Petra Kuppers
Biographic Data
| ID | 1356552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Petra Kuppers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Petra |
| FAMILY NAME | Kuppers |
| SIGNATURE | KUPPERS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3540-8383 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Somatic Care Performances: Turtle Disco and Tendings
This essay discusses accessibility, community, bodily pain, and writing engagement, as well as meanings of “dramaturgy” in somatic and improvisation contexts. We work together as tender bodymindspirits—never just one, always interwoven—in complex inner and outer worlds. As a group of people working together, we use writing to find paths for witnessing experience. We created performances for and with each other. These are all small practices, ofte…
Disability and Sexual Assault in Public(s): Performance/Nebula
This montage essay investigates elliptical fractured storytelling modes around disabled embodiment, a court case of sexual assault, and the social media aftermath. It tracks how knowledge of perceived sexual vulnerability folds into one's bodymindspirit, and how pain runs through and shifts in these multiple foldings. The essay's earthy, plate-moving tectonics build an autoethnographic star-reaching galaxy that incorporates various modes of story…
Tides
A prose-poetry exploration of human/non-human agencies, influences, and livelinesses, focused on an artificial mini-reef
Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters
In *Eco Soma*, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures. Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived exp…
The Community Performance Reader
Part 1: Pedagogical Communities Part 2: Relations Part 3: Environments Part 4: Rituals, Embodiment, Challenge Part 5: Practices List of Contributors: Petra Kuppers, Gwen Robertson, Eugene van Erven, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, Gerard Delanty, Anita Gonzalez, Dwight Conquergood, Jessica Berson, Baz Kershaw, Nicolas Bourriaud, Becky Shaw, Cedar Nordbye, Devora Neumark, Theresa May, Ubong S. Nda, Marcia Blumberg, Graham Pitts, Ana Flores, Libby Wort…
Towards disabled futures: Non-realist embodiment in puppetry1
This article engages disability puppetry as plays of transactional object relations, opening into speculative realms, articulating new alignments of embodied and enminded difference. The examples here range from hospital practices via art/life pain-related somatic explorations to experimental poetics of classroom and gallery installations, and from there to small local theatres working in collaboration with mental health service providers. In all…
Community Performance Reader
Community arts practices
This chapter offers a contemplation not (only) of a community of minds, but of co-habitation, embodiment and enworldedness as necessary aspects of a thinking towards a coming community. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy provides theoretical tools to consider community beyond self/other relations. In The Inoperative Community, he configures community by thinking about the way that being-together can resist and deconstruct dominant power relations, which …
Invited hauntings in site-specific performance and poetry: The Asylum Project
This field report from The Asylum Project, an Olimpias disability culture experiment, centres non-mainstream experiences of space in two Michigan performances, accessing extrasensory experiences as a creative form. How can we witness and amplify histories of intersected violence and emergent forms of healing? How can we invite hauntings? In community performance practices, we address the infrastructures that allow us access to be together. We ask…
Dancing Material History: Site-Specific Performance in Michigan
Site-specific dance in and by Northern Michigan lakes brings Petra Kuppers experientially into a different relation to environmental materiality. Autoethnographic method merges with an attention to the materiality of art practice and the difference dance makes. It beckons: let’s merge. Dancing bodyminds in space, in change, in time. Disability, precarity, economy, indigenous and settler history. Breathe in and out with the pull of edge land, the …
Arts-based research sharing and disability culture methods: Different ways of knowing
In this mosaic, three of us assemble writings about an international arts-based research symposium, Disability/Culture: New Grounds (The University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies Conf
Disability Performance in the Streets: Art Actions in Post-Quake Christchurch
After a pilgrims’ walk in Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa, on the anniversary of the deadly quakes, A Different Light Theatre Company, comprised of people deemed to have cognitive difference, creates their own small public intervention: a Christchurch masquerade
Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction
Crip Time
I live life in slow motion. The world I live in is one where my thoughts are as quick as anyone’s, my movements are weak and erratic, and my talk is slower than a snail in quicksand,” writes Australian author and activist Anne McDonald, reflecting on her perception of time. “I have cerebral palsy, I can’t walk or talk, I use an alphabet board, and I communicate at the rate of 450 words an hour compared to your 150 words in a minute — twenty times…
Outsider Histories, Insider Artists, Cross-Cultural Ensembles: Visiting with Disability Presences in Contemporary Art Environments
Disability is highly visible in contemporary performance festivals and art venues. Traveling from the disability performance ensemble work of Theater Hora and Jérôme Bel, to Javier Telléz's installation Artaud's Cave at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, and on to the Australian Back to Back Theatre's Ganesh versus the Third Reich at the Bodies of Work festival in Chicago raises the pressing questions: How and why is disability art and performance becoming…
Trans-Ing Disability Poetry at the Confluence
This essay offers a poetics of trans-ing at the confluence of disability culture and trans cultural expression, indigenous naming of the land and performance trance. It discusses work by genderqueer poet Eli Clare and by Anishinaabe poet Margaret Noodin before analyzing the process of a translatory videopoem collaboration between Denise Leto and Petra Kuppers. One difference is not the same as another, but between experimental poetics, assemblage…
Io Saturnalia
Poetry-ing: Feminist Disability Aesthetics and Poetry Communities
Research Article| September 01 2011 Poetry-ing: Feminist Disability Aesthetics and Poetry Communities Petra Kuppers Petra Kuppers University of Michigan [email protected] Petra Kuppers teaches in performance studies and disability studies at the University of Michigan. She is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and artistic director of The Olimpias (www.olmpias.org). Her books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies o…
Introduction: Deleuze, Disability, and Difference
Deleuzoguattarian thought occupies strange and marginal spaces in Disability Studies literature. While some scholars find great depth and richness in work that de-naturalizes language and bodily experience, some find it too far removed from everyday life. But in this issue there are only a few notes about the historical relationship between Disability Studies as a discipline and Deleuzoguattarian thoughts and practices, even though the contributo…
Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch
The article posits a rhizomatic model of disability in order to discuss the complexities of disability as a lived experience, and disability as a representation. The article works with a Deleuzoguattarian toolbox to explore poetry, performance, and experimental video in their contributions to making disability a site, space, world of richness and artful living
Contact/disability performance. An essay constructed between Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus
This dialogue discusses disability and performance through poetic interrogation, interspersed with segments of Neil Marcus's play My Sexual History. The authors touch on such topics such as sexuality and representation, dance and theatre, the management of disability staring, speech difference and writing, curiosity and shrouding
Dancing Stories: A Community Dance Residency in a Hospice in New Zealand
Canoes forging through cold waters, mountains rising from the sea, a heart beating under a mountain lake, an albatross sailing toward the Antarctic: these were the story-images of Coastal Mappings, a large-scale community project set in and around Dunedin, New Zealand. In the Coastal Mappings performance project, people in the last months of their lives joined cancer survivors, family members and other interested people in explorations of Pakeha …
Tiresian Journeys
Given the media frenzy over Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid, and the ensuing questions about the state of feminism, it seems a serendipitous moment to feature two pieces—written by the women who conceived and performed them—that offer very different but complementary takes on agency, identity, and the conflation of the public and private as one's body becomes the locus of the gaze. Petra Kuppers's dramaturgical meditation on her e…
Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam
This essay reads Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and a dance performance by the Houston-based group FrenetiCore as sites at which autism is under construction
Scars in disability culture poetry: Towards connection
In this article I present a sample of US disability culture poems and their treatment of scars in order to re‐evaluate the status of the wound in disability culture. I argue that instead of becoming a sign of melancholic identification with a victim position, these scar poems speak with a different imaginary, one that aims at connection rather than isolation and a focus on the individual body. With this the article adds to our understanding of di…
Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters
In *Eco Soma*, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures. Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived exp…
Performing Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry
“Performing Determinism” discusses the performance of disability through poetry: the instability of language, the ability of words to clasp both generic and specific meaning, and the gaps that surround the performances of self. Disability culture acts as a frame for the inquiry, as the essay discusses crip aesthetics, crip critical practice, and the embodiment of language. In the reading of poems by Jim Ferris and Stephen Kuusisto, disability cul…
Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies
petra kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant University. She is the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003) and is currently working onBodily Fantasies: Medical Visions/Medical Performances (Minnesota University Press, forthcoming, 2006
Scars in disability culture poetry: Towards connection
In this article I present a sample of US disability culture poems and their treatment of scars in order to re‐evaluate the status of the wound in disability culture. I argue that instead of becoming a sign of melancholic identification with a victim position, these scar poems speak with a different imaginary, one that aims at connection rather than isolation and a focus on the individual body. With this the article adds to our understanding of di…
Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam
This essay reads Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and a dance performance by the Houston-based group FrenetiCore as sites at which autism is under construction
Vanishing in Your Face: Embodiment and Representation in Lesbian Dance Performance
Lesbian dance performance has to come to terms with the cultural invisibility of the lesbian body, and the dichotomy of traditional gender representation. This paper charts strategies for the play with the invisible, the grotesque and the liminal in the dance performance of three UK-based choreographers: Emilyn Claid, Yael Flexer and Kate Lawrence. Their performances create tension between the role and the body, between the public and the private…
Creteil's 15th International Women's Film Festival, 26 March-4 April 1993
Journal Article Créteil's 15th International Women's Film Festival, 26 March-4 April 1993 Get access Cathy Fowler, Cathy Fowler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Petra Küppers Petra Küppers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 34, Issue 3, Autumn 1993, Pages 289–292, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/34.3.289 Published: 01 October 1993
Creteil International Women's Film Festivel, 18-27 March 1994
Journal Article Créteil International Women's Film Festivel, 18–27 March 1994 Get access Cathy Fowler, Cathy Fowler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Petra Küppers Petra Küppers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 35, Issue 4, Winter 1994, Pages 394–397, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/35.4.394 Published: 01 December 1994
Th International Festival of Women's Films, Creteil, 1995
Journal Article 17th International Festival of Women's Films, Créteil, 1995 Get access Cathy Fowler, Cathy Fowler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Petra Küppers Petra Küppers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 1995, Pages 427–431, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/36.4.427 Published: 01 December 1995
Vanishing in Your Face: Embodiment and Representation in Lesbian Dance Performance
Lesbian dance performance has to come to terms with the cultural invisibility of the lesbian body, and the dichotomy of traditional gender representation. This paper charts strategies for the play with the invisible, the grotesque and the liminal in the dance performance of three UK-based choreographers: Emilyn Claid, Yael Flexer and Kate Lawrence. Their performances create tension between the role and the body, between the public and the private…
The Twentieth International Festival of Women's Films, Creteil, 3-12 April 1998
Journal Article The Twentieth International Festival of Women‘s Films, Créteil, 3–12 April 1998 Get access Cathy Fowler, Cathy Fowler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Petra Kuppers Petra Kuppers Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 39, Issue 4, Winter 1998, Pages 401–404, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/39.4.401 Published: 01 December 1998
Addenda? Contemporary Cyborgs and the Mediation of Embodiment
New Landscapes
Essay| December 01 2001 New Landscapes: Community Art, Video Process And Fantasies of Disability Petra Kuppers Petra Kuppers Petra Kuppers is a community artist and the Artistic Director of The Olimpias. She moved in September 2001 to the U.S. to become an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant College, Rhode Island. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2001) 29 (3): 24–25. https://do…
Landscaping: Spacings
Space Rules: Techno-Nomad Theatre
Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies
petra kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant University. She is the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003) and is currently working onBodily Fantasies: Medical Visions/Medical Performances (Minnesota University Press, forthcoming, 2006
Moving Bodily Fantasies: Medical Performances and Modes of Communication
This DOI is not currently attached to any metadata records. DOIs can’t actually ever be deleted (they’re persistent), but sometimes our members create DOIs in error. We do have a process to approximate deletion which we follow only in rare cases where the DOI has been genuinely created in error, and most crucially, if the DOI has never been published anywhere online or in print and never otherwise distributed to or communicated with anyone (autho…
Moving Bodily Fantasies: Medical Performances and Modes of Communication
This article investigates the relationship between movement, communication, and medical presentation in three contemporary dance performances. In particular, I wish to present three instances of collaborative work: of work where boundaries between specialists and “lay people,” between different kinds of expertise, and different kinds of knowledges become questioned, dismantled, and (re)erected through performance. My argument hinges on the ongoin…
Helen's eyes-a text on knowing, vision and the not-quite-there future
The Wheelchair's Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability
How can the wheelchair be other than a placeholder for tragedy or negativity? Kuppers examines the wheelchair as a prop and as a playground of multiple intersecting narratives, desires, textures, and signs in Murderball, Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Museum of Fetishized Identities, and the X-Men movies
Performing Determinism: Disability Culture Poetry
“Performing Determinism” discusses the performance of disability through poetry: the instability of language, the ability of words to clasp both generic and specific meaning, and the gaps that surround the performances of self. Disability culture acts as a frame for the inquiry, as the essay discusses crip aesthetics, crip critical practice, and the embodiment of language. In the reading of poems by Jim Ferris and Stephen Kuusisto, disability cul…
Just Try Having None: Transmuting, Transcribing, Transfixing, Transfiguring, Transforming, Transcending Pain (review)
Dancing Stories: A Community Dance Residency in a Hospice in New Zealand
Canoes forging through cold waters, mountains rising from the sea, a heart beating under a mountain lake, an albatross sailing toward the Antarctic: these were the story-images of Coastal Mappings, a large-scale community project set in and around Dunedin, New Zealand. In the Coastal Mappings performance project, people in the last months of their lives joined cancer survivors, family members and other interested people in explorations of Pakeha …
Tiresian Journeys
Given the media frenzy over Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid, and the ensuing questions about the state of feminism, it seems a serendipitous moment to feature two pieces—written by the women who conceived and performed them—that offer very different but complementary takes on agency, identity, and the conflation of the public and private as one's body becomes the locus of the gaze. Petra Kuppers's dramaturgical meditation on her e…
Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam
This essay reads Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and a dance performance by the Houston-based group FrenetiCore as sites at which autism is under construction
Scars in disability culture poetry: Towards connection
In this article I present a sample of US disability culture poems and their treatment of scars in order to re‐evaluate the status of the wound in disability culture. I argue that instead of becoming a sign of melancholic identification with a victim position, these scar poems speak with a different imaginary, one that aims at connection rather than isolation and a focus on the individual body. With this the article adds to our understanding of di…
Introduction: Deleuze, Disability, and Difference
Deleuzoguattarian thought occupies strange and marginal spaces in Disability Studies literature. While some scholars find great depth and richness in work that de-naturalizes language and bodily experience, some find it too far removed from everyday life. But in this issue there are only a few notes about the historical relationship between Disability Studies as a discipline and Deleuzoguattarian thoughts and practices, even though the contributo…
Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch
The article posits a rhizomatic model of disability in order to discuss the complexities of disability as a lived experience, and disability as a representation. The article works with a Deleuzoguattarian toolbox to explore poetry, performance, and experimental video in their contributions to making disability a site, space, world of richness and artful living
Contact/disability performance. An essay constructed between Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus
This dialogue discusses disability and performance through poetic interrogation, interspersed with segments of Neil Marcus's play My Sexual History. The authors touch on such topics such as sexuality and representation, dance and theatre, the management of disability staring, speech difference and writing, curiosity and shrouding
Poetry-ing: Feminist Disability Aesthetics and Poetry Communities
Research Article| September 01 2011 Poetry-ing: Feminist Disability Aesthetics and Poetry Communities Petra Kuppers Petra Kuppers University of Michigan [email protected] Petra Kuppers teaches in performance studies and disability studies at the University of Michigan. She is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and artistic director of The Olimpias (www.olmpias.org). Her books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies o…
Io Saturnalia
Art (31 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Visual arts (16 works) · History (14 works) · Literature (14 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (14 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Poetry (10 works)