Tiresias
(all photos on this page are rehearsal shots, not production stills)
Sample Project Photos for public sharing
Project Publications include:
Oracular Practice, Crip Bodies and the Poetry of Collaboration.
A Meditation hosted by Petra Kuppers with Aimee Meredith Cox, Jim Ferris, Alison Kafer, Neil Marcus, Nora Simonhjell, Lisa Steichmann, and Sadie Wilcox.
About Performance: No 8, 2008, 67-89.
The videodance DVD is now available for free. Contact us if you would like a copy.
Who is Tiresias?
The figure of Tiresias penetrates Greek drama - the hermaphroditic shape shifter who has lived both as a man, as Zeus's priest, and as a woman, as a prostitute of great renown.
Tiresias wields his and her staff throughout Antigone, Oedipus, The Bacchae, through Ovid's Metamorphoses and many other canonical texts where his blindness, her cripdom, offers special status as advisor to the mighty.
So what it is about?
Tiresias is a crip show - and much more than that. In our show, we take Tiresias out of the background fabric of history. Now Tiresias and his disability, her undecidable bodily status, the malleability of his body, gender, her tri-pedal step and his blind/seeing eyes become the focal point of disability cultural work.
With this, the show raises important questions about contemporary disability culture aesthetics, and the connections between cultural labor and aesthetic process.
What does it mean to investigate minority politics through a trickster figure?
How do certainties of definition and identification enter the play when the reclamation takes serious translation across time, languages, poetic universes?
So what is going on in the show?
- A month-long development session with the Center for Independent Living, Ann Arbor, culminating in a show in February 2008, Duderstadt Video Performance Studio. Guest artists: Kathy Coleman, Eli Clare, Neil Marcus.
- Photographs by Lisa Steichmann (installation/exhibit in Myth of Difference, Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, Jan/Feb 2008)
- A list-serv conversation by many project participants, about what it means to be seen and to see, to be naked and exposed, comforted and challenged, to touch boundaries. (forthcoming publication in About Performance, Special Issue on Photography and Performance, June 2008)
- Tiresias Video-dance (dir. Petra Kuppers/Sadie Wilcox, poetry Jim Ferris, performed by Aimee Meredith Cox, Kathy Mancuso, Sadie Wilcox, Neil Marcus, Lynn Manning, Tom Bayer, Jim Ferris, Nora Simonhjell, Petra Kuppers
-from the same footage, a second video dance: No Visible Borders, dir. Tim Householder, poetry Nora Simonhjell
- Tiresias performance installation as part of Dance Under Construction, UC Berkeley, April 2008
We offer workshops, residencies, seminars and lectures on disability culture work, crip culture poetry, accessible dance and collaborative practice.
Contact: Petra Kuppers, petra (at) umich.edu
At the heart of our show are images, sounds and words of seduction: an erotics of encounter with disability’s non-binary difference which problematises conventional notions of disabled people as tragic, sexless or deficient.