The work was available on our website only for the period of the screening.
“On A Wheelchair Ramp in the Middle of Nowhere” (00:02:17) by Petra Kuppers, Kym McDaniel, USA, 2023
On a giant wheelchair ramp in somewhere Utah, two disabled dancers meet for a brief improvisation encounter. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan, for the Speculative Embodiment Working Group.
Disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. In 2022, she was named a Dance/USA Fellow. Petra is Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Experimental filmmaker, collaborator, choreographer, and performer. She began filmmaking after a head injury and resulting chronic illnesses changed her relationship to her body and dance. Her films have recently shown at Slamdance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, ADF’s Movies by Movers, UnionDocs, and Experiments in Cinema, among others. She has an MFA from the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Screendance and Graduate Screendance Program Head within the School of Dance at the University of Utah.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
