Embodiment/Movement/Design: An Arts-Based Research Seminar

Embodiment/Movement/Design: An Arts-Based Research Seminar

In this experiential workshop, we will look together at ways in which disability culture approaches can enhance our practices. How can we reclaim simulation exercises, shifting them away from simulation and toward stimulation? How can we explore the generative and creative potentials of our different senses and our forms of locomotion, our rhythms, our spatialities and our breaths?

Our session will involve collaborative space travel, likely outdoors. We will go on a journey together, and then discuss the format and its applicability to questions of design and community practice. In the second half of the workshop, Petra Kuppers and her collaborator Stephanie Heit will share inspirations of Asylum, the current Olimpias disability culture research project, a community performance inquiry that will culminate on July 12th at 310NRXd, a performance space in New Cross Road. The project takes some of its inspiration from Emmanuelle Guattari's I, Little Asylum and other texts that put precarity, mental health difference and space into conversation.

In preparation for the workshop, the participants will read the short “Embodiment/Enmindment” chapter from Studying Disability Arts and Culture (Palgrave, 2014, chapter available from organisers).

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan. She also teaches on Goddard College’s Low Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. She leads The Olimpias, a performance research collective (www.olimpias.org). Her Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (Palgrave, 2011, paperback 2013) explores The Olimpias’ arts-based research methods. She is the author of a new textbook, Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2014). Her books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art(Minnesota, 2007) and Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007). Edited work includes Somatic Engagement (2011), and Community Performance: A Reader (2007).

Stephanie Heit is an artist living with bipolar disorder, and she engages with herself and the world through multiple creative practices: movement as a dancer and massage therapist and words as a poet and teacher. She received a BA in Dance and MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. Awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, her work has been published in Nerve Lantern, Bombay Gin, Dunes Review, One Less Magazine, For Immediate Release, and is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic.

This event is jointly sponsored by the Disability Research Centre and the European Research Council funded project, Universalism, Universal Design and Equitable Access to the Designed Environment. The project is based in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, and is led by Professor Rob Imrie.