Left to right: Sarah Dean, Beth Currans, Ashwini Bhasi, and Slade Billew, Mad Conductors , Turtle Disco garden
organized by Bhumi Patel and Petra Kuppers. I want to take a beat and invite you to read the symposium title again: Co-Dreaming: Improvisation Toward Liberatory Worlding. I expe- rience these words as portals and as power vortexes into imagining ways to create and be with the present and the future. This symposium’s aim was to “bring together queer artists to cre- ate new worlds through our embodied connection with the land and ecosys- tem.” I don’t know about you, but I’d love to inhabit and be part of that future world. TUNING INTO THE KNOWN & UNKNOWN Before I continue, I am going to pause, and welcome you to pause as well, to tune into our individual embodiment in this specific moment.
In my own life, as someone with mental health difference, as some- one bipolar and with traumatic brain injury from electroshocks, I am in a constant improvisation to meet the day and bend it to my current capacities, which can vary wildly. One of my adaptations has been shapeshifting between disci- plines, usually movement and writ- ing. As a young dancer, I had to reinvent my life when movement wasn’t available due to depression. Writing offered another space to choreograph with words. Now the edges of these two dis- ciplines often blur and act more as a support to each other rather than as a replacement. I love the qual- itative differences – the ephemer- ality of a move, the there-ness of a word on the page. I regularly inves- tigate and play in these mediums in a form based on and developed as an adaptation of Barbara Dil- ley’s Contemplative Dance Practice, which I was introduced to while a dance student at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the late 90’s. About a decade ago I started offering Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice, which includes – in addition to meditation, per- sonal awareness practice, and open space improvisation – two addi- tional periods dedicated to writing (or drawing, mark-making, etc.) with prompts offered based on the umbrella word/theme evoked at the opening of the session. For the last eight years, this prac- tice has happened out of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space I codirect with my spouse, commu- nity arts practitioner and disability culture activist, Petra Kuppers. Tur- tle Disco operates out of our living room on Anishinaabe land in what is colonially called Ypsilanti, Michi- gan and in the zoom(shell). It began, in part, as a response to Trump taking the presidency in 2017 and our desire to embed ourselves in community and cultivate stronger
page, another engagement with the unknown, with all of its possibili- ties. This is practice. The return to space, beautiful space, and the return to time with its linear metronome and inexact past, present, future. I’m also aware of writing in this moment, March 2025, while the United States is in a coup and so many of our live- lihoods, resources, and lives are at stake. This reality is also balled up in the pit of my stomach, a sensation of disgust. The invitation to write about the future, to imagine a future, feels like a welcome balm, a practice of hope. Imagination and dream prac- tices feel integral to this moment. To dream, to imagine, I draw on my orientation as a queer disabled person and the shapes I take in the world, in my days, and how those shift depending on inner and outer weather. I draw on the power and tenderness of disability culture and all the gorgeous beings that make up that culture – the disabled art- ists who figure out how to adapt, to invent, and to create alternative ways of making, being, and existing.
POR DIANA LARA Y ISADORA PAZ TABOADA
Notice sensations. Run tongue over teeth. Listen
to the sound of breathing.
I have a bit of unease in my belly, nerves about what is or isn’t com- ing out in this writing. The blank
Exist. Survive. Thrive.
connections, especially with queer and disabled people, on a local level. Something that feels salient in these times of so much uncertainty and fear is how contemplative and improvisa- tional practices strengthen the abil- ity to be with the unknown and to be with discomfort. I remember offering Contemplative Dance & Writing Prac- tice on zoom during the early days of Covid lockdown. We had to figure out how connection and communication could happen in this new medium, and we did that together. I’ve noticed in the practice, whether on zoom or in person, that making space for not knowing, and for being ok with not knowing, results in unexpected play and laughter. There is room to be surprised, whether that is a strange close-up of a lobster stuffie in a zoom square or a raucous round of drum- ming on the floor and body parts that spreads across the room. Perhaps
there is some information here about the importance of not predetermining the future. I’m reminded of the line from the essay “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable” by Rebecca Solnit that I used to have taped on the wall near my bed: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable tran- spire quite regularly.” This line accom- panied and supported me through many years of psychiatric hospi- talizations, treatments, and bipolar extremes. I may need to put this quote up by my bed again. It is easy to get overwhelmed within news cycles and doom scrolling and executive orders. I need a reminder – whether that be in words or in images or a specific sound – of being at a threshold, a gateway. Company for the between time, that liminal space where the future hasn’t
happened yet but there is a somatic knowing and opening towards what is to come. I wholeheartedly believe that impro- visational training that includes deep listening to the bodymindspirit and tuning into community (humans, more-than-human, larger environ- ments) offers good preparation for meeting the future. With that said, it feels as I’m writing this that fail- ure, whatever that might mean, or not being prepared or ready, also needs to be included as we dream into the future. Or perhaps that is another way of saying, multiple ways of engaging are possible. Or in another iteration, perhaps it is impossible to be prepared. In improvisational spaces we often talk about working with whatever is available in the moment. Maybe this moment calls for doing the best we can and making that we as diverse and queer and beautiful as possible.
Participants in Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice, Turtle Disco
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in dance SPRING 2025 44
SPRING 2025 in dance 45
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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