Co-Dreaming: Improvisation toward Liberatory Worlding was conceived as a micro, self-produced residency play time by Petra Kuppers and Bhumi B Patel to bring together queer artists to create new worlds through our embodied connection with the land and ecosystem.
Date: October 16-October 19, 2023
Funded by Dance/USA
Organized by Petra Kuppers and Bhumi B Patel
Taking place on the occupied and unceded territory of the Chochenyo Ohlone people (Oakland) and Ramyatush Ohlone people (San Francisco)
Co-Dreaming: Improvisation toward Liberatory Worlding
Co-Dreaming (Bay Area) Participants
Schedule of Improvisation Sessions
Tuesday, October 17th
Joe Goode Annex from 11am to 4pm
Indoor practices led by Petra, Stephanie, and Bhumi
Wednesday, October 18th
Outdoors at Fort Funston (layer up!) from 11am - 3pm/4pm depending on the elements
Land-based explorations led by Petra, Stephanie, and Bhumi
Thursday, October 19th
Outdoors at Township Commons Park from 12pm-3pm
Culminating improvisations and picnic
**Please bring food/beverages if you'll want them breaks throughout each day**
Co-leaders
Movement artist and writer Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer (she/they). In its purest form, she creates performance works as a love letter to her ancestors. While Patel has trained in Western forms, she seeks to create movement outside of white models of dance at the intersection of embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice for voice and body as a pursuit for liberation. Patel seeks liberation through dancing, choreographing, curating, teaching, and scholarship and attends to her desires to create nourishing community spaces. She earned her M.A. in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her M.F.A. in Dance from Mills College. She is a member of Dancing Around Race, founded by Gerald Casel, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. Patel’s work has been presented at Human Resources (LA), CounterPulse (SF), Joe Goode Annex (SF), RoundAntennae (Berkeley), SAFEhouse Arts (SF), max10 (Santa Cruz), RAWdance’s Concept Series (SF), The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest (SF), Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival (Berkeley), and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency (SF). Bhumi has been a Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, an Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, and a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. She has presented her research at the Dance Studies Association Annual conference, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, and the Popular Culture Association Annual conference and has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance.
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist, shock/psych system survivor, and a member of the Olimpias, a disability performance collective. Her book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), won the 2023 Midwest Book Award, and invites readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. Her first poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017), was a Nightboat Poetry Prize finalist, and explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference. Her current project is Every Horizon Turns Liquid, where neurodiversity meets ecopoetic immersion. Water is at stake amidst climate change and evolutionary rigors that task the bodies – human, animal, plant, imaginary – that inhabit these biomes and plot escapes. This work emerges out of somatic engagements along the shorelines of Lake Michigan and other real and imaginary locations. Stephanie’s work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Sonora Review, BathHouse, Venti, Rogue Agent, Ecotone, Anomaly, Bombay Gin, and About Place. Disability culture, collaboration, and her lived experience with mental health difference inform her community engagements.
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a German community performance artist, a disability culture activist, and a wheelchair dancer. She uses social somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s and continues to lead workshops internationally. Petra’s fifth academic book is Eco Soma: Joy and Pain in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access), which won honorable mention by the National Dance Educators’ Organization and was shortlisted for the de la Torre Bueno Prize by the Dance Studies Association. Her new collection, Diver Beneath the Street – true crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil – will appear in February 2024. Petra was a 2021 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library's dance division, a 2022/2023 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow. She is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home on Three Fires Confederacy Territory, colonially known as Ypsilanti, Michigan. Petra is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan.