Mad Conductors Participatory Performance & Crip/Mad Archive Dances Screening
November 2 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
This is part of the 2024 Disability Arts & Culture Gathering, a weekend of disability culture arts-based research and community building centered on twin inquiries of environmental and interspecies gentleness, mad memory, and archival intermedial/technological play.
From the organizer: We are happy to welcome people joining from elsewhere. All Gathering events unspool in crip time, with rest and relaxation practices built in, from fireside hang-outs to watercolor/drawing playtime.
Mad Conductors Participatory Performance
with Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley
Join us for a participatory performance that explores memory, remembering, and forgetting. How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? We’ll explore improvisational scores that invite us to investigate and play through writing, movement, doodling, sound, and other mediums we invent. You are welcome to witness and/or to participate to whatever level you wish. We will work together to create a supportive space to tend ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.
Mad Conductors is a collaborative performance project directed by Stephanie Heit and Alexis Riley that arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric medication brain zaps. It is an exploration of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being. What happens when energy is transferred? Who or what conducts the ensemble? What resources do mad ancestors and archives offer?
followed by:
Crip/Mad Archive Dances Screening
with Petra Kuppers (and many others)
A screening of an experimental documentary. 35 mins, dir. Petra Kuppers, 2024. How do disabled and mad people survive, dance, insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain? This experimental documentary charts disability culture archives and embodied gestures of survival and creative expression. It draws on community with human and non-human others: media clips as performance gifts, archival footage from dance archives, environmental embedment and grounding in trees, water, desert and lakes. Together, we dance, and spring our binds. Please note: This experimental documentary shares instances of medical incarceration including insulin violence. It offers survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation. The film is fully subtitled in English. A full audio-description track is available on SoundCloud. The documentary uses “crip,” and “mad” as in-group signifiers, aware of stigma and histories.
Stephanie Heit (she/her)
Stephanie is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a shock/psych system survivor, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), invites readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. Website: https://stephanie-heit.com
Alexis Riley (she/they)
Alexis is a white disabled psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary artist-scholar from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). Grounded in disability culture and rooted in feminist praxis, their work blends practice as research and applied theatre methods to center mad bodies as sources of pleasure, connection, and care. Her current performance series, The Mad Memory Project, applies this focus to the archives and spaces of medical incarceration. Recent writing and creative projects have been featured in Theatre Topics (2019), QT Voices (2022), Liminalities (2024). Alexis is currently a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan.
Petra Kuppers (she/her)
Petra is German queer cis disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (2022, open access, winner of the ATHE 2024 book prize with distinction for Innovative Achievement). She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a current Just Tech Fellow, with her Planting Disabled Futures virtual reality project. www.petrakuppers.com
