project image
Petra Kuppers
TENDINGS

first performed on April 23, 2018
Judson Memorial Church/Movement Research Sharing, New York, NY
performed three times in 2018

THE OLIMPIAS

Petra Kuppers, Stephanie Heit

Ann Arbor, MI
petra.kuppers@gmail.com
olimpias.org

TENDINGS
THE OLIMPIAS

The Olimpias worked with a group of participants during the 2018 Earth Day weekend on “Tendings,” in city parks and river edges in NYC. We explored small everyday collaborative practices that combine care gestures, disability culture, eco-specific investigations, somatic exercises, and writing. We placed well-known somatic movement scores into a disability culture framework. In the beautiful space of the Judson Memorial Church, we invited the audience to join us in building a (Beuysian) Social Sculpture: a breathing braid, head on belly, hands on limbs, some people lying on the ground, some sitting on chairs. A pulse of life and breath ran through us. A monologue drifted over the finished scene: environmental observations, connected tissue: “lines, boxes, sharp corners, and bodies that held me, that touched me, giving me lovingkindness, witnessing my aching body. We find the softness.”