Art Talk with Disability Culture Activist and Community Performance Artist Petra Kuppers

Speaking with disability culture activist and community performance artist Petra Kuppers is like taking a journey through the senses, which is exactly the kind of experience she cultivates in her artistic practices. Kuppers uses movement, sound, taste, scent, touch, and dream-like visuals to take those she’s inviting on her performances to new places, real and imagined. These methods, as she states on her website, are meant to “engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.” In 2023, Kuppers received a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her art and scholarship. 

In addition to being a performance artist, Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan and a published poet. She has also received a 2022/23 Dance/USA fellowship, the American Society for Theatre Research’s best dance/theatre book award, and the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts’ Award for Arts and Activism.

At the time of this writing, Kuppers is in the South of France as a fellow at the Camargo Foundation, completing an experimental documentary as part of her Crip/Mad Archive Dances project, which she pursued with the resources from her Guggenheim Fellowship. This project tracks the presence of disabled movement in archival dance footage, which Kuppers said can be a challenge due to the stigmas around disability or mental health difference, which archivists or individual’s families often left off the record. Using relational methods and storytelling to find people and records that might fit into this project, Kuppers then responds in the present. 

“I was able to find these beautiful dancerly traces from the Bronx Psychiatric Institution, and then we dance with them in disability community, track them, be in gestural and physical communication with these traces.”

In her distinctive style, Kuppers spoke with the NEA via video conference about the other ways she has engaged community in performance, how that work translates into her poetry, and the power in operating outside of the confines of traditional art spaces and methods. 

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: How were you first introduced to art and your artistic practice? Where did that begin? 

PETRA KUPPERS: I've been engaged in art life practice and fields all my life. I grew up in Germany in the countryside, middle of nowhere, in an environment where I had a strong sense of the animacy of the world around me. There were creatures in the rivers, and in the trees, creatures I could be in relation with, dance with. This sense of the aliveness of the world still very much drives how my work happens now. 

I also grew up as someone who lived with pain. From quite early on, I experienced a lot of pain, so I always had to find a way of modulating my interest in the natural world and being outdoors and moving. I did enjoy moving a lot, so I had to find a way to work with, not against, my painful experiences.

I'm a first-generation high school finisher in my immediate family. There was no model, there was nobody out there who was telling me “Well, these are the ways you can go. These are the kind of experiments artists are engaged in.” I had to find them by and by. At university I started experimentation with community performance work. At the University of Cologne, we had a student theater. They were very happy to accommodate obsessive people who wanted to do strange experiments – like me. They gave me a studio to work in for a year on [a performance piece] called Frankenstein, and I did a German stage translation of [the novel] Frankenstein. It was deliciously weird. My team was really varied, too - some of us were squatters, some were architects, some were students, people from all different walks of life. We explored movement together and we engaged in these strange birthing rituals, a slow coming into sensation and world awareness. The movements still look very much like what I'm doing now—movement practices that are not dependent on virtuosity or on an ability to jump high. Instead, they were all about concentration, immersion, relationship to self, other and ground, ritual practices. That's still very much what I do today.

NEA: You say that you're grounded in disability culture method. Can you describe what that means to you and how that manifests in your work?

KUPPERS: Disability culture methods means, for me, that I'm always trying to come from the place of a question. Who's not in the room, and how can we have more people in the [real or virtual] room? That core question characterizes to me what disability culture is about. I, and the group of people I work with, always think about whoever “we” are as provisional. The kind of ways in which we communicate are provisional. We're not trying to come up with best practices. Instead, we're trying to experiment toward more access for more of us, toward more open futures. For me, that meant that my first art practices beyond these student experiments were Dance with a Difference, where I’ve danced with people who also had significant chronic pain. I danced a lot with people in hospice, in the last months of their lives – hand dances, skin dances, small vibrational work of presence and joy. 

I also worked a lot in mental health self-help groups with people who had really complicated relationships to movement. Many of us had experiences of not being allowed to physically move freely due to incarceration, poverty, age or mobility differences, or were forced on medications that altered movement patterns. Many of us had memory problems and could not memorize movement patterns. For all these reasons, many in our group were not interested in engaging in conventional movement practices, something “recognizable” as dance for audiences, but we were very happy to think about the relationship between inner and outer movement. Dream journeys to experience freedom. Artful ways to calm ourselves and open new pathways to rich sensation. That's, for me, a really important part of the kind of disability culture work that I do. How can I make delicious movement experiences available to people who might be joining me on their bed? How can I use media, like video dance or written language, to enlarge who can dance with us? 

NEA: Community seems to be a big part of what you do—performance as being in community. There's a perception that performance is something that is given to an audience versus bringing them in. Can you talk about your perspective on community and performance?

KUPPERS: There's many ways I can answer that question. I'm just going to do it through a recent performance experience. Last December, I was in Venice, Italy, as part of the Venice International Performance Art Week. I opened this festival with a performance in a beautiful palazzo by a canal, very inaccessible, but we were still plenty of disabled people there. We just had to have a lot of help in order to get into this thing.

In this performance, I invited people to go on a Crip Drift with me. We touched in with the lagoon, Venice being surrounded by the water. We traveled back in time and felt ourselves standing in the lagoon, our feet in the mud, next to a salt worker, a woman worker who was winnowing salt from the sea by opening up earth dams toward evaporation beds. We went on this dream journey in the darkened room, with red light glowing on us. Volunteers then gave everybody in the audience a sea salt crystal. Next, I invited people into contact, asking them if they were happy to touch someone else’s shoulder, or a hand, or just be in energetic connection. In this way, I wove 120 people into a giant crystal. Then I invited them to put their salt crystal onto their tongue, if they agreed to do so. Of course, salt is quite a mild substance, but it still is a mind-body-spirit-altering substance. You put salt on your tongue, and you know it, right? Your whole body responds, it’s like electricity coursing through. So we created this communal crystal, a lattice, humming with energy, moving through time and space together. We then invited the waters of the lagoon to come in, to dissolve and interact with our salt, and the whole giant room began to move, to vibrate. Swaying, dancing, dreaming, we were all touching each other in some way, either energetically or physically, in this beautiful half-light of the palazzo. 

There’s something about 120 body-mind-spirits dreaming together that creates a different experience in this time-space. That's what I'm so interested in, transformation. No one had the same experience. No one was asked to have the same experience. 

It's less about storytelling. It's less about sharing our life experiences direct. Instead, it's a dance of the community. It's a community of breathing, a community of being enfleshed, a community of being at a particular time and space and touching in with other times in space in order for us to imagine new futures for Venice, new futures of how we live on the edges of lagoons, in climate emergency worlds, in states of dissolve.

NEA: Can you speak about your different artistic practices and how they feed into one another?

KUPPERS: I just published in February Diver Beneath the Street, my fourth poetry collection, with Wayne State University Press. That is a book that holds onto some of these drifting experiences that I just described in the Venice performance. It holds onto these experiences through the medium of poetry. 

At the heart of Diver Beneath the Street are two serial killer murder cases. True crime meets eco-poetry. I'm looking at the sites in my neighborhood in Ypsilanti and in Ann Arbor where the bodies of young white women were found in 1967 to ‘69, and Detroit sites where older Black women were found in 2019. The 60s cases are the famous Michigan Murders. They are one of the reasons why women are told not to hitchhike, to constrain their travels. The aftermath of these cases tells us how women are supposed to navigate space. As a white queer disabled woman with a scooter whose access to space is complex, I got really interested in this aspect of the national obsession with true crime. 

My wife and collaborator, poet-dancer Stephanie Heit, and I found out that we had bought a house on the street where the murder house was, where the final evidence was found that convicted the 1960s murderer. Then the pandemic happened, and we were in shutdown. I couldn't be in physical community. So instead, like many of us, I engaged a lot with my neighborhood. At that time, and continuing into the present, the pandemic forced all of us to think about those edges of life and death.  

I drifted through the neighborhood with my little scooter, moving, feeling the roots beneath me. When you're on a scooter, on a wheelchair, you really notice the unevenness of the pavements, the way trees strain against the geometry of city planning. Diver Beneath the Street speaks about these experiences of drifting through different neighborhoods. I was drifting past some of the sites where women's bodies were found, and I wrote about decay and renewal. About nematodes, springtails and worms, and about the recycling of life that happens in soils. The resulting collection dives into soil, dives into the Huron River, dives into locations through trance-inducing drifting methods. I do not write about the murders themselves, the women’s suffering, or the murderer. Mine is a very different engagement with racialized, classed, and gendered crime patterns.

In my language engagement with site, I am also holding on to some of what I have learned about Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language. When I live in different countries, I always try to get a sense of what the Indigenous language feels like, what the grammar is like, as that speaks so much about relationships. Even though I don't speak Anishinaabemowin, I was able to take two semesters' worth of instruction in this, and that has left a trace in my relationship to English, and to the land where I now live. Again, the animacy of the world that I spoke to at the beginning, that sense of animacy and relationship is very much part of Anishinaabemowin grammar. While I'm writing in English, I'm trying to have in my ear that there are other languages that are part of this land. English is a settler language that has a very different relationship to trees, to shrubs, to the beetles than Anishinaabemowin has, and being alert to that in the crafting of poetry is something I find very generative.

NEA: You're so wonderful at painting a picture. I have these images coming into my mind as you're talking that are so vibrant. It’s also evident your work operates outside of traditional art spaces and is more experimental. How would you advise or encourage others to seek out working outside of the traditional engagement with art, and engagement with the world, when it can feel very daunting or unaccepted?

KUPPERS: That is a lovely question and an important one. I would point to art/life again, that connection between art and life, and the satisfaction of being in creative contact with the aliveness of the world. That's, for me, the only way in which there can be hope for us as the human species, for this human species working, living, being in human and more-than-human community on a planet that is becoming less and less habitable for many of us. 

That was a big answer. Let’s make it a small answer. We can use our senses to invent new methods, to find new art forms, to connect ourselves with heritage art forms that might not be part of what is currently happening on the paid stages or in the paid galleries, but that might be part of the traditional frameworks of our lineages. These are such satisfying ways of being part of human cultural production. The majority of people who want to be on the big stages, have their paintings in the big galleries, or have their book be a major bestseller, will likely not achieve that particular goal. Many of us artists, even if we properly train and do everything we're supposed to do, will not get there. It's tiny little bunches of people who get that kind of recognition. That's just how it is in this particular star-based art world system. Getting satisfaction out of the connection between art and life, touching in with spiritual depth and the depth of relationships that you build with others, with yourself and with the world that you're in, that you're part of, that you're serving—these will provide so much more satisfaction than any kind of external marker. Your path will be much more enjoyable if you have other ways of finding recognition and affirmation. It will make for a much more satisfying life, particularly and specifically when there's so much precarity in so many people's lives. Where do you find joy? Start with that.