HOW TO MOVE AS BODIES ON THE EDGE? In conversation with Petra Kuppers

Originally published in Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2026.

CHAPTERS

00:00:00: Opening and Introduction

00:02:16: The Scar as Somatic Archive

00:10:10: Touch and Consent

00:16:11: Disability Culture as a Knowledge Practice

00:24:40: Collaborative Ecologies and More-than-Human Relations

00:33:16: Access, Justice and Rethinking Cultural Infrastructure

00:39:53: Eco Soma: Material Attention and Relational Agency

01:01:11: Community, Intersectionality and Ethical Self-Location

01:17:36: Closing Credits

How to move as bodies on the edge? is the ninth episode of VestAndPage’s momentum series, offering crucial insights into how to approach and think about performance-making in a time torn by inequalities, exclusion and global political extremes. Here, artist and writer Andrea Pagnes engages with Petra Kuppers, a leading figure in performance studies and an internationally renowned disability culture activist and community performance artist, to explore how performance operates within disability culture today: as resistance, ritual and co-created presence. They reflect on what it means to perform without reproducing ableist norms and on how performance offers alternatives that help craft new spaces where people with disabilities, neurodivergences and chronic illnesses are not only visible but also central. In the conversation, Kuppers draws on her long-standing interdisciplinary art practice and research, integrating methods from disability culture, performance art, dance, somatics, community art and speculative poetics to envision more socially just futures.

Kuppers’s latest academic study, the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), is available as open access. Her Crip/Mad Archive Dances, an experimental documentary, won the Best Artists’ Film Award at the international Together! Disability Film Festival in 2024, and a presentation based on the project won the Calgary Artistic Research Award from Performance Studies International (2024). Her dance videos have recently been shown internationally and published in Poetry, Denver Quarterly’s FIVES and Unearthed. Her latest poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street (2024), examines connections among true crime, soil and the membranes of life and death. Kuppers was a 2021 Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow, a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2024, she received the Visionary Trailblazer Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for her lifelong work in community performance. She leads the Olimpias, an association of international disability culture artists, and co-runs Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, dancer and poet Stephanie Heit, in their home on Anishinaabe Territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She runs weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research and is the Anita Gonzalez collegiate professor of performance studies and disability culture at the University of Michigan. She is currently working on Planting Disabled Futures.

Welcome to the momentum of summer 2026.