Hurricane Poetics and Crip Psychogeographies

One weekend in October 2017, we led a workshop at Movement Research, a New York City laboratory for the investigation of dance and movement forms. As the cofounders of the Asylum Project, a range of site-specific explorations of sanctuary, edge space, and communal well-being, infused by crip culture / disability culture values, we are interested in poetry and performance as ways of being in the world. The workshop offered a sample of our collaborative and community-based practices, including tuning our body-minds to inner and outer geographies and energies, and engaging in score-building—improvisatory activities that allow for individual exploration within a structure. One of us, Stephanie, is a psychiatric-system survivor who is bipolar, and the other, Petra, is a wheelchair / scooter user who lives with chronic pain. We moved with the workshop participants through a cityscape touched by climate change, hurricane memories, and workers' struggles, trying to stay attuned to the presence of halting steps and painful pasts.

We grounded our exploration in our work with the Olimpias, an artists' collective founded by mental-health–system survivors in Wales in 1996, with Petra as artistic director. The collective creates collaborative, research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies, exploring pride and pain, attention, and the transformative power of touch. The Olimpias is disability led, and nondisabled allies are always welcome. Stephanie has been an associate of the collective since 2014, the year we met and fell in love. Since then, we have co-led the Asylum Project.

Each day during the workshop, we met for two sessions, at two different sites, divided by a lunch break. On the following Monday night, we gave a performance at Judson Church.

Asylum Project workshop participants on Delancey Street, New York, 2017. Photograph by Petra Kuppers. Previous spread: Asylum Project workshop participants in Judson Church, New York, 2017. Photograph by Ian Douglas.

PETRA: THE DÉRIVE

Our core method of engagement goes back to Situationist practice: every day, in some form, we played in the realm of the dérive, or drifting. The original European avant-garde movement of Situationist International (SI) began in 1957, when the Situationists engaged in what Claire Doherty describes in Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation as "artistic practices for which the 'situation' or 'context' is often the starting point." Given what I've read of Guy Debord, cofounder of SI, I am not sure that I would have wanted to play on their playground, or that I would have been allowed onto it, as a first-gen-university-going, disabled, white woman of size, grounded in disability-culture values. Critics including Simone Hancox have accused the early movement of elitism and authoritarianism. Sensitivities to power differentials and their effect on space engagement are core to Olimpias actions, so we take note of anything that feels too easy in our work with historic forms.

In 1958, Debord wrote in his "Théorie de la Dérive," translated by Ken Knabb, that the dérive "is a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances," which involves the dropping of "usual motives for movement." In our dérives during the New York workshop, we stumbled, arrested our ambles, and got stopped in multiple ways. Our arresting influences included the pattern arrangements of orange plastic safety-fences that kept spaces separate; danger zones of rubble; and the lines concrete markers make in space. For dancers, the "usual motives for movement" are already suspended. The line between dérive and improvisational impulse frayed easily as we fell into Debord's second description of the dérive as it engages space: "Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll."

Framing our work by calling on asylum imagery repeatedly bound us back to the city's histories, to personal memory, to feeling safe and unsafe in skin, world, city, nation. Where...