Left to right: Bhumi Patel, Stephanie Heit, and Raven Malouf-Renning, Queer Mad Electrics at Township Commons Park, Oakland, photo by Petra Kuppers
[ID: Dancing people in silhouette with arms reaching to gather currents from the air, water, and each other in electrical play, inside the architectures of the Township Commons.]
Queer Electrical Fields
We gather in the shade under the metal structures of the old shipping facility in Township Commons Park in Oakland. It is an unusually hot October day in 2023 forecast to reach nearly 90 degrees; several participants have already bowed out due to the heat. The small group present is eager to play. After we do an access check-in, talk about temperature accommodations, and make sure everyone has enough water, we begin.
I invite people to experiment with what grounds them. Gestures. Stims – a term that originates in autistic and neurodiverse cultures referring to repetitive soothing actions. Touch. Movement patterns. Sound. Each person harvests a repeatable phrase to bring back and share with the group.
Hands touch the heart, brush down the front of the torso
and legs to contact cement.
Gentle jiggle of the whole body.
Slow intentional twirl of a strand of hair.
Loose-jawed sigh.
We slowly build a collective grounding vocabulary. This will be a resource for the next part. This may be a resource for the future.
Now we work with the following score: Take charges and currents from the environment and move them through your body. Where do they enter? Where do they exit? How do you direct the energy? Return to the grounding vocabulary whenever you’d like.
We dance next to the Bay, that watery conductor, and play with changing the volume of the charge as it moves through our bodies and out knees, hands, zapping out top of head, bouncing off a shoulder blade. We send currents to each other, back to the water, feeling our own conductive properties. Eventually, we reinscribe our own electrical fields, peripheries vibrating quicker due to the heat.
This offering, “Queer Mad Electrics,” was an early exploration of what would become Mad Conductors, a participatory performance I co-direct with disabled interdisciplinary artist and dramaturg, Alexis Riley. Mad Conductors arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric memory loss. It is an exploration of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being. “Mad” in this context is being used as the reclaimed slur (similar to queer) for madness rooted in the Mad Pride Movement.
On this particular day, we experimented with electricity and connection. The engagement was also shaped by being next to and in dialogue with the Bay and its inherent dangers, kindnesses, fluidity, and conduit properties. This was the culmination of the Co-Dreaming: Improvisation Toward Liberatory Worlding Symposium organized by Bhumi Patel and Petra Kuppers. I want to take a beat and invite you to read the symposium title again: Co-Dreaming: Improvisation Toward Liberatory Worlding. I experience these words as portals and as power vortexes into imagining ways to create and be with the present and the future. This symposium’s aim was to “bring together queer artists to create new worlds through our embodied connection with the land and ecosystem.” I don’t know about you, but I’d love to inhabit and be part of that future world.
Tuning Into the Known & Unknown
Before I continue, I am going to pause, and welcome you to pause as well, to tune into our individual embodiment in this specific moment.
Notice sensations. Run tongue over teeth. Listen
to the sound of breathing.
I have a bit of unease in my belly, nerves about what is or isn’t coming out in this writing. The blank page, another engagement with the unknown, with all of its possibilities. This is practice. The return to space, beautiful space, and the return to time with its linear metronome and inexact past, present, future. I’m also aware of writing in this moment, March 2025, while the United States is in a coup and so many of our livelihoods, resources, and lives are at stake. This reality is also balled up in the pit of my stomach, a sensation of disgust. The invitation to write about the future, to imagine a future, feels like a welcome balm, a practice of hope. Imagination and dream practices feel integral to this moment.
To dream, to imagine, I draw on my orientation as a queer disabled person and the shapes I take in the world, in my days, and how those shift depending on inner and outer weather. I draw on the power and tenderness of disability culture and all the gorgeous beings that make up that culture – the disabled artists who figure out how to adapt, to invent, and to create alternative ways of making, being, and existing.
Exist. Survive. Thrive.
In my own life, as someone with mental health difference, as someone bipolar and with traumatic brain injury from electroshocks, I am in a constant improvisation to meet the day and bend it to my current capacities, which can vary wildly. One of my adaptations has been shapeshifting between disciplines, usually movement and writing. As a young dancer, I had to reinvent my life when movement wasn’t available due to depression. Writing offered another space to choreograph with words.
Now the edges of these two disciplines often blur and act more as a support to each other rather than as a replacement. I love the qualitative differences – the ephemerality of a move, the there-ness of a word on the page. I regularly investigate and play in these mediums in a form based on and developed as an adaptation of Barbara Dilley’s Contemplative Dance Practice, which I was introduced to while a dance student at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the late 90’s. About a decade ago I started offering Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice, which includes – in addition to meditation, personal awareness practice, and open space improvisation – two additional periods dedicated to writing (or drawing, mark-making, etc.) with prompts offered based on the umbrella word/theme evoked at the opening of the session.
For the last eight years, this practice has happened out of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space I codirect with my spouse, community arts practitioner and disability culture activist, Petra Kuppers. Turtle Disco operates out of our living room on Anishinaabe land in what is colonially called Ypsilanti, Michigan and in the zoom(shell). It began, in part, as a response to Trump taking the presidency in 2017 and our desire to embed ourselves in community and cultivate stronger connections, especially with queer and disabled people, on a local level.
Something that feels salient in these times of so much uncertainty and fear is how contemplative and improvisational practices strengthen the ability to be with the unknown and to be with discomfort. I remember offering Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice on zoom during the early days of Covid lockdown. We had to figure out how connection and communication could happen in this new medium, and we did that together. I’ve noticed in the practice, whether on zoom or in person, that making space for not knowing, and for being ok with not knowing, results in unexpected play and laughter. There is room to be surprised, whether that is a strange close-up of a lobster stuffie in a zoom square or a raucous round of drumming on the floor and body parts that spreads across the room. Perhaps there is some information here about the importance of not predetermining the future.
I’m reminded of the line from the essay “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable” by Rebecca Solnit that I used to have taped on the wall near my bed: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” This line accompanied and supported me through many years of psychiatric hospitalizations, treatments, and bipolar extremes. I may need to put this quote up by my bed again. It is easy to get overwhelmed within news cycles and doom scrolling and executive orders. I need a reminder – whether that be in words or in images or a specific sound – of being at a threshold, a gateway. Company for the between time, that liminal space where the future hasn’t happened yet but there is a somatic knowing and opening towards what is to come.
I wholeheartedly believe that improvisational training that includes deep listening to the bodymindspirit and tuning into community (humans, more-than-human, larger environments) offers good preparation for meeting the future. With that said, it feels as I’m writing this that failure, whatever that might mean, or not being prepared or ready, also needs to be included as we dream into the future. Or perhaps that is another way of saying, multiple ways of engaging are possible. Or in another iteration, perhaps it is impossible to be prepared. In improvisational spaces we often talk about working with whatever is available in the moment. Maybe this moment calls for doing the best we can and making that we as diverse and queer and beautiful as possible.
Mad Conductors
I want to return to Mad Conductors, the project whose seeds were activated in that workshop by the Bay in Oakland. Alexis and I have continued to develop this work through collaboration between the two of us and through performances in university settings, conferences, and community workshops. Our core questions have been: What happens when energy is transferred? Who or what conducts the ensemble? How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? What resources do mad ancestors and archives offer? I think these queries may offer potential infrastructures into the future.
Please join me at a performance that happened on a spring Saturday morning in the Turtle Disco garden. Lounge in one of the red camping chairs or a zero gravity chair. Choose to stretch out on a towel on the grass. There are multiple options to accommodate comfort needs. Today we are going to experiment with holding memory and memory gaps as a community. We each call up a memory of a place associated with pleasure and positive feelings. In a meditation, we focus on and experience the qualities and sensorial details of that place, then distill them into a few words that we write (or draw, always multiple access options) on strips of paper. As a group, we experiment enacting memories for each other using gestures, voices, words, and any of the instruments – tambourine, wind chime, shakers, to name a few – spread out on the ground. We act as conductors for our own memories, tweaking the score as we see fit: more bells, quieter at the end, everyone reach arms to the sky.
My interest in this query was how we might collectively hold memory. As a shock survivor with profound memory loss, I’ve had to rely on loved ones to fill in and recall the blanks. This has often felt like a deficit, with shame or frustration attached, grief for the missing. On this morning, I had a gestalt-like experience of my memory becoming more luminous held by the collective. We all entered into a contract to create and embody each other’s memory place; it didn’t feel like a favor or disability service, but rather an opportunity to rub against someone else’s experience and feel it as vibration, word, gesture, with forgotten or unrealized parts just part of the fabric.
I want to highlight some of the elements in this performance that may be useful for being into the future. I say “being” into the future because the present moment and inhabiting that present moment, in whatever way that looks like for you, for us, feels critical for the future. So does the collective. How do we collectively hold and create this moment? The next? And onward, until the next becomes future? In the instance of our small exchanges in the garden, consent and explicit contracts were important. We verbally exchanged:
Will you hold my memory?
Yes, I will hold your memory.
Words can act as invocation and sharpen the focus of action. When I say action, this also can mean yielding, receiving. The backbody sinking into soft spring earth. When I was asked to hold someone’s memory I felt myself become more attentive, aware of the vulnerability and tenderness with which I was being entrusted. This softening into the moment and into exchange is improvisational practice. We are at play inside this small memory score while simultaneously being inside the larger score of the world with its stressors, constraints, openings, and delights. Sometimes the unexpected shows up. Sometimes we are lucky enough to be aware and tuned in to receive it fully. And when I say fully, I mean in whatever way registers for, and honors, your bodymindspirit in that moment.
I want to end with some questions as invitations that you are welcome to engage with through writing, movement, or whatever medium resonates or is available. Within these questions, as scaffold, inherently lies the need for space to rest, to shore up for what comes next, as well as to grieve for what has been lost, whether that be memory, job, home, or loved one.
What does “collective” mean in your worlds?
How do you shore up lifelines and connections?
What are your questions for the future?
What bodily shapes will support the shift from here to there?
How can your existing resources be amplified in community?
In the Turtle Disco garden, we came up with responses for how to hold each others’ memories and also how to hold each other. Multiply this within a group. Include the Blue Flag Iris and Cardinal flower in the garden. White Pine that towers above us from the neighbor’s yard. Extend to a larger community. Make sure to call in the mycelium, the four-leggeds, and all the waters. The unseen, the ghosts. Keep weaving these connections that slowly and with care are a pulsing thing, a web of antennaed knowing, so many strings, vibrating in song.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of In Dance.
