loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work.

Our panel in Tuscon, April 17--so excited!

Opening Trauma into Transformation: The Politics and Poetics of Embodied Knowledge in Physical Difference and Disability

This panel explores loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work. As intertwined artists, the bright light we stand in is that of transformation through embodied inquiry. Elements of the panel invite audience participation/sensory immersion. 

Amber DiPietra:


“The Disabled Sex(ological Body) Worker: a Poetics of invisible, Intimate Performance”


Amber Dipietra, as a body and personality, has moved on an arc from socially-isolated child with a disability, to poet, to disability advocate, to escort, to intimacy coach. She recently moved from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, FL where she has started a a local chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, swoptampabay,org.. Find her at adipietra.blogspot.com and thebodypeotik.com. 



Violet Juno:


"Portals to Transformation: Body, Art, Architecture and Sound"


Violet Juno is a transdisciplinary performance artist who has performed and exhibited at 70 venues in 36 cities since 1990. She combines text, sound, visual tableaus, kinetic sculpture, movement and a unique form of three-dimensional mapping to create multisensory experiences for her audience. Her work addresses issues involving disability/embodiment, trauma/transformation, and the poetic tension between language and languagelessness. More info at www.violet.juno.com



Margit Galanter:


"Vivid Spaces: Movement as a Re-source"


Margit Galanter is a movement educator, arts investigator, and dance poet living in Oakland, CA. Her fascination with the potency of movement -- the multiplicity of tones, its cultural efficacy, the composing -- has drawn her to embodied inquiry for decades. She has presented, performed, and taught her work throughout the US, and has a thriving practice in the Bay Area called Physical Intelligence Life Arts, where she finds the greatest understanding through the mysteries that emerge from the speculative nature of conversation, creative collaboration, and shared practice. PI Practice: www.physicalintellgence.org * Arts: www.margitg.wordpress.com


Denise Leto:


“Postcard Divinations, Embodied Loss, and the Poetics of Origin: A Grief Geography”

Denise Leto is a poet, editor, and explorer of multigenre and collaborative forms of media and performance. She wrote the libretto for the performance piece, Your Body is Not a Shark, which examined the poetics of embodied difference and disability through music, text, and dance. Recently, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Sicily and was the recipient of the Orlando Poetry Prize. onecontinuousword@wordpress.com

vaquera outtakes: love and herpes

On our way out to pizza, I was able to say something cute and something funny about the new purse my mom had given me. A purse that looked like all the small, sleek, dark brown purses. And I was able to say it lightly, with a tone of forgiveness for all the ways mom and I were intertwined and how that lead to the decisions that got me and him here.

I could feel my tone be really winning, and it was genuine, though still very fresh, tenuous.  We laughed with nervous relief. The strain of a plucked wire. He plucked me off the porch, swung me around in a hug before he set me down on the driveway. I said, with wry caution, as we got in the car, "Don't get too excited Though I am the one who has the issues with excitement. This is clearly chemical. It may not last..." 

It had only been 10 days since I'd started anti-depressants. 

He was quiet, then said,

"Well, you know that joke about love and herpes..." then paused, considering. I was surprised since it was usually me that knew jokes and facts about anything sexually sketchy.

"What?"

"My biology teacher in high school--who was really socially awkward--used to say it."

In describing the teacher, he could have been talking about himself, but he never, or rarely, judged himself by making reference to any character traits in others.. Itself, a trait I found unfathomable and somewhat admirable.

"Yeah...?" I prompted, in what I hoped was a naturally rhythmic way. 

He spoke very slowly. It was this that left me feeling lonely in my racing head. Or gliding on the brink of shared discovery. Depending on the day.

"The difference between love and herpes is that herpes is forever," he finally supplied.

By now, we were driving, winding our way out of the suburban cul-de-sac. His joke and a drop in the stomach, though I was well aware of what I'd said just before it--in essence, Don't count

on this lasting, me persisting as this me...for you, for an us.

"So, I hope I have your herpes." He added, matter-of-fact.

"Oh, OK." Now, I was back, talking in a voice, which was one of my real, intimate, but light voices. "We'll, you definitely have that, because I have herpes."

We were on the highway now. Flashing by chain establishments. Walmart, CVS, Home Depot. I hated these buildings, monolithic processors of commodity...and I, left to my own devices, could mot reach any of them. Nor did I want what they had. What i wanted was a good escort community.  Then,  I hastened to add, in case he had forgotten,

"Just the cold sore kind--I've had since I was a little kid."

"Me too." He steered his aged Toyota in a gentle,  but adept way, between two raging SUVs.

"Mmm--hmm," a long-awaited, haughty confirmation in my voice. "That makes sense, that bump just beneath the inside of your lip I felt, which I was afraid was something worse." I remembered trying to tactfully ask him about it and him refusing to name it--which I later learned had nothing to do with danger or evasiveness or the existence of something untrustworthy. Though, in fact, his refusal to name was the big thing I would never trust--my tactic being to keep pointing to all my wild cards, out in the open.

"No," he said "You couldn't possibly remember a bump because you never kissed me with your tongue when we were first getting to know each other."

This was disturbing, but plausible. Some version of me had an excellent memory, but I did realize there was lots I didn't remember about the months before I met him and after. Also, it was sad to think (no matter what we would decide about our relationship in the coming months) that there was a time when I had held back from really kissing him.

"Well...at that time, I was getting my personal and professional wires crossed. If I didn't kiss you at first, it was because I was stalling to see if I needed to get paid or not."

He slapped my thigh as we pulled into the parking spec. "That's my girl!" 

This was the kind of tone we could hope to last if the medicine worked and, or, if I decided not to go back to the city.

We walked, hand-in-hand, across the strip mall parking lot, toward the pizzeria, which was painted a kind of neon sherbet color. It was not quite 5pm. I was not quite 40, but headed to the early bird special. He preferred it because of his acid reflux. Across many yards of glimmering blacktop,  the cab of a semi rested In the shade. 

"Oh la, " I sighed, "Remember when we met a year ago...and you were homeless and I was a prostitute?"

He squeezed my hand and said, softly, "That's my girl.”

outtakes from vaquera because the book about vaquera won't matter, as matter-in-action, unless the process lives in the "open* somewhere else. like here.

Progressively, I move off the page as I admit that reading--with one, low vision eye, is not an effective use of psychic, creative and processing energy. It certainly is not the kind of dance of phenomena the eye, the brain, the literary image in cadence can make, if less constrained, across a page.

Sometimes, I fear I am a lazy/nervous thought-circler. My partner sometimes claims I am a naysayer. Poet friend Sabrina claims the physical needs of a more limited body have taught me economy. Her answer is a balm, and a way forward. Though it is clear that through too much economy, I fail to make choices--intuitive, embodied moves, through the chaos that could be nothing or everything. A mass of content and energy.

I mean, in terms of editing--shaving away from a mass of collected earth and flesh--that could be a manuscript. A poem-book, or kind of story. Editing, choosing what to keep and not to keep, and how to cut the contour, so it can appear, as a durational form, here in the world, as book.

It is starting to matter so much less to me--writing, I mean--if it ever did. I just wanted to approach a subliminal singing and traveling.  Except writing is still a medium through which to enhance a witnessing/noticing practice around moving and connecting, physically. The editing feels pointless, a thing not mean to be contained as text. But then subsequently, I begin to disappear as a writer, as nothing gets edited, done, sent away, published. And that could be Ok, because my real work is that of a sex(ological body) worker/poet/performance artist. That is an imperfect sequence of descriptors to describe one situational body artist arcing through time, a word for which, I do not have a thing. Just me, is the thing.

Documentary poetics, then, and more direct memoir are a way to point at the body (sex (art (work. but it becomes a mass of sorting and sequencing, and trying to channel different tones and degree of fact into form so that something can be told if it cannot be witnessed or experienced somatically.  And again, I can't make it into some thing, not at least until more cultural shifts occur. Much of what i am making/documenting/discovering goes on over here, quietly and consistently as the body poetik--and outside the sessions with the clients, appears only occasionally at performance of those sessions to audiences. (Yay for last October in Boulder/Naropa and yay, trepidatiously, to the Soamtechnics conference in Tucson this spring!)

But I can make them apparent here too, it occurs to me, as a number of discrete outtakes from many undercover works and their corollary writings. Bhanu has taught me that the blog is almost better than the book. No, it is is. it is document, in the more alive, unfixed sense.

I used to be afraid that if I blogged, there would be nothing left to really write, since all the wiring is about an art of lived experience, a looking through a lens of sex and disability, of chronic pain and sex, of curvature and light and supple flow, of intimacy and it's bridge with poetry and the body in motion. And the very practical economy of who can come together, with who, in the most intimate way, and for what most personal efficacy and why. Sex and power and the juice that flows the world.

I think the only way to cut away now, to make any choice, to feel that I am making the motions of making the sex body art work that I do visible, is to actually blog. To blog as editing process. Because it is all process work. The writing is only an arm of the overall arc, the conversation my palm has with the spine.

So, right, yeah. I am trying to write a series of long poetic sections into a manuscript about sex work, deformity, bones, cowgirls, fear and safety in the sacrum. To help me edit it, to leverage choices around what to cut and how to sort and sequence, I'll alleviate some of the pressure from the body of notes, by a kind of restorative yoga. A lifting and pulling away in which the cut parts are put in traction, here, on the blog, as outtakes from the thing that will be  isolate in it's own, discrete body (as we all are and have to unlearn and learn in degrees), a finished manuscript, the vaquera manuscript.

And, I'll begin...now. Or tomorrow.

As for Open"

"Bodies are enfleshed, but not enclosed: they are open, radically so—biologically, environmentally, socially, politically, and affectively. To be open means having the capacity for connection and curiosity, and willing to be receptive to otherness and difference. Openness is an engagement with processes of becoming, to be in anticipation of future states without predetermined ends. To be in the open is to be exposed and vulnerable under conditions of necessity and possibility, of risk and danger. Open is ontological, an ethical stance, an imperative: it demands of us to open borders, detention centers, and prisons, to open our eyes and our hearts, our senses and our awareness. Invitations are openings, as this one is: Let us come together and open ourselves to the embodied experience of our messy entanglements, fraught alliances and fuzzy boundaries with each other and with the Earth. And let us do it in Tucson. Open Embodiments is an international conference marking the relocation of the Somatechnics Research Network to the University of Arizona’s new Center for Critical Studies of the Body. Founded in 2005 by Nikki Sullivan and colleagues in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, the Somatechnics Research Network is an international, transdisciplinary group of more than 500 researchers interested in the “always already” technologized nature of embodiment—that is, in the sense in which embodiments cannot be distinguished from the means and methods of their making, that they are contingent, emergent, actualized, and materialized relations between some parts of a milieu and others. Somatechnics conjoins an open-ended curiosity about embodiment in our contemporary techno-nature-culture contexts with an ethics of embodied difference derived from feminist, queer, transgender, disability, and critical race methodologies, and with a political commitment to dismantling and refiguring those social technologies that maldistribute the means of life and survival according to modes of embodiment, including anthropocentric hierarchies of value. Over four days, conference participants will have the opportunity to connect their scholarly, artistic, creative, and activist engagement with embodiment’s openness to the geophysical/geospatial location of Tucson, Arizona, in the U.S./Mexico borderlands: to the surreal beauty and hazards of the Sonoran Desert, to the many vital local cultures of resistance to the militarized violence of the border and to the state’s ugly and damaging race/gender/sexuality politics, as well as to the University of Arizona’s historic commitment to interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the physical and life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. The conference will take place in numerous venues in Tucson’s revitalized historic downtown as well as the nearby University of Arizona campus. In addition to breakout sessions for delivering academic papers and keynote presentations from internationally renowned thinkers and culture-makers, Open Embodiments will include film screenings, performances, workshops, and other public events."

--from the Somatechnics conference site.


What opens us and spurs us on.