In this workshop, we will listen to and move with sounds we are making with our own breath, in our own home, while being comfortable on a mat on the floor (or in a similar comfortable position for yourself and your particular bodymind). The practice is informed by Pauline Oliveros' deep listening work, by Continuum Movement, and by Olimpias disability culture practices. We will use our breath to channel sounds through our body, paying attention to the images, sensations and movements that come up as we engage our home space, and the objects inside it. We will then move from experience into creative writing.

Professor Kuppers uses this practice as the basis for movement/writing workshops in Turtle Disco, a disability-led somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan, that she co-leads with Stephanie Heit. This work is a self- and communal-care resource for creativity, rhythmic attunement, and low-key dropping in, to support ourselves for living in a complicated world.

❃ ❃ ❃

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and a Professor of English, Women's and Gender Studies, Theatre and Dance, and Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also serves on the faculty of Goddard College MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. Additionally, she is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias: Performance Research Projects, an artists' collective that creates collaborative, exploratory environments for people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences to interact with their allies. Her publications include Theatre & Disability (Palgrave, 2017), Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2014), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and the poetry collections Green Orion Woman (Dancing Girl Press, 2018) and the ecosomatic Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020).