A Huron River Séance: Psychogeographic Performances by the River With Turtle Disco

Mon, 11/04/2024 - 9:19pm

When: 2024

"This video poem documents a Crip Drift by the Huron River, in Ann Arbor, part of a historical investigation into local soils, materials, historical change, toxic loads and reclamations. 

Crip drifts are methods for moving through the world and living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing for contact, with contamination and toxicity, with joy and aliveness, with flow and elements. 

For these sessions, a number of local people came together with community performance artist and disability culture activist Petra Kuppers to engage in psychogeography: to drift on the land and by the water, to let ourselves be shifted and shaped by the energies we found. 

In this video, we found ourselves responding to the PFAS (eternal chemical elements) that waft like a plume beneath Ann Arbor, and that threaten our ground water, as well as by the memories of the toxic loads the Huron River carried over time and into all our futures. Along the river, we danced and touched soil, water, and memory.

You can watch an interview with Petra about the processes behind this video, the poem behind it, and various other videos of this kind in a presentation given at the Ann Arbor Downtown Library.

The dancer in this poem, A Huron River Seance is mental health activist, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, author of PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022). She and Petra run Turtle Disco, a queer/crip led community somatic writing studio, out of Ypsilanti.

The dancers in a second Crip Drift video poem, Green Bone Child, seen in the library presentation, are Charli Brissey, who teaches in dance and technology at the University of Michigan, and Marc Arthur, a performance artist who teaches at Wayne State University and who investigates political encounters around the AIDS pandemic.

Both source poems come from Petra Kuppers’ psychogeographic and ecopoetic exploration of Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Detroit sites of true crime, Diver Beneath the Street (Wayne State University Press, 2024)." - Performance artist and activist Petra Kuppers