People

Performances in hospices, on beaches and at the memory of slavery medicine, cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the United States, communal poetry among mental health system survivors, Butoh dancers and in video installations; Deleuzoguattarian aesthetics and playful rhizomes.

Performance scholar and community artist Petra Kuppers engages these sites and practices as laboratories of experimental disability culture. Here, the possibility of new forms of embodiment, engagement and community take shape at the intersection of the past and the emerging future, in an embodied poetics that brings together movement, touch and language. Disability culture appears as a process, not a static definition, and offers seeds for artful justice work towards respect, love and an enrichment of the everyday.

This book presents a senior practitioner's/critic's exploration of creative community processes sustained over more than a decade, and models the connections between arts-based research and research-based arts.