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 WilcoxWriting about performance, photos like pearls glide through our fingers. The sensuality of touch and words is at the heart of Tiresias, an Olimpias performance project I directed in 2007/8 at the University of Michigan. In this essay about collaboration, our voices braid together.Over the course of a year, Tiresias welcomed collaborators in performance events and photo-shoots in California, Rhode Island and Michigan. We met for a few days in various locations, both inside studios and out in nature, danced together, and posed for Lisa Steichmann's camera while talking about disability culture, erotics and difference, and the poetics of becoming visible. In February 2008, the Tiresias Project culminated in a community performance with students from the University of Michigan and community members of the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living, an organisation run by and for disabled people. In between our meetings, the US and European artists engaged in this project discussed their experiences and connections on a list-serv. The materials of this essay - fragments, gazes and touch - emerge from these email conversations. In this essayistic photography/ performance meditation, disabled and non-disabled artists and academics, queer and straight, white and black, all beautiful, explore what it means to perform, nude and dressed. We engage in oracular practice: we call a new land into being, unclear, shape-shifting, and built on the terrain of our bodies. The essay fragments meditate on a dance session/photo shoot in Ann Arbor, Michigan and an outdoor photo-shoot in Rjhode Island as part of an arts and ecology conference. Throughout the essay frame, I am shifting positions myself: I write as a director, a performer, a theorist, a critic, and as a friend in a collaborative experiment.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 was blinded for knowing the secrets of man and woman, but was given second sight. Since then, Tiresias wields his and her staff throughout Antigone, Oedipus Rex, The Bacchae and Ovid's Metamorphoses where his blindness, her cripdom, offers special status as advisor to the mighty.What is seen, what is known, what is spoken: these are the questions around photography and performance that fuel our exploration. I first became fascinated by Tiresias after reading disability culture poets' reworking of ancient myth, and when I watched Martha Graham's Night Journey, in which the Oedipus myth is retold through Jocasta's eyes, with Tiresias as the time-keeper. Graham created her feminist version - how can we as disability culture artists do the same? What happens when we make the shifting crip elder the focus of our work? What can I find here for my own body, shifting in time?In our workshop/performances, we take Tiresias out of the background fabric of history. NowTiresias and his disability, her undecidable bodily status, die malleability of his body, the shimmer of her gender, her tri-pedal step and his blind/seeing eyes become the focal point of disability cultural work. This is an erotic show. We open ourselves up to an exploration of boundaries, try to reclaim seduction for disability: not as a freak parade, but as sensuous bodies engaged sensuously with the world. At the heart of our show are images of seduction, an erotics of encounter with disability's difference which problematises conventional notions of disabled people as tragic, sexless or deficient. Through photographs, poetry and dance, we remember our future.Sadie Wilcox is one of the videographers of the project, and a disabled woman. She writes about her approach to the combination of text and movementin photographed images:SADIE WILCOXIMAGE CAPTURE: DISABILITY, AESTHETICS, AND MULTIMEDIA REPRESENTATION"The construction of disability on digital television. …