Hello everybody,
Happy summer! We had a lovely and rich Olimipias summer camp at Sierra Hot Springs and Lake Tahoe earlier this month, with poetry and memoir manuscript workshops, life drawing, dances in and out of the water, video shoots, and tree-wrapping-tents stories. We plan to have more of these camps (with better staked tents), at Harbin Hot Springs, in Michigan?s countryside, in Australia in 2010, and elsewhere.
Here are two upcoming performances, and we hope some of you who live in the Bay Area can join us!
Burning: An Olimpias Participatory Performance Installation Subterranean Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft Way (between Shattuck and Fulton), Berkeley Friday, July 31st, 7pm Space rental donation suggestion: $10, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Come and explore with us the poetics of bodily fantasies in our new Olimpias Disability Culture happening. Put your arms around someone, accept a touch, put words in your mouth: what does it feel like to speak of cancer, of leprosy and environmental toxicity? Locate yourself. What happens when bodies change, undergo transformation, expose themselves? What happens as you let images and poetry of poison and healing roll down your veins? Move with us, be moved by us. Dance improvisation, butoh, contact, ritual, video, visual art and poetry in a performance installation.
Performance participants, videodancers and art creators include: Adam aka Paul Cotton, Amber DiPietra, Ashok Albrecht, Dax Pierson, Eboni Hawkins, Harold Burns, Kristina Yates, Leroy Moore, Leora Amir, Leslie Schickel, LissaIvy Tiegel, Mayuko Abaye, Neil Marcus, Petra Kuppers, Sadie Wilcox.
Director: Petra Kuppers
Info: www.olimpias.org
The performance installation takes place inside the art exhibit CORPOREAL DISTANCE. Sadie Wilcox uses large-scale drawings to document somatic movement sequences and improvisational crip-choreography. The work on paper includes graphite, conté, and acrylic media depicting multi-layered configurations of physical gesture and kinesthetic interaction. The series was created in response to the 2009 Olimpias Disability Culture collaborative workshops.
Sadie's artwork can be viewed online at www.sadiewilcox.com
Wednesday, August 5th, Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco, 7pm, free Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus read from Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (Homofactus Press, 2008)
A love story for crip culture! By turns playful, unsettling, raw and moving, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story is an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion?one keystroke at a time. Cripple Poetics is e-mails, IMs and letters between lovers; poetic rumination/invigoration; and disability arts manifesto. Reader Ann Fox (Davidson College) writes: "As lovers/poets/performance artists Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus court each other, they woo us as well. We are seduced by their great love of each other, crip culture, and a fierce, revolutionary dynamism that makes us want to whirl with them, through pleasure and pain, into the maelstrom of the possibilities for joy and expression the body?and this life?offer.?
Book review by Carrie Sandahl: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/177/177
More performances and presentations (contact me for details if you are in these areas):
Artist?s Talk, University of Washington Seattle (August 12th), as part of Integrated Dance Summer School Burning Happening: Port Townsend, WA (August 16th), Ann Arbor (September 29th) Cripple Poetics: Ann Arbor (October 1st, Duderstadt), Toronto (late September) Anarcha (Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, Michigan State University, Oct 7-9) Olimpias Development Week with Sophia Lycouris, practice-as-research, Edinburgh School of Arts: early November, Ann Arbor
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Petra Kuppers
Associate Professor
English, Theatre and Dance, Women's Studies University of Michigan
mobile: 734-239-2634
email: petra@umich.edu
Artistic Director of The Olimpias
homepage: www.olimpias.org
