounds and sites, as the mechanics of baring and tuning meet hard edges. Spaces of deafness and spaces of pain meet. Text and movement articulate the richness of disabled embodiment.
- The Olimpias Site-Specific Dance Series 2004/2005
- Snow Paths - a site specific dance performance, date and location to be announced
- The Autumn Forest - a site-specific dance performance, October 31st, 5.30 pm
'on the edge of': The Autumn Forest
Samhain: Join The Olimpias dancers for an evening performance intervention
on the edge of the forest. Forest myths, fleeting events, lights shining in
the dark and glimpses of magic bodies unite in a celebration of autumn, and
the changes of the season. The performance is part of a series of site-specific
dances 'on the edge' - in sites that connect different environments, spaces
in transition, border-countries.
The performance lasts about 15 minutes, and ends in a sharing of food and drink.
The performance is weather dependent - light rain won't stop it, but sustained
bad weather will mean cancellation.
Entrance is free, but if you can, bring a non-perishable item for the Rhode
Island Food Bank.
Location: Lincoln State Woods
Time: 6.30, October 5th
- Siren - a site-specific dance performance, September 12th 2004, 5pm
 |
This performance is part of the Wind Sea Sky
sculpture festival on Easton Beach, Newport. No entry fee, but please bring a non-perishable item for the Rhode Island Food Bank. How does the Siren live? Ignoring the horror stories of drowned |
See also Sirens 2003
- The Olimpias receive Rhode Island Foundation Award
Petra Kuppers/The Olimpias have been awarded a 12.000 dollar grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, as one of 9 artists to receive New Works funding in 2004. In collaboration with VSA Rhode Island, she will work with other disabled artists in Rhode Island's rural spaces, investigating the theme of 'Tracks'. What traces are left behind by different, non-normate forms of embodiment?
In various workshops over the year, we will explore temporary earth art, photography, video and movement work. The project will culminate in a traveling exhibition. Video artist Agnieszka Woznicka from the Rhode Island School of Design will collaborate with us in a video documentation to accompany the exhibition.
If you are a New England artist, and would like to be part of one or more of the workshops, contact pkuppers@bryant.edu.
- New Book Published: Disability and Contemporary Performance
Partly as an outcome of The Olimpias Performance Research Series's work, Petra
Kuppers's book, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, has
been published with Routledge Press, December 2003. Thanks to all of you out
there, my disability community, for your generous help, inspiration and ideas!
Especially, many thanks to the artists I discuss in these pages!