The Tobin Siebers Disability Arts and Culture Lecture: Collaboration and Improvisation

In this special guest lecture, held at Liverpool Hope University on 26 July 2016, Professor Petra Kuppers paid tribute to the life and work of her friend and colleague Tobin Siebers.¹ As David Bolt explained in his introduction to the event, Professor Siebers served on the board of JLCDS for over a decade. He was an active reviewer and edited a special issue of the journal with Alice Hall shortly before he died in 2015. His work continues to make a leading contribution to the field. Given her work and friendship with Tobin Siebers and her role as a disability culture activist and community performance artist, it was more than fitting for Petra Kuppers to give the Tobin Siebers Disability Arts and Culture Lecture.

The Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University welcomed academics, independent researchers, artists and representatives from disability arts organisations across the UK to this memorial lecture. Taking place only shortly after the UK vote to leave the European Union and the horrific murder of 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Kuppers's talk addressed the relevance of disability activism and disability arts to asylum and sanctuary. These themes have resonated equally through her distinctive pedagogy, research, and arts practice. Beginning with personal insights into the foundations of the disability studies community at the University of Michigan, we were reminded of its emergence through activist rather than academic energies. A further account of the playful nature of the community arts activities at Michigan offered a moving description of the early days of this important work, of which Siebers was a significant part.

Kuppers's address centered on the importance of interdependency and mutuality to creative arts practice through an exploration of her shared experiences of two site-specific pieces of work with her partner, the somatic poet Stephanie Heit. Kuppers began by acknowledging the influence of poet Audre Lorde on her exploration of collaborative arts practice, disability arts, and activism. The significance of "interdependency between women" is acknowledged by Lorde as "the only way to the freedom which allows the I to be not in order to be used but in order to be creative" (Lorde and Clarke 111). This sentiment is evident in Kuppers's emphasis on mutuality in her pedagogic approach as well as through her arts practice. She was keen to connect with her audience, prompting us to explore who was in the room and who was not, a pedagogic approach explained in Disability Arts and Culture. She engaged us in a fluid, conversational sharing of experience through the uses of participatory approaches, such as audience/group sourced visual descriptions and communal readings of text. These approaches enabled us to share potentially distant personal experiences making them live again in this new space.

The lecture offered a participatory exploration of Kate Gilmour's Higher Ground. Photographs of this work show a repurposed abandoned convent, a clapboard house, its exterior painted pink with a deep red interior visible through two opened windows. Swings were installed inside the building and women volunteers in long white dresses and red shoes were seen swinging out of the windows, over the window ledges into the outside world. Kuppers offered a vivid account of activating the work with her partner, each swinging back and forth through the windows for half an hour prompting this personal reflection:

"Swing, swing. Swing, swing. Swing, swing"

Two women swing out through the windows of a pink clapboard house.

Their white dresses lift with the breeze of momentum.

Freedom. Exuberance. Escape.

I think of my grandmother as a child. She swings in her cellar, kicking the ceiling. Her mother scolds her for the thump, thump, thump on the kitchen floor.

A soft chorus of voices "Swing, swing. Swing, swing. Swing, swing"

She described her struggle to keep her shoes on and her burning thighs and trembling legs. Through this vivid physical experience she described being able to recognise something of those who had been present in those rooms before, imagining the women who had previously occupied that place. Her rich account of...