The Crip/Mad Archive Dances

How can media technologies and live presence help us to think about embodied disabled and mad gestures in and out of the archive? What is an “eco soma” approach to engaging site, the elements, and time?

The Crip/Mad Archive Dances is a lecture by scholar and artist Petra Kuppers that draws on her prolific research integrating performance and disability studies to address disabled and mad presences in dance archives. The talk at EMPAC is rooted in Kuppers’s book Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access), parsing what she calls “eco soma methods” and finding dis/comfort within participatory performances grounded in disability culture. Kuppers discusses the strategies and insights of the performance and archive project Crip/Mad Archive Dances with a poetic documentary-in-progress.