The Crip/Mad Archive Dances: Embodied Histories

How do disabled and mad people survive, dance, insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain?

This experimental documentary charts disability culture archives and embodied gestures of survival and creative expression. It draws on community with human and non-human others: media clips as performance gifts, archival footage from dance archives, environmental embedment and grounding in trees, water, desert and lakes. Together, we dance, and spring our binds. Petra’s Q&A opens up using various creative methods to approach archival finds.

10:30 - Intro and documentary screening “Crip/Mad Archive Dances”

11:10 - Q & A with Petra Kuppers (on Zoom)

Please note: This experimental documentary shares instances of medical incarceration including insulin violence. It offers survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation. The film is fully subtitled in English. The documentary uses 'crip' and 'mad' as in-group signifiers, aware of stigma and histories.

A full audio-description track is available on Soundcloud.

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Petra Kuppers (she/her)

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, uses a psychogeographic lens to investigate true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, bringing together life and death (Wayne State University Press, 2024).

She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently at work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Social Science Research Council Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026).

VK Preston

VK Preston is a Concordia University faculty member in the Department of History and co-director of LePARC (Performing Arts Research Cluster) at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, Technology.