Disability/Culture: 2012 UMInDS Spring Conference and Practice-Based
Research Symposium
with Wobbly Dance Company (Yulia Arakelyan and Erik Ferguson), Aimee
Meredith Cox, Sadashi Inuzuka, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Ariel
Osterweis and Melanie Yergeau. January 31st to February 2nd,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Deadline for applications: Nov.
1st, notification: Nov. 15th.
For our fifth arts-based inquiry symposium we invite scholars and
artists to explore together the realm of disability culture(s), the
slashes between disability and culture, the connects and disconnects
between embodiment, enmindment, aesthetic access, interdependence and
community. Professional development, networking, and socialising are
also part of this symposium. It is a forum for sharing work by doing
work together: running workshops for one another, sharing our queries
and insights through practice. Paper giving will not be our main mode
of working.
We invite up to five fellows (graduate students, faculty, independent
artists and activists) to come together with the organizing team for
three days. Before the symposium, a small reading/viewing pack sourced
from all participants will be mailed out, to prep us for our time
together. During the symposium, each fellow will have one hour to
present material and engage the others in practice. We will be in
residence at the Duderstadt Video Performance Studio on UM?s North
Campus, with multiple performance technologies and innovative tech
wizards at the ready. Together, we will work toward a roundtable for
the Thursday afternoon University of Michigan Initiative on Disability
Studies Spring Conference. The symposium begins at 1pm on Tuesday the
31st, and ends at 4pm on Thursday the 3rd, although you are welcome to
stay on for the UMInDS Spring Conference poster session and social,
arranged by the UM Allies for Disability Awareness Community
Organizing group.
Each invitee will have transport and accommodation costs reimbursed up
to $300 dollars. The conference hotel offers rooms for about sixty
dollars a night, and we will assist people who want to be hosted by
graduate students.
Application Process: please email us a short CV, a sample of your
experimental, performative or critical writing, movement practice or
visual art, and a brief statement about why you would like to
participate. Youtube links are fine. Alternatively, send a DVD or CD
with performance or visual arts material, also accompanied by a
statement, to the symposium director, Petra Kuppers, University of
Michigan, 435 S. State Street, 3187 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, MI
48109-1003, [log in to unmask]
Deadline: November 1, 2011 Notification: November 15th, 2011
Bios:
Special Guests:
Wobbly Dance Company (http://wobblydance.com/wordpress/)
Yulia Arakelyan is a Russian speaking Armenian born in Baku,
Azerbaijan in 1982. She discovered dance in 2002 when she attended a
performance by Light Motion Dance Company in Seattle, WA. Nine months
later she was on stage, dancing with the company in her first
performance. Yulia has been dancing and performing non-stop ever
since. From 2004-2005 she trained with CandoCo Dance Company in
London, England as part of their Foundation Course in Dance. In 2007,
Yulia was the first wheelchair user to graduate from the University of
Washington with a BA in Dance. Some of her most influential teachers
not in any particular order are: Sheri Brown, Mizu Desierto, Jurg
Koch, Miguel Gutierrez, Natsu Nakajima, and Katsura Kan. Yulia has
performed with Performance Works NW, Lilian Baylis Studio Theatre
(UK), Long Distance Project, Impetus Arts, VSA Vision Gallery,
University of Washington, Polaris Dance Center, The Headwaters and
Scratch PDX. For the past year, Yulia has been researching her family
history and Armenian history. She?s putting all that research into a
series of solo and the first solo, Boud-a-getchere (This, too, will
pass) was performed at the 1 Festival this past July in Portland, OR.
Erik Ferguson is an anti-virtuoso movement artist living in Portland
Oregon. He got his start studying improvisation with Alito Alessi in
Trier Germany in 2003 and has performed and taught DanceAbility and
contact improvisation throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as the
UK, Oaxaca, and British Columbia. He has most recently studied
improvisation with Deborah Hay and Barbara Dilly. He is a perpetual
student of Butoh who has studied with various teachers including Akira
Kasai, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, Mizu Desierto and many others. His
performances range from storytelling to dance theatre exploring themes
of embodiment, gender identity, and extremes of human emotion. Erik is
also a practitioner of visual arts including drawing, painting, and
printmaking as well as multi-disciplinary pursuits combining art,
assistive technology and social networking.
Based in Portland, OR, Wobbly Dance is a multimedia duo using
performance, film, improvisation, digital interaction and visual art
to create multi-sensory environments and explore themes on embodiment
in the natural world. Currently they are working with choreographer
Mizu Desierto on a full length show, Underneath, to be premiered in
October 2012.
Sadashi Inuzuka: http://sadashiinuzuka.com
Born in Kyoto, Japan, Sadashi Inuzuka has established his career as an
installation artist who explores the innovative and poetic potential
of clay. He has exhibited, lectured and worked as an
artist-in-residence nationally and internationally. He is a professor
of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
?Since 1999, I have led ceramics classes and workshops for individuals
who are blind, visually and/or cognitively impaired. My background as
a ceramic artist and as a person who is visually impaired made me want
to do something about bringing the low vision and sighted communities
together through the medium of clay. So the programs began as a way to
foster better understanding across physical, cultural, economic, and
generational divides through art. For people with disabilities, I
believe working collaboratively in ceramics helps independent thinking
and working, self-pride and self-respect, social skills and
communication.?
?For many years I focused on the physical part of art ? the long hours
in the studio, the effort of making large ceramic sculptures. I was
absorbed by the demands of the material and found inspiration within
my own mental and emotional states while in the studio. Later in my
career, as I began to look around me, my work shifted. Still
physically involved in making hundreds of elements for large
installations, I began to explore my relationship to the larger world
and the fragile balance of society and the environment. These
installations were intuitive interpretations of pressing issues ?
water ecology, invasive species, gene modification. It was during this
time that I began to mix traditional materials to new technologies.
In my new work, I have returned to an interest in the body - that my
consciousness is connected to my experience of the world through the
senses, of form, touch and reflection. My concern for the future of
the natural world and society may not be as evident, but it is still
there just deeper and less obvious. The inside and outside worlds
still meet, and this time my work is that skin.?
Organising team:
Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and assistant
professor of performance and African and African American Studies at
Fordham University. Dr. Cox?s research and teaching interests include
expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public
anthropology; Black girlhood and Black feminist theory. She is
currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and
the Choreography of Citizenship in Post-Industrial Detroit.
Shapeshifters is an ethnographic exploration of the performative
strategies young black women in low-income urban communities use to
access various forms of self-defined economic and social mobility.
Dr. Cox is also a choreographer and dancer. She trained on scholarship
with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional
dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the
founder and creative director of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led
arts activist organization currently working in partnership with the
Sadie Nash Leadership Project.
Aimee is a long-standing Olimpias collaborator, and was one of the
co-leaders of the Anarcha Project, which investigated the connections
between black culture(s) and disability culture(s) through a focus on
slavery medicine and its reverberations in contemporary health care
inequalities.
Petra Kuppers is a community artist and disability culture activist,
Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series, and
Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She also
teaches on the low residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard
College.
Her academic book publications include Disability and Contemporary
Performance: Bodies on Edge (2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical
Performances and Contemporary Art (2007), Community Performance: An
Introduction (2007), and Disability Culture and Community Performance:
Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011), a book that charts many
Olimpias performance experiments. A poetry/cross-genre book, Cripple
Poetics: A Love Story, with Neil Marcus and Lisa Steichmann, appeared
with Homofactus Press in 2008. Her edited work includes, most
recently, Somatic Engagement, an collection of artists on the poetics,
politics and publics of embodiment (2011).
Currently, she is at work on a series of experiments in fictocritical
poetry writing created in response to conversations about disability
culture, Aboriginal survivance and art practice, experienced during a
fellowship at the Australian National University in fall 2010.
Material from this series has appeared in Performance Paradigm, and is
forthcoming in Antipodes.
She?s also developing The Olimpias?s current performance series, WEFT,
a social somatics/participatory performance action to honor
international labor. The current focus is on the industrial production
of clothing, and on how our bodyminds make sense of these materials
that touch us all the time, and whose origins are often so mysterious
or invisible to many of us.
Fragments of WEFT happened in 2011 with the MFA crowd at the American
Dance Festival; with people from the AXIS summer intensive at People?s
Park, Berkeley, sharing food and actions with homeless people; with
community artists in Montreal, Canada; as part of the Dance and
Disability roundtable at the University of Washington; and in
Gotenburg, Sweden, where the action aimed to highlight affect and
emigration, remembering the fact that a third of all Swedes emigrated
over the course of 50 years.
Neil Marcus is a performance and visual artist, and poet. "Disability
is an art ? an ingenious way to live." This award-winning playwright,
actor, poet, and performance artist earned national acclaim when he
crafted his experiences as a man living with dystonia, into a powerful
staged work. Storm Reading, first produced in the late eighties,
challenged audiences to reevaluate conventional ideas about disability
and set a standard for performing artists with disabilities, and for
performance access technologies. Voted one of Los Angeles? top ten
plays of 1993, it enjoyed a nearly decade-long run. Since then,
Marcus? passionate stance toward life has infused his artistic
choices. Believing that "life is a performance," he has cast his
creative net wide, participating in a range of diverse projects.
In 2008, he published Cripple Poetics: A Love Story, with Petra
Kuppers and Lisa Steichmann, and circled the globe performing from
this book, to audiences at disability arts festivals, poetry centers,
universities, community centers and Centers for Independent Living.
His current book, Special Effects: Advances in Neurology, appeared in
2011 with the Portland Publication Studio. More than a document of
the early days of the disability rights movement, the book is also a
window into California zine culture of the 1980s. Art in revolution:
social justice, the human growth movement, art in the everyday. From
flourishing dystopia to speech storms, Neil documents living artfully
in Berkeley, California, and in Disability Country.
In 2011, Neil choreographed a videodance on Richard Chen See, an
ex-Paul Taylor dancer, and he's currently working on a piece on the
relationships between jazz aesthetics and speech difference.
Ariel Osterweis is Assistant Professor of Dance at Wayne State
University. This fall, Osterweis earns her Ph.D. in Performance
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (dissertation: ?Body
Impossible: Dynamics of Race, Sexuality, and Virtuosity in the Dance
of Desmond Richardson?). Osterweis? writing has been published in
Dance Research Journal, Women and Performance: a journal of feminist
theory, e-misférica, In Dance, Dancer Magazine,Studio: The Studio
Museum in Harlem Magazine, and is forthcoming in TDR/The Drama Review
and Mediated Moves: A Popular Screen Dance Anthology (published by
Oxford University Press). In addition to writing at the intersection
of race, gender, virtuosity, and performance in the U.S., Osterweis
also researches contemporary geo-choreographic practices in West and
Central Africa. She has also co-organized conferences at UC Berkeley
on dance and disability and African and Caribbean performance.
Osterweis danced professionally in New York with Complexions
Contemporary Ballet, Heidi Latsky Dance, Homer Avila, and Mia Michaels
R.A.W., among others. She has also choreographed works based on
pregnancy, doubling, and the experimental ?Drawing Poems? of Robert
Grenier. Most recently, Osterweis has been theorist/dramaturge for
performance artist Narcissister, working with issues of race,
feminism, and the explicit dancing body.
Melanie Yergeau is an assistant professor of English at the University
of Michigan. A recipient of the 2009 Kairos Best Webtext Award, she
researches how disability studies and digital technologies complicate
our understandings of writing and communication. She has published in
College English, Disability Studies Quarterly, Computers and
Composition Online, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and
Pedagogy. Additionally, Melanie is an editor for Computers and
Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State University Press.
Along with John Duffy, she served as a guest editor for the Summer
2011 special issue of DSQ on disability and rhetoric.
Melanie is also a disability rights activist. She is a member of the
National Advisory Committee of the Autism NOW Center, a joint
initiative of the Administration on Developmental Disabilities and The
Arc. Additionally, she serves as the board chair of the Autistic Self
Advocacy Network (ASAN), and formerly directed its Central Ohio
chapter. During her time with ASAN, she has organized several protests
against Autism Speaks and its lack of Autistic representation, its
support for eugenics, and its ableist advertising practices.
Currently, Melanie is working on an academic book project that
explores autism and its construction as an arhetorical condition. She
blogs semi-regularly at http://aspierhetor.com
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