October 9, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM
Studio 2
Inspired by Kelly Fritsch’s (2011) suggestion that “to crip is to open up with desire to the ways that disability disrupts,” this workshop invites us to rethink what it might mean to dance through a desire for the creativity of disabled/mad life. As an entry point into this exploration, we will engage with Asian American, gender, and disability studies scholar Mimi Khúc’s (2024) suggestion of a “pedagogy of unwellness” that invites us to consider questions of care and access as our choreographic task within the studio and on the stage. Moving beyond expectations of mastering the body and its movement—expectations that often work to exclude disabled/mad embodiment from dance creation, we will engage in somatic/movement practices to understand and care for how our bodyminds are accessing creative space. Learning from such explorations we will develop dance phrases that express gestures of care for ourselves and for each other. We will finally navigate how our different embodiments of care might move and perform together through an improv jam. Reflecting on this experience, we will consider how a desire for disabled/mad embodiments of creativity might shift how we understand our choreographic and production practices.