Into Fantasy: Expressive Objects in Turtle Disco

Puppetry worlds allow embodied artists to reach beyond their own skin sacks, beyond the limits of their human bodies, and beyond the limits of our given and experienced environment. During the time I spent writing this book, this concern, moving beyond skin limits, became very vivid to me in my own practice, and so I will spend some time exploring an eco soma of object/puppetry theater.

Once a week, a number of local artists meet in Turtle Disco, my home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in a repurposed living room that faces the street. It is a somatic writing studio I co-create with my wife and creative partner, Stephanie Heit, a dancer and writer. She and I both identify as disabled: I am a wheelchair user; Stephanie is bipolar and lives with brain injury. Most of the people who come to Turtle Disco likewise identify as disabled and as queer. Our Turtle Disco practice is purposefully local. For me it is the pendant of my ongoing and long-standing wider international practice. As I am thinking about sustainability in terms of my own art/life practice, my aging, and in terms of global travel, Turtle Disco and its local web follows the impetus given by feminist science writer Donna Haraway, who already appeared in this book in chapter 1. In the last chapter of her influential book Staying with the Trouble, she discusses communal storytelling as a tool for imagining new futures. She focuses on a person in a commune, Camille, a fictional entity of the Children of the Compost, a collaborative web of speculative narratives. Camille is genetically bonded to monarch butterflies in an effort to save them from extinction, and readers follow five generations of Camilles and their changing physicalities and adaptive embedments.

Camille came into being at a moment of an unexpected but powerful, interlaced, planetwide eruption of numerous communities of a few hundred people each, who felt moved to migrate to ruined places and work with human and nonhuman partners to heal these places, building networks, pathways, nodes, and webs of and for a newly habitable world. (2016, 137)

Turtle Disco sees itself in this (future) lineage: local, sustainable, aware of the histories of extraction, exclusion, and colonial violence in our place; with neighbors coming together, engaging in art/life practice to sustain ourselves as a chosen web. In our practices, Turtle Disco rehearses for Haraway’s small cooperatives, small communities, healing and recharging caves. Turtle Disco imagines itself as health/care/performance/practice to hold ourselves, nonhuman others, and the world to new forms of cohabitation.1

In one of our practices, object theater work and shared animacy, honoring life and story everywhere, becomes very resonant. In this chapter, I use this example to move (or, as you will see, creep) my eco soma argument into the speculative mode and into genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

My own disability manifests itself primarily through chronic pain. In one of our weekly sessions, “Contemplative Dance and Writing,” led by Stephanie, individual movement and meditation are followed by an Open Space segment. In this segment of the practice, people can either choose to participate and engage each other or to witness from the side. I often wish to participate but find my limbs frozen by pain. To get off my cushion station and move into the circle can be too hard. Even though Stephanie and I have installed a grab bar on the wall near my nesting spot, I sometimes cannot easily rise up. So, one practice I engage in is draping a soft, fluffy blanket (that is part of my nesting station) over me. Then I animate it like a puppet. I creep and slide slowly into the middle of the room, unable to see where I am going, but slowly and in keeping with my pain rhythm: a pink plush monster puppet, a blob, an amoeba, unconcerned with high kicks or wide reaches but rippling with sensitive edges and fringes, sliding and pooling across the wood floor.

As you read this, feel your sensations. What are you sitting on? What is it made of? How did it come to this place? What is your relation to it—and how are you defining “relation” here? What stories does the material tell you when you use your own sensitive fringes, your fingertips (maybe your lips) to touch it? How does it feel to contort your own body into new configurations, to create new relations with what is familiar to you? Enjoy the stretch. Remember this information as you move forward—still sitting on and with cohabitant objects.

Eventually, in Turtle Disco, my blanketed body encounters something: maybe someone is reaching out to me, or there’s a foot in my trajectory. At this point, the blanket/my body become a unit. The new assemblage becomes puppet: nonfacial, sensing in tactile ways, with readable and relatable emotions and narratives. We retreat, and we foray. A play of rhythm might happen, with a flap of the blanket chiming with moving fingers, or a segment of cloth mirroring the movement of other dancers in the space. Everybody in the space is creator and audience alike, entering into these hybrid fantasy worlds as they wish to.

In my reading of what is going on, we, the people in the room, play like children. We are able to animate everything around us—and we also play like adults, able to connect our imagination with strata of knowledges we have of the objects we use as somatic extensions. Shells hold memories of summer holidays that become entwined with newer knowledges of the environmental costs of air travel. “Made in China” wind-up toys bop rhythmical on the wooden floor, but as we finger them, labor conditions, plastic pollution, and supply lines enter the dance, too.2 There’s a tiny plastic whale I play with, touching its round surfaces. And while I hold the little whale in my hand, we spontaneously make sounds in the studio, chirping and humming in call and response, slowing and booming. Soon, my improvising bodymind weaves into the dance the effects of sonar and seismic blasting on whale life and on whale pods.

This kind of entangled object theater stands in complex relation to the authenticity of the performing human body, the energetics of presence that an actor brings to a performance environment. This is often a topic of discussion when disabled theater makers begin to explore how to bring their impairments into the (visual) conversation: how their disability can shape aesthetics. As Emma Fisher found out in her interviews with disabled puppeteers, when they created puppets that spoke to their own embodiment:

many puppets were animal/human hybrids, including a fish and a caterpillar, each with a human face. These puppets seemed to be truer representations of how we viewed ourselves than had we chosen to use figurative puppets designed to mimic our human bodies. (2017, 364–65)

Nonrealist representations that take flight from recognizable human figures and bodily configurations can allow for deep expressive potential. Instead of mimicry, we find other ways of creating relationality and of infusing objects with emotions and interactivity. This is another facet of eco soma imagination at play: an extending of one’s skin envelope into expressive collaboration with materials, enacting and literalizing the poetics of new materialist perspectives on material’s agency. In my manipulation of the blanket, for instance, the blanket also speaks back to me. I am aware of its materiality: an oil-based process creates the fluffy, soft, and easily washable fleece blankets we are using, and I am aware of the fiber shedding that accompanies these materials and contaminates our waterways.3 Sometimes, when I am under it, deep into performance trance, I imagine the tiny marine creatures that died long ago, and I feel the pressure of the earth before transforming into oil, buried under strata of rock and sand.4

In the Turtle Disco sessions, other objects become animate, too. In our dances, we involve small figurines that inhabit Turtle Disco’s window ledges: wind-up toys from around the world, leaf skeletons from the garden, and tiny plastic sharks and dragons. One by one, depending on mood and session, these become part of the dance, amplifying or initiating movement from cripped, painful bodyminds. The objects can carry a lot: if someone is not feeling up to eye contact, or is very tired, or wants to act out some angry scene without endangering the rest of the living actants, these objects help us.

In these research practices in Turtle Disco, becoming with other, becoming fictional, and becoming (to link again back to Emma Fisher’s practice) a disabled caterpillar are all avenues for self-expression and modes of connectivity. Time, space, and bodies shift under pressure in many different ways.

In this chapter, I investigate the use of fantastical genre narratives in a range of forms: a shadow puppet theater around mental health; a Butoh performance film about plant/human cohabitation; a poetry segment about rays, biomatter, and language; and connections between Black Lives Matter’s social media labor and a dance video focused on Antoine Hunter.

Nonrealist Embodiment: Playing Monsters

Let’s dive even further into surrealism and into minor-key strangeness. In this section, I put fictionalized and yet still somatically available bodies into genre play. I am visiting with a small community-based theater—a boxed space complete with velvet mini-curtains, props flying in on sticks, and other elements of traditional European puppetry shows.

On the first Friday of each month, my small home city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, shares community music, gallery exhibits, and shows in the downtown area. In July 2017, one of these shows was part of a run of True Stories of 1 in 4, a partnership between a local small experimental puppet theater—the Dreamland Theater—and the Full Circle Community Center, a downtown Ypsilanti drop-in center for people living with mental illness. The title of the show pointed to the incidence of mental health difference in the general population, and the evening used various storytelling techniques to access stories of people with significant mental health differences. For this show, interviewers for the project had visited Full Circle and interviewed people there to reshape their participant narratives as puppet sketches.

As part of my preparations for this writing, I also visited this drop-in center, which is operated by Washtenaw County and open to all who identify with mental health issues, whether with a case worker or not (in the U.S. context, this is an important marker, as it involves issues of insurance coverage and disability benefit—some drop-in centers are only open to people with a case worker).

When I arrived, the person who opened the door for me was an elder Black man who clearly had taken on the role of greeter. He offered me friendly entry into the community center proper: there was a long corridor, various rooms (some with art material stashed away in boxes, some with games), including one TV room. I was there on a cool morning, and few community members were about. Most were men, mainly elderly, and they seemed to be in the middle of a comfortable mid-morning snooze. The ones awake, as well as two women, greeted me happily and chatted with me about the offerings and, in general terms, about the collaboration with the puppeteers—one of many local art groups and wellness groups that comes by and offers their services.

I left with only a superficial sense of it all, as I didn’t feel it would be ethical to disturb people too much to find out more, drill down about working processes, or just hang out like a barely embedded anthropologist. But I also got a friendly vibe and a sense of how the interviewers likely went about their project.

The puppeteer organizers described their project’s intention as raising awareness of a community that is often ostracized due to social stigma. I was interested to see how storytelling and the different temporalities and affect structures of mental health difference would leave traces in the modes of delivery, in the way a narrative gets told.

The performance that night in the Dreamland Theater had a large audience. I had come with a group of friends: gender and disability scholars from local universities as well as local disability artists, many of whom have lived experiences of mental health difference. Many of us expected what I would call the most common experience of community theater: self-witnessing, fairly linear stories of challenge and survival. Instead, what we experienced that night thoughtfully engaged the multiplicity of storytelling and created other possibilities for the telling of disabled lives, shifting environments and humanity into newly scaled patterns and into new animacies.

The third piece of the evening, “The Language of Time,” was the most surreal and experimental one, mixing the puppeteer’s aesthetic of Cthulhu-like monsters with a crip time narrative of nonlinear sensory immediacy. Those two complexes warrant unwrapping: Cthulhu and crip time.

Cthulhu is a cosmic monster created by U.S. writer H. P. Lovecraft and first appeared in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. He is part of a strange cosmology, usually referred to as Mythos, in which ancient alien gods bring interdimensional madness to Earth: humans are strangely drawn to this way out of human worlds but go mad when they open up portals for Cthulhu.

Ever since Lovecraft first wrote about this entity, other authors and artists have taken up Mythos figures—something about this particular flavor of speculative nonhuman otherness has proven remarkably seductive over the years, even though Lovecraft and many of his American Gothic stories are overtly racist and sexist. But Lovecraft’s fear of otherness is so baroque and intense that many people of color, women, and others who have experienced marginalization pick up figures of the Mythos and play with them: they are ripe for reclamation (and also out of copyright).5

Even those who do not read much speculative fiction might, for instance, be familiar with the storylines of Guillermo del Toro in films like Hellboy and Pacific Rim, all founded in Lovecraftian Mythos. Richard Stanley’s Color out of Space (2019) is a direct adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s short stories and features the transformation of a rural locale into voracious and yet seductively beautiful animal-plant-alien hybrids.

In Lovecraftian worlds, madness is not redemptive, nor does it offer new insights into the here and now: the cosmic madness is not some romantic “madness as seer” thing. And yet, Cthulhu madness is a form of escape, a response to the sudden opening of confining reality toward something else.6 In Mythos stories, readers find dimensions that are overwhelming, fever or drug dreams, grandiose and colorful, swirling and moving at interstellar speed.

Crip time, on the other hand, is a phenomenon originating from disability culture.7 It emerged as a term in line with many other nonmodernist, nondominant forms of temporality.

In the crip time lineage I cite when tracking down a print origin, I source the term to Anne McDonald, a nonspeaking disabled woman who used facilitated communication (a communication board) to get out of a nursing home, eventually earn a degree, and become a leading part of the Australian disability culture scene. She writes about crip time (and I cite her at length here, as she is often condemned to shorthand in the citational politics of academic literature—and the very act of coming to the page is something to be honored):

I live by a different time to you.

I do not refer to the usual differences in the way we all experience time. We all know that time speeds by when you have nothing to do; time hangs heavy when you think you could have something to do if people re-ordered their timetables. So tempting is the long sleep in, so wearing the long afternoon left unattended. The time my caregivers spend loitering is negligible, the time I spend waiting is interminable. One’s perception of time is dependent on one’s dependency.

But my time is different from yours in a more important way. Imagine a world twenty times slower than this—a world where cars travelled at three miles an hour, lifesavers took an hour to chew, a glass of water half an hour to drink. Pissing would take quarter of an hour, lovemaking longer than it does now (which might be a good thing).

I live life in slow motion. The world I live in is one where my thoughts are as quick as anyone’s, my movements are weak and erratic, and my talk is slower than a snail in quicksand. I have cerebral palsy, I can’t walk or talk, I use an alphabet board, and I communicate at the rate of 450 words an hour compared to your 150 words in a minute—twenty times as slow. A slow world would be my heaven. I am forced to live in your world, a fast hard one. If slow rays flew from me I would be able to live in this world. I need to speed up, or you need to slow down.8

This is a science fiction story all of its own and an affecting one: “Imagine a world . . .” I imagine that those of you who have never read her work before might gulp or have some other visceral response to this description of a life world. McDonald’s words offer those of us not in her time signature a glimpse of a different world. She uses science fiction imagery to imagine shifting her environment to fit her embodiment: eco soma “slow rays.” She might shift our world, beam us like a crip Doctor Who into new time-space continuums. “Slow rays” do not really sound like “permission.” Instead, they offer narrative possibilities of violent transformation. Science fiction movies rarely use rays in a consent-based environment. Rays also speak to radiation, creepingly slow transformations at the level of nuclei, transforming and (potentially) destroying tissues from within.

I appreciate this agency fantasy image complex hidden in her quote, this metaphor-rich press on the passivity and caught-ness that is very much her fate in a fast-paced world.

Crip time has become a generative principle for many who think about nonnormative temporalities, to the point where the term has taken off from its grounding in a particular woman’s disabled specificity toward much more generalized theorizations. I shift the concept back to McDonald’s “slip into this world” invitation, toward embodiment and enmindment, the specific and nongeneral ways of being that disabled people bring to the world.

I invite you to think about your own locatedness again, this time your locatedness in time: What kinds of different temporalities can you name? Which ones are you familiar with? Do they offer overt or covert critiques to power relations?

Let’s go back to the Dreamland Theater. So how did Cthulhu’s otherworld and crip time’s immersive potential operate together in this puppet show? I never met the woman whose narrative was shared here, but community members described her as someone with traumatic brain injury, telling a dense story of ant poison, falling down stairs, potential parental abuse, exclusionary experiences at school, and frightening encounters with doctors.

The only spoken words of the puppet sequence are: “You can read and write, why can’t you do math?,” spoken as a teacher monster looms over four pupils at a school desk. Doctors’ offices and other institutional settings complete the scenarios. Throughout the wordless show, animal/human/monsters appear on the backlit screen, shift in scale as they move farther away from the light, then loom and vanish.

Who are monsters? Who are helpers? At one point, the heroine, a small figure with flowing hair and multiple eyes, and an ant take up about equal space on the screen. A bottle labeled ant poison hovers threateningly over both of them. Environment and self-experience shift in relation to one another.

Halfway through the puppet show, a dragon/snake appears, its intentions unclear, but large, detailed, beautiful, with cut-outs and intricate framing: a rest for the eye rather than a narrative motor. In another moment, the heroine is lost in a puzzle-piece forest, something that to members of disability culture worlds might read like a comment on Autism Speaks iconography of missing puzzle pieces, which see autistics as damaged, with missing pieces (a rhetorical move disability culture activists condemn as hate speech): the figure is caught in normative puzzle worlds, without a fit, imprisoned, immobile.

Pigs with translucent ears/potential wings accompany the emergence of Cthulhu: a big-headed creature with multiple eyes and octopus tentacles, quite recognizable to genre fans of Lovecraftian bends. The monster holds a big hammer and threatens the heroine figure, who runs, following the pigs, across the screen. But escape is at hand. The pigs and the heroine run into a flying saucer spaceship and take off. As the spaceship gets smaller (closer to the light), a new figure appears: a stylized earth. Soon, the image shifts again, and the earth becomes an Escher-like tapestry of ant forms, circling us back to the beginning of the narrative.

Patrick Elkins, the puppeteer, described to me his experiences working with the woman’s narrative—how he first heard the interview about her life and how he was captivated by the sense of time developed in the narrative outside of “normal” time frames.

He didn’t use the expression “crip time,” but when I offered it, he found the concept a fitting one: traumatic brain injury and mental health difference as a different form of living in time, telling stories, sharing circles and lines. He also told me that he met the drop-in center user later again after working on her story and that she had seen his adaptation of her story and enjoyed the silhouette narration.

Puppet work is magic work: it transforms this world into forms of abstraction. Objects take on their own power, and a materialist presence spins on in its own storytelling power. When I watched “The Language of Time,” I did not see a woman’s authentic experience, narrated in realist terms and conventional temporal pacing and then transformed more or less faithfully into shadow puppets before being received by me with my mind full of Cthulhu and crip time. To employ this method of engaging the performance piece, I would have had to invite this woman to tell her story of injury and poisoning again. I know from personal experience that many disabled people find this a burden, a ballast, a retraumatizing, even if they feel themselves forced internally to tell it all again and again. So instead I use a writerly imagination’s tools as methodological interventions grounded in disability culture ethics.

Things threw shadows, and objects took on life: their own vibrant matter but also the projections they reflected back. Papers cut intricately into shape interacted with light and set off associations. Neurons fired. Coherences emerged, nexuses of meaning, an escape narrative, a trajectory away from the certainties of this world. There might be starships. There might be pig helpers. There might be stars.

There are disabled people in (the) future(s). There are disabled people in space.9 This is the delicious narrative I choose to take away from this show and from this particular engagement of puppetry with disability. Cthulhu is up for crip reclamation. In the weft spun in the Dreamland Theater as well as my own Turtle Disco engagements with nonrealist embodiment and enmindment, disability becomes a motor. Disability culture ways of telling stories shift across bodyminds toward objects and toward audiences, pushing, pulling, and ultimately shifting disability’s significatory field. In these eco soma encounters, relations between worlds, time, and bodyminds shift and open up: art sends out rays.

I want to trace the slowness of this offering as a way into sense-sharing at work in other contemporary speculative texts also concerned with centering socially denigrated forms of embodiment by opening up new agencies in leaky, contagiously swinging temporalities.

Let’s track how artists use fantasies of slowness and nonhuman time to open into new worlds and into sensoria that are deliberately marked as nonordinary, whether through bodily difference, drug use, environmental change, housed/unhoused status, or animal/human crossings (or all of the above). The examples I discuss in the next sections are a fifteen-minute dance film created by White disabled dance artists from Portland, Oregon; a sci-fi poetic sequence by Korean American poet Sueyuen Juliette Lee; and a discussion of Afrofuturist aesthetics, Black Lives Matter, and a dance video set in the streets of San Francisco with Deaf African American dancer Antoine Hunter. In these texts, engagement bends into somatic configuration, and communication happens at the level of strata, matter infiltrating bodyminds in temporal shifts.

Waking the Green Sound: Interdependencies

Waking the Green Sound: A Dancefilm for the Trees was created in 2016 by Wobbly Dance Company, a company led by Yulia Arakelyan and Erik Ferguson in Portland, Oregon.10 The film was developed with other Butoh artists (i.e., artists engaged in a Japanese-initiated international movement vocabulary of transformation). Butoh is a transnational movement originating in the World War II period and the devastation of Hiroshima. Its intense physical exertion and exteriorizations of affect have become a projection surface for many critics interested in the political power of human performance intensity.11

The film begins as the camera peers into a private world, beginning with an overhead perspective on straw hats, moving to reveal laced, gloved hands holding a yellow tea pot, resting on three sets of knees, which are in turn kneeling on a leaf-strewn ground. I am at some kind of (mad) hatter tea party, fueled by the ingestion of plants.12

A sideview close-up shows three pale creatures (Yulia Arakelyan, Erik Ferguson, and guest dancer Grant Miller), all with unusual limb configurations and ways of moving, carefully wrapped in lace and flowery cotton (see Plate 13). Two of the figures connote maleness, one femaleness, although all wear feminine-coded clothing and makeup that feel like costumes or masks (breast scars later on in the movie vibrate any binaries into trans-territory).13 Their deliberate, dancerly movement vocabulary consists of hand twitches, yawns, eye contacts, necks flaring out to take in air.

The effort of breathing is visible. Breathing and its hindrances were some of the core issues that shaped the film’s emergence. Dancer and Wobbly Dance codirector Erik Ferguson narrates how physical shape, the precarious effort of breathing, opened up a path to explore dance video. For the company, shifting from live performance to video was a move into more accessible territory, after a residency where the dancers were faced with dancerly conditions that stretched the “limits of breathing and certain aspects of our physicality. After that, Yulia was looking for a way to control the time duration, and for the freedom to go back and refine things without dangerous physical exertion” (Campbell 2015).

Video can offer this freedom, a space to breathe. It allows these dancers to be physically safe and to open outward, playing on the limits of outside and inside in gorgeous outdoor scenes. The camera shows the breathing action in this video, a physiological and autonomic action that flares cobralike around Yulia Arakelyan’s neck.

That is one of the benefits of screen dance for performers. But what about audiences, and witnesses of screen dance? Arakelyan’s breath gathers additional signifiers in the slowness of its unfolding. There is the intertextual play that is part of watching popular culture on screens: slow deep breaths often signify deep emotional content in movies.

In dance studies, the term “kinesthetic empathy” has currency: the way that audiences can feel an “alikeness” with moving others that can lead to physiological and/or emotional atunement. That argument, based on the grounds of physiological sameness, falls down for me as soon as I think about racist, ableist, misogynist, classist, or transphobic references in film and live performance: it’s always been much too easy to discard empathy for bigotry.14 Still, dance studies’ desire-line toward otherness swings in my witnessing of Arakelyan’s breathing. Different fields touch, linked in the somatic act of taking breath, making breath’s commonly unconscious presence experiential. This is an eco soma moment for me: the ambivalent swing/distance that dance film offers to me as a moving, feeling viewer, caught by rhythm but on the other side of a screen, eyes lost in a two-dimensional representation.

The slow mesmerizing work of the video does not heal crip precarity.15 But the connections between technological intervention, plants, and the surfaces and interiors of bodies align in a new configuration in a form of interdependent healing ritual, “to learn practical healing rather than wholeness, and stitch together improbable collaborations” (Haraway 2016, 136).

To rephrase, this is an eco soma intervention, a shifting of gears into other realms—and I am not using the term “mesmerizing” innocently, either. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was a German physician who created a system of hypnotic induction that became a forerunner of the use of hypnosis in Western medicine. The word “mesmerizing” links back to this medical practice of tapping into “animal magnetism,” manipulating a spiritual fluid circulating inside and around a patient, something akin to the balance of humors in humoral theory. In more common usage today, “mesmerizing” refers to something holding us in its spell. That’s the use Edgar Allan Poe made of Mesmer when he wrote the story, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (published in England first under the title “Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis”). In this story, a patient gets hypnotically suspended at the moment of death from tuberculosis. In the days and months that follow, the patient does not decay but lives nonbreathing, vibrating between life and death, until the spell is released (and an ultraquick and gory decomposition into liquidity affirms that the actual moment of death was a long time ago). Before the hypnotic release, the narrator manages to coax comprehensible language out of the living corpse: a communication months after death.

Lived time is an issue in Poe’s story: temporalities of physiological and psychological processes get rearranged in horror mode rather than in crip time. There is no horror in Waking the Green Sound, and I see more that has to do with Haraway’s practical healing than with boundary transgressions between life and death. But the mesmerizing aspects are there: leaves and hands shiver, creating the small, repeated movements (or sounds) often associated with hypnosis. Breathwork, plant medicine, hypnosis: these are all methods of reaching altered states, shifting us out of this world to find new imaginations (see Plate 14).

The other image complex that colors my reception of Waking the Green Sound is the concept of soma, not (as it has been so far in my book) in the meaning of somatics, but in an earlier and more hidden lineage: “soma,” the drink of the gods, a hallucinogenic beverage made from plants. Soon, in the video, the gloves come off. Dancers’ hands are partially paralyzed and drape over the table that links the three figures. The careful reveal leads to connection: hands finding one another and unusual finger alignments and ratios intertwining over the sound of gongs and bells. We’re watching a ceremony, a ritual.

The three make tea, interdependently, ritualistically, and with joy. Three pairs of hands work together to stuff leaves and flowers into the big yellow tea pot. Eventually, the camera travels into the pot and cuts to a field of leaves. In it lie the three dancers, shaved heads and girded bodies covered in dried white clay. The surreal tea party shifts into hallucinatory territory as the small, white figures clench and open, laugh and shiver. Temporal accelerations and surprise cuts undermine a sense of embodied, co-breathing realism and highlight the surreal qualities of these plant/human figures who appear with flower lips, plants at the limits of ingestion, at the threshold.

Soma was such a threshold drink, a psychoactive substance described in the “Indo-Ayran” (a complicated term I will come back to later) Rigveda, emerging out of the oral transmission of Vedic culture. According to Frits Staal, professor of philosophy and South/Southeast Asian studies, and frequent commentator on Vedic rituals from the West, “soma” referred to the godhead, the plant from which the drink was made, and the drink itself; and the ingestion of soma seemed to offer linkages to all three of these entities (2001): god, plant, fluid. The status and uses of the magical drink “soma” have been discussed extensively among Vedic scholars and in the English literature on texts such as the Bhagavad Gita. My library research on the topic brought me down many ethnobotanical paths, including discussions of which ficus trees give their seeds for the drink (Kashikar 1986); whether it was millet, Eleusine coracana, ragi, or the brilliant red fly-agaric mushroom, also linked to Siberian shamanism (in the influential Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Wasson 1968); and what the status of the word “milk” is in the context of soma. Soma reading leads me to longevity research, altered-state research, as well as deep into the exegesis of texts of religious ritual. Every time I have given a talk on Eco Soma, someone in the audience approaches me afterward and asks about the hallucinogenic, life-giving mythical drink: there’s still quite a subculture out there, and the term “soma” links us bodymindspirit explorers.

The hippie story of cross-cultural imbibing is central to many lineages of performance. For instance, French performance visionary “Papa” Antonin Artaud is a touchstone for many performance artists like me. He lived through excruciating asylum experiences and yet was also a free, privileged, grant-sponsored European traveler to Mexico. While in Mexico, Artaud withdrew from heroin, certainly a terrible experience. However, he got to know peyote and participated in Tarahumara rituals, setting the stage for many future performance-art travelers, searching for and finding art in psychoactive ritual.

But the story of soma, when tracked through the archive, also leads down another route into a deep maelstrom of cross-cultural violence. In an essay published in 1920 in the journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, E. B. Havell, Julius Eggeling, and Max Mueller discuss the soma plant as it appears in descriptions of Vedic rituals (Havell 1920).

Mueller’s name is probably the most famous here. This German-born but British-based “orientalist” offered the first coinage of the term “Aryan race” in the English language in 1861 (Lectures on the Science of Language). French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau used the word in his efforts to legitimize racism: he saw the “Aryan race” as superior.16 Mueller, in turn, strongly protested the conflation of the sciences of language and of “man” in resonant images: “It would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar” ([1888] 2004, 120). And yet, the “science” of skull measuring, which gave us terms like “dolichocephalic” (long skulled) deeply influenced theories of intelligence, culture making, and language acquisition; racism’s intertwined heritages and co-constitution with disability, sex, class, and gender move into view again.17

Eventually, as I flip forward in time, and stay with the exploration of soma ritual, I come across people like Chintaman Ganesh Kashikar (1986, on soma drink and the ruling classes), another eminent researcher of Vedic ritual and traditional Pandit who taught in Pune and who also edited a Rigveda edition (called the Poona edition) that improved on the one edited by (again) Max Mueller: indications that the orientalist and colonial frameworks of who gets to construct knowledges begin to show holes (Bahulkar and Bahulkar 2003).

Time to breathe. Soma (the drink) and breathing are closely linked in the scholarly discussion of Vedic ritual:

The effects of some psychoactive substances appear to be similar to those of breathing in chant and recitation, including silent varieties that developed into meditation in the Upanishads and Buddhism, not to mention Yoga.

The inhaling and exhaling that accompanies the giant opera or breathing exercise of a Soma ritual is one of the features that helps explain how a psychoactive substance can become a ritual. (Staal 1988, 2001, 754)

It is easy to see how Waking the Green Sound relates to this image complex: breath, ingestion, psychoactive substances, painkillers—but as I spin this list, I am getting further and further away from the actual film, I am caught in my own phenomenological horizon space that can be dominated by the presence of pain and by the joy of not being in pain. But there is more to come back to in the film itself.

The film is full of nonrealist, nonconsensus time cuts as examples of crip time, of alternative temporal patterning. There are the slowed-down meditative movements often associated with Butoh, as well as the sped-up movements so often associated with drug dreams, all within a soundtrack that samples the whoosh of the ventilator, binding breath back into rhythm.

In the dance/dream, the clay-covered figures begin to peel, their skin now visually akin to the trees they wind around. Again, my pain body reads these images in the context of pain, and I think of aspirin, a substance found in tree bark familiar as a healing plant to many peoples across the globe.

Small and only partially controlled feet and hands shift against bark as I see one of the figures up in a tree. Leaves, bark, lichen, clay, skin: the boundaries become unclear. I am in the realm of Donna Haraway’s a-kin, techhumannatureculture, biomerging with the slow-moving camera and the waves of cuts.18

This dance video is a form of hypnosis, offering a view of crip time’s difference that asks for attention and the consciousness of breath, the nongiven-ness of grasping toes and fingers. Toward death and toward life, Butoh’s precarity is in the weight of its heightened sensory experience, made experiential in the temporality of this slow unfolding. Breath is visible, flaring, staccato in the rhythm of the film’s cut.

The sun goes down on one performer, and alights on another one, shivering in the aspen-shake of sun leaves on her face, a sped-up camera jittering us into an awareness of duration. She uncovers an old turtle shell, and climbs into it, merging her body into another species’ remnant.

Here is another aspect of Waking the Green Sound that offers a shared cultural/phenomenological horizon space: human/animal/plant hybrids as sources of horror material. The aesthetic of the Green Sound never lets the images slide into horror, but the image-complexes certainly have currency in horror movies: people whose movements are slowed or sped up (think Ringu, or, in the English version, The Ring), animal-humans (think The Island of Dr. Moreau, an archetypal horror movie involving disability and body modification), plant-humans (think The Body Snatchers and its multiple remakes, or The Girl with All the Gifts19), trans as a bodily concept (think Silence of the Lambs), and, of course, people with physical or psychiatric disabilities (this basically encompasses the entire history of Western horror movies, from the ambivalently fun Freaks via Psycho to any baddie in a wheelchair ever).

In the film, three small humanoids with turtle shells on their backs crawl toward a magic door, a golden portal, held close by the bone-whiteness of an antler. Inside, incense burns, its smoke filling the air; music drones; everything touches and adheres in tropes of transgression; there is embodied infusion everywhere. Cloths wrap white limbs, and gold paint enhances the dancers’ small articulation of life. Small arm movements, breathing patterns, and movements that seem to speak to inner journeys all hide behind closed eyes and tattooed skin.

A cut to a different scene: the tea party becomes raucous, drinks spill, flower heads are thrown. Ecstatic sensations flow through flailing limbs. There is laughter. There are screams. And there are the half-closed or wide-open eyes of bliss. Something circulates in the blood and light, in the tea and the leaves, in the dried lichen and the painted skin, in lung pearls in gas exchange. Humans and plants dance amid permeable membranes.

I find myself hoping that the hosting plants in the forest environment had as much fun as this dancer trio. There is tenderness in the shooting: no trees look like they were harmed in making the video, although some plant leaves have been shredded for tea steeping. So I asked, and I received this answer, full of crip love and tenderness, mutual caretaking, interdependency, and intimacy. The shooting location was on Cowlitz peoples’ territory, and

was the backyard of the wobbly house, our house, and that was the magic of it, to get as close as we could, as intimate as we could, with the nature that was very near. Those 100 year old fruit trees are on our property, the temple was our shed repainted and laid with an altar for that scene. Chain link fence was disguised with miles of amaranth stalks collected and contributed by friends and late summer leaves covered the tatami mats we lay on. (personal communication, July 2020)

Three disabled dancers, in ground-level locomotion without chairs, their unusual bodies’ and limbs’ sensuous surfaces in touch with other living things, enjoy the high of dance and plant touch, supported by their friend network. Sampled and layered sound (by Sweetmeat) and sensuous camera work (by Ian Lucero) enhance the somatic immediacy of the movement and ask me to think about the trans/mit/ability of videodance: its power to shift me, to touch me in the absence of easy physical alignment. I have physically danced with two of these three dancers, we have swum together in a Salamander ritual in the Mediterranean sea, our bodies rolling across each other in dance studios, limb to limb. I have smelled their presence, and they have smelled mine. Watching them in these delicious colors, in costumes controlled and aligned with the camera’s gaze, makes me remember our shared sweaty embodiment in a dance studio, in a contact jam, in supportive salt water.

As someone with chronic pain, I recognize the draw toward bringing (animate) things close, to live in close-up, to find touch and energetic transfusion in one’s immediate environment. A lot of my own work emerges from close-ups, from seeing things very near to me. On days where it isn’t easy to go out, these close things become my environment, my scenic boulders, rivers, and mountains. Think about the Introduction’s dust bunnies beneath the sofa, a feather escaped from a down jacket, or a spiderweb in the corner of a window. In my street, I look for moss, sit by it, and move with it.20 Seeing my world with new eyes, in new perspectives, lying on the floor or pavement, tracking my sensations with words, opening into speculative encounters with heightened entities: these are all ways in which pain and pleasure find openings and release. I write here as someone who vibrates in sympathy, in disability culture ways, and in access intimacy, with Wobbly Dance’s approach to their home forest ritual.

Video acts as a memory machine, but it also offers momentary points of approach before denying similarity, enacting narratives that do not speak of familiarity but insist on difference, on what is not known. My body neither looks nor moves this way, my neck does not flare this way when I breathe, but there is a base structure that translates across the screen, when I watch, and when I co-breathe, for fifteen minutes, halting my day’s speed to be seduced by color, shape, and moving form.

The interplay of drugs, diffusion, and substances offer a quasi-ecstatic field here, a softness of release. Disabled dancers, usually so constrained by medical realities and by projections of helplessness that need to be protested against through super-crip competence, may loosen the bounds of control. They can perform with abandon, at least in the carefully controlled environment of a video shoot.

But as a disabled person living with an awareness of my social surroundings, I can’t just release myself to the fantasy. This fantasy still remains anchored in the complexities of drug release, racialization, and drug criminalization: who has access to legal drugs and who does not; what is at stake in having drugs, prison pipelines and supply chains, opioid crises; and the denial of painkillers to people whose lives are unthinkable without them. At different moments, in different ways, speculative embodiment snaps in and out of focus and inserts precarity and suffering into any sense of White abandon. There is something impossible here. Suffering swings in my reception of this strange, guarded dream.

Suffering and mourning: this is a nexus of thought in much eco-arts work. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), an influential popular ethnobotanist, aligns with equally influential White writer, Joanna Macy, when the former argues that:

until we can grieve for our planet, we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. (2013, 327)

In Waking the Green Sound, hands are in the earth. Wounds and scars are on display. Necks flare, struggling for breath. The trees in the film do not show their wounds, but most viewers will be familiar with the dried-up husks of trees where the water table has receded too much, or with the changes in habitat, insect-load, and tree illnesses that are affecting more and more tree stands.

But in my writing about the film here, other wound-complexes also align. I think of historical wounds of war and genocide, where human histories pressure any readings of trees and human in alignment. The Nazis were expert at mining cultural mythology for a new philosophy of earth/human engagement, articulated via the old German oak, via “Indo-Aryan” claims of Sanskrit ancestry for White Germanic racial purity and via rituals in forests. So when I write about these images on the video screen with so much love, and even when I engage myself in tree dancing, my skin in touch with bark and leaf, these other histories of my lineage shiver through me. The dancers in Waking the Green Sound might well have been gassed by Nazis, for crip and queer reasons, had they been born at that time (a different place might not have saved them: a birth in the United States might have also led to death within the eugenics movement, “the American Science”). Empathy and identification draw fragile alliances. Their contours change quickly: who is in, and who is out, can shift over the course of a few years. Phenomenologically, I am never “just body,” never without the entwinement of eco soma engagement with the world as a cultural, historical, material, and spiritual entity.

Sun Rhythms: Poetry’s Embodiment

From the grounded embrace of botanical slowness, let’s move to a slow vision of stars, in the moment of going nova, an ultimate abandon. In this section, I explore another meaning of rays, of connecting devices that touch one surface to another through energy transmission, in reading. This loops a bit further out from my eco soma argument so far. I have negotiated non-copresence through videodance, which has its own histories of kinetic embodiment discussions. Now, in this example of literary non-copresence, only fragmented words remain; but, as I hope to show, the eco soma witnessing practice can work on this complex horizon, too.

In a different kind of speculative mode between planets and suns, Korean American poet Sueyeun Juliette Lee engages light as a mode of emphatic engagement, a transfusion of human words and stellar time, articulated through the decay procedures with which sunspot eruptions operate on language. In the development of the poetry sequence “Solar Maximum” (2015) the somatic, the experience of embodiment, is the substrate to meaning, the base from which impact is measured. Here in Figure 24 is a double spread from Solar Maximum.

Look over this page, the last one from the long poem: let your eyes travel, track your eye movements—the subtle play of muscles deep inside your eye sockets—feel the jumps. What does witnessing the blank spaces feel like?

Rhythmicity and its syncopation, weakening strong beats and offering weaker ones to come to the fore in new alignments, are at the heart of much Afrofuturist musical work.21 These temporal shifts of syncopathic openings, of matter burned out, away, holes in wholes, a contagion of rhythm and influence, are at work in Lee’s oeuvre. The formal experimentation holds a lineage with works like M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which uses textual procedures to witness the death of African slaves thrown off ships in the middle passage. Philip repurposes legal language, the eighteenth-century British legal case examining the slave-trading ship holder’s culpabilities, and explodes it, fragments it, radiates it to smear across history. Water dilutes into its component parts, syllables, and letters, left behind on a white field. Philip illuminates racial atrocity in the past, contaminating the present, making nonpoetic texts speak differently in difficult articulation. Philip refuses to use the language of oppression to speak to the White market: she decomposes it instead, pointing out holes.

Holes are the connection I am drawing here, recycling material to thin it, to let it shine through to other eras and other imaginations, like some of the slow play in Turtle Disco or Lovecraftian flights. Lee uses palimpsests for her purposes, engaging with burned-away records. Lee casts into the future and witnesses the effect of light on human bodies, mashing scientific texts into their constituent parts. These texts become marks, akin to the shadow a hand throws on a wall (in one of the photos woven through the text, an image from the Egyptian Western Desert). There are exploded source texts from radiation cancer treatments, material from NASA publications, and information from the Cryonics Institute.

The poet’s long poem “Solar Maximum” (the title sequence in Solar Maximum [2015]) combines visuals and found text, both scientific and mythological, with a more narratively oriented voice.22 It begins in narrative time, with a stable “I” that charts causes and effects in temporal order, in a sentence arranged in a prose poem. This block of prose content speaks to infiltration and precarity: “My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent / radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synched me to coronal/flares” (73).

The reader finds out that the sun eruptions cause scar responses in the subject’s skin. The light conditions are not easily discernable and do not align with human perceptions of brightness or cloudy sky: “One can’t choose the mood / that gathers, the body’s response” (73). Unpredictability is part of the pattern emerging in this endtime poem, in which personal dissolution and dystopic radiation death of the planet align with mythological texts of Gilgamesh and a sheltering raven, who offers solace: “When she rests / she stretches out her wings, and the entire earth cools beneath her subtle / breeze” (79). Light affects memory and creates photographs, the screens that humans populate with dead ones, loved ones, near ones. When light eviscerates matter, holes appear in memory, skin, and cancer cells. Atom bombs explode. Sunlight sears. Nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, the inexorable nonanthropocentric actions of the distant sun: hybridity bleeds into a story that sits between U.S. and Asian relations, between individual cancerous bodies and the hygiene of “nations.” Cause and effect become unclear, and the narrating subject can engage in narrative magic tricks and tell us of endless money and papers and phantom glass shards falling from her shaking hands, all while bankers use “iridium-plated bones” to forecast the stock market (97). Eventually, repeatedly, “the entire world condenses into a magma skitter” (91) and language appears holey on the page, white space infiltrating sentences and lopping off endings. “The body quenches into ore” (105): reading this, I am back at the extraction narratives, the golden shirt, in the first chapter, back at the senses of unequal distribution of risk, mining work, but also at the site of the apocalypse, of heat death. The preciousness of sensation sears off the poem’s surfaces, glittering shards that make unclear location, radiating origin and lanced destiny. The poem calls to Shamash, an Akkadian solar deity, with exhortations of protection, with the desire for sheltering narrative and temporal abeyance.

Throughout the poetic sequence, humans and elements bind together, establish co-living/dying, in penetration, proliferation, holiness, and holes. Disassociation and noninfluence are as present as their other. One of the images strewn through the sequence is a close-up of brain tissue, of capillaries, that supply brain tissue with nutrients. “Tight seals in their walls keep blood toxins—and many beneficial drugs—out of the brain.”23 In all this, bodies are shining things and are shone upon; they are connecting mechanisms in a world that heats and/or cools toward disconnect: “body = filament/body = a wick, halted” (75).

To read Solar Maximum and its interplay of narrative, repurposed scientific language, images, and exhortations connects the act of reading to many other speculative and fabulist universes. Genre reading is contaminated reading, full of leaky borders and proliferating similarities. Reading along, I can see the connections to so many of the lowbrow adventure science thrillers I enjoy and the study of which was a central part of my feminist critical training.24 One of these novels, Deep Fathom (2001), White U.S. author James Rollins’s rollicking story of the sunken continent Atlantis, also twists around light, sunspots, and light’s material ability to bore holes, explode the world, and twist time. The story centers on an unknown element at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, complete with a tense description of presidential war-mongering and atomic war with China (which weirdly turns out to be an alternative history narrative, reset into the historical sequence of uneasy contemporary peace through a mysterious light- and time-bending crystal pillar).

I read Deep Fathom and Solar Maximum simultaneously, by chance, and was struck by the thematic similarities and the different aesthetic strategies at work. There are clear similarities: both works lean into global space, adventure, and experimental narratives with different aims and effects, centering Western science and yet opening up avenues for non-Western knowledges to impact and shift the monolithic nature of colonial knowledge patterns. Gendered patterns arise, too: Rollins’s work features a strong White Canadian woman heroine sidekicked by a Chinese woman scientist with a good sense of humor; yet the undisputable hero is a White American ex–Navy SEAL, a man of hard body and mind. Lee’s book is a world of “she,” with female others encountered and addressed.

Science fiction poetry is not a well-known subgenre of experimental writing.25 But Lee sees her work in the heritage of the speculative, of science fiction. She writes in the notes to her collection:

This collection represents my efforts to sketch out a speculative poetics —one that explores the various moods of imagined (future) spaces and their implications for human emotional and psychological being. Despite writing “towards” these imagined futures, my aim is hardly predictive, but reflective. I hope to invite us to meditate more intelligently upon our present — its circumstances, relations, and structures–and envision whether we desire to continue along our current trajectories.26

The effect is of slowing, halting meditations, in tension with the forward-leaning nature of futurity writing, with its temporality of the “what now” that characterizes much dystopic and adventure fiction. In Solar Maximum, the core image is the permeability of skin/page/tissue, the slow burn-away of material to offer the lace-effect of palimpsest-like memory holes.

Like other genre work, Solar Maximum invites the penetration of my reading self by other scenes, stories, and images from beyond the book’s pages. From the flash shadows of Pompeii to Gilgamesh’s pilgrimage to the sun, from stories of cancer radiation to the deaths of Hiroshima, from Zong! to genre texts about solar flares: sun/star/fire/violence/death are central to these holes in pasts and futures. Permeability here is a language function, an attention to the medium and matter of light as a communicative substance as well as an illuminator. The poem’s politics link with Wobbly Dance’s engagement with touch by nonhuman elements through the opening of language description to a literal enactment of searing erasure. In the decay of sentences, the reader witnesses the materiality of the invisible/occluded environmental forces and of the fragility of human life. Lee’s poem invites halting. It invites you to take the words into your mouth, let your eyes skitter over the gaps, and feel the slowing earth rotation: “uptempo, the horizon stutters to/converge” (106).

In the section that follows, we will follow this trail of life’s fragility, its violence, and of the agencies that keep people anchored.

Black Lives Matter: Protesting Death, Living Breath

Sending rays out to influence dominant others to see and feel their human co-inhabitants of this earth is hard, but it is a mechanism that is used again and again, as artists strain against the odds. At one end of somatic coherence building is the performance heritage of building empathy by performing the ultimate time shift: death. Positioning one’s self in the place of a dead other is a core act of performance work—and yet, as an interracial sign acknowledging White supremacy, this way of witnessing another is fraught with complexity.

African American theorist Saidiya Hartman, in a discussion of a White abolitionist’s usurpation of a Black body’s suffering, shows how empathy “fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead.” She points out the problems of moves that “require that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible” (Hartman 1997, 19, 20). Response-ability fails again and again when communication and communion are disrupted by White supremacy (i.e., when the White body usurps even the position of victim in order to be able to translate a connection to suffering). Shaped by categorizing systems, humans fail to recognize co-humans.

This kind of misrecognition of shared humanity is at work in a contemporary U.S. political environment, which is once again openly saturated by hate and violence against people of color. The ongoing assaults on Black people, in particular young Black men, Black trans women, and Black disabled people, are pervasive. They are far from isolated incidences, or citable as the U.S. race legacy, “in the past.” George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin in summer 2013 became the flashpoint for the ongoing U.S. protests and for the emergence of Black Lives Matter as a performative activist organization. I am using “performative” here in a different sense from the way it emerged in the resurgence and deepening of anti-Black police violence in 2020: rather than using the term to mean “fake” or “hollow,” I focus on the generative potential of performance, as transmissive or as touch.

These 2020 protests followed the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Dion Johnson, Dreasjon Reed, Atatiana Jefferson—seven names out of a long list of Black people killed by police. Read them out loud. Feel into yourself as you read these names, and listen to the echoes inside yourself. Name the sensations that rise up as you pay your respect to the dead.27

Black Lives Matter is a protest organization initiated by three queer Black women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. In 2013 Garza wrote a Facebook post titled “A Love Note to Black People” in which she said: “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” This note became the rallying cry for international actions against the devaluing of Black lives. Black Lives Matter initially were focused on image- and performance-based interactions. They relied on the power of (social) media to engage in their activist labor. Social media are deeply entwined with liberal and capitalist frameworks, something that for a time earned Black Lives Matter critiques in the wider Black liberation community. Yet, they successfully galvanized and channeled a critical engagement with the precarity of Black lives under White supremacy.28

The intertwining of rays and lives, (social) media, the influence between screens and streets, and matters of life and death will guide me through the remainder of this chapter. In serious play on an eco soma method of change: how do I/you/we think about bodily stepping toward otherness, becoming implicated, without just “placing the self in (the other’s) stead” (Hartman 1997)?

Multiple authors in the ever-expanding critical engagement with affect theory have noted the use of affect as infiltration rather than a motor for identification (see, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari 1987, Goldie 2000, Brennan 2004, Ahmed 2010). In these pages I track this form of contagious touch through the interaction of screen- and street-based activism. The two are different kinds of performance tactics, but both are designed to elicit the impersonal and automatic forms of reactions (not identifications) associated with affect transmission. Energy gets amassed. Things, stories, feelings roll. Magnetic swings draw eyes to the screen or make one feel something in one’s chest. Interactions between the affective contagious regimes of social media and the physical acts of movement are at the heart of this section, where people take up gestures by dead others, an eco soma practicing of chosen lineage. These gestures become artful eco soma political actions toward future life on shared horizons but without collapsing other into self.

Performance, Witness, Hands Up: Michael Brown

It was late November 2014, the day after a Missouri Grand Jury made the decision not to indict the police officer who shot teenager Michael Brown in August of that year in Ferguson, Missouri. The day after the verdict, protests erupted in Ferguson, Boston, Chicago, and New York, and the boy’s father, Michael Brown Sr., asked protesters for nonviolence and for a moment of silence for his son.

I worked with my University of Michigan undergraduate “Space and Site” class in one of many sites around campus, exploring freewrites and performance actions. That day, we situated ourselves in a Catholic church, and many of us came to this site shaken and disturbed by the polarized disclosure of racist precarity in the United States, a coming to consciousness (for those of us not already there, protected by White privilege from experiencing a racist world). In the church, chosen before the national events overtook us, we were on the edges of public and private space, with shushed instructions, undisturbed writing space, occasional worshippers sitting in the penumbra of our actions, and the ethical challenge to us to respect the sacred site and come to expression.

On this day, in the aftermath of the news and the ongoing social media reaction, we created Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed sculptures in front of the altar, witnessing where we were at after the previous night’s news. Some among us, mainly students of color, created sculptures of fear and pain, sharing with White students how dangerous the world felt to them. At one point, a student held another in a form of pieta, a mother cradling her slain child. Others used hand gestures with extended fingers to symbolize guns—a move that some in the group then commented on, linking the easy availability of gun symbols to the ubiquity of guns in the country. At another point, students protected one another with bodies extended outward like battle shields.

In our sculpture work, we used text, moving from silence to sound, quietly reciting Audre Lorde’s “Power,” a poem commemorating ten-year-old Clifford Glover’s murder in 1973. The poem narrates the child’s murder and offers images of the policeman who “stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood/ and a voice said ‘Die you little motherfucker.’” The poem takes us to the trial, where the policeman says, “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else/only the color” (Lorde 1975).

We used our bodies to contaminate ourselves with violence, to touch and be touched by others, to invite something of a mother’s pain, a policeman’s fear of Blackness, or a child’s last breath. We did not exactly “act out” being these people but instead we invited incursion, a point of engagement and interpenetration without full identification. The work felt dangerous, at times appropriative, but the students and I had an open discussion of what we might want to do to mark this historical moment, and upon group agreement we went with it (but acknowledged the dangers of pain glorification and appropriation). The day demanded a loosening of boundaries between students and teachers, between personal experience and what we read, heard, or viewed out there, between one’s personal biography and the wider operations of White supremacy.

A performance studies essay by Anusha Kedhar fueled our preparations that day. Many performance scholars used this widely circulated essay to center Black voices in commentary on the public scene. This blog post came out in October 2014, as a much-cited emergency write-up in the blogosphere, offering talking points in the immediate aftermath of Black people being killed. Kedhar offered an analysis of the well-known “hands up, don’t shoot” gestural sign of protest around the world. The gesture and the words accompanying it were used in the aftermath of the Michael Brown killing by protesters approaching armed police with their hands up repeating these words. In many protests around the United States and beyond, this physical/verbal sign became a signature of a particular moment in race relations. At one point, the Black liberation activist Reverend Al Sharpton described the sign in this way, encouraging protesters:

If you’re angry, throw your arms up. If you want justice, throw your arms up. Because that’s the sign Michael was using. He had a surrender sign. That’s the sign you have to deal with. Use the sign he last showed. We want answers why that last sign was not respected. (Pearce 2014)

Kedhar writes about the “hands-up” gesture’s failure to be respected, to communicate across state and citizen, officer and subject, citing literature professor and blogger Keguro Macharia:

Michael Brown’s death “indexes the failure of this bodily vernacular when performed by a black body, a killable body . . . Blackness becomes the break in this global bodily vernacular, the error that makes this bodily action illegible, the disposability that renders the gesture irrelevant. [It is read as] always already threatening, even when that movement says, ‘I surrender.’” In short, blackness is what lays bare the limits of this kinesthetic sign, what turns this universal gesture of submission into a gesture of guilt, criminality, and culpability. (2014)

The code cracks under the weight of the alternative recognition system called racism: under racism, a fairly familiar human gesture, hands up and palms out, no threat, becomes illegible, as the recognition of this system is just about Blackness equated with threat. The bracketing off into the [nonhuman] inserts an illegibility into the communication machine.

Kedhar offers a range of other reading strategies of the choreographic, embodied sign of “hands-up.” One of those is informed by performance scholar André Lepecki’s analysis of choreopolitics. Kedhar writes:

If police formations and blockades in Ferguson are choreopolicing strategies of an increasingly militarized police force, the “hands up don’t shoot” gesture has become a choreopolitical tactic of defiance. Demonstrators walk toward police officers with their hands up, challenging the police officers to shoot, daring them to respond, to reckon with the officers’ culpability, to remind them of their culpability. (2014)

This reading relies on recognition, on an understanding by the police that protestors share humanity with them and that the state ordinances and rules are imposed on a situation in which humans meet, in the flesh-space, now-space, of urban geography. The gesture suspends the rules of engagement that govern a particular location or time, and the gesture’s slow and deliberate enactment tries to make safe this push against sanctioned space arrangements. The “slow” and “deliberate” are core points here: the fastness of everyday actions, in singularity, do not work (and that fastness, ordinary speed, guided Brown’s killer). But the group choreography, drawing attention to its nonnatural, deliberate state, holds a different message: it slows the flow of business as usual.

This sense of out-of-time-ness, the starkness of a Black or Brown person slipping into a different time/space moment and using this as a fulcrum to effect recognition, is also at work in a much-shared photograph. It is one of many images that have come to symbolize the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement deeply embedded in the image politics and affective contagious regimes of social media. Sharing, liking, forwarding, meme-ing the image—all these social media mechanisms draw power to and into the image, roil it in energy. In the photograph, a Black woman dressed in a gorgeous dress stands in the flow of police ranks in Baton Rouge, in July 2016, during the protests following the death of Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man who was selling CDs outside of a convenience store. The photo and its resulting memes are easily discoverable via search engines, and I encourage readers to go looking.

Social media identified the woman as Ieshia Evans. Search for her name on the internet: her image has become more visible than her name, and the act of searching for her can be an acknowledgment of her action. The photograph is by Jonathan Bachman, a New Orleans freelance photographer on assignment for Reuters that night. In the coverage surrounding this photo, which has since gone global as a meme, one Facebook user describes the woman in this way:

Look at her posture. She is balanced, powerful, upright and well-grounded with both feet firmly planted on the earth. Look at the line made from the crown of her head to the heels of her feet. She is only protected by the force of her own personal power. (Jami West, cited in Bogart 2016)

This reads like an embodied (maybe even dancerly) description, informed by a Black aesthetics of groundedness, earth connection, strength, and nobility. The “natural royalty” swing of the (otherwise purely descriptive) “crown of her head” aligns well with womanist images of Black women’s power.29 The other feature of the photo is the backward swing of the heavily armored police officers, two figures dressed in black who seem to sway backward in front of this upright, straight figure. It looks like she might have issued some kind of sound blast, a magic wham, to repel these figures, whose lines are broken by angular knees and elbows. She seems to float in her own temporality, her dress billowing both forth and back, not in the slipstream of the same movement as the two soldiers.

As a cultural theorist trained in the ways that media images can create endless snakes of images linking to images linking to images, I can help to push against deadliness and make connections between African American citizens confronting a state apparatus that condemns them to death with hopeful imagery from Afrofuturist repertoires.30

In particular, this image echoes for me the literary description of the arriving alien in Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014). Lagoon is a novel set in Lagos, Nigeria, where it charts the effects of alien arrival on a sea witch as well as a local woman and her circle. The alien is a shape-shifter, fragmenting into nano-tubes of black material under the microscope, then erecting herself as a stunning woman. Humans who are drawn to the alien have special abilities. The rhetorical power to stop and sway masses is one of them: a famous music star narrates a soundwave moment, his ability to generate transforming waves of temporal displacement. The kind of effect that can repel soldiers in full armor and upend them in the street—the kind of effect so many commentators read into Evans’s image.

Incongruous kinetic energies fuel this photograph. It is memorable not just for the strength and beauty of the woman in her diaphanous dress facing two police officers as the advance guard of a whole line of black-garbed stormtrooper soldiers. The image captures deliberation, a defiance of the speed of postmodern racial escalation. Ieshia Evans did get arrested and was eventually released. She was, and is, in real danger as a Black woman engaging in public protest in the street. But Evans made conscious choices about how to face danger, including her posture, location, and dress, choices that spoke to the heightened nature of an occasion that demanded recognition of the escalation of racial tension and supremacist governance.

I make a choice to understand this political gesture in the street as a gendered and powerful act of Afrofuturist activity, emerging from the poise and dress choices Evans made, which align with Kimberly Nichelle Brown’s argument that “contemporary African American female writing is a product of choice, of agency, rather than solely a reaction to victimization” (2010, 64).

Afrofuturist Nalo Hopkinson defines Afrofuturist science fiction as “literatures that explore the fact that we are tool-makers and users, and are always changing our environments” (Nelson 2002, 98; interview). In the time-slice offered by Bachman’s photo, we see Ieshia Evans explore everyday tools (of dress, habitus, and spatial orientation) to comment on the need for change and to drop our armors and arms, even in the midst of precarious living. In the choreopolitics of this image, “Black women and girls are in the present and can and do signify (on) the future” (Morris 2012, 162). And then their expressions of agency can become a different kind of visual/literary/cultural bodymind politics, one that flows across the globe.

Breathing Street Rhythms: Eric and Erica Garner

In July 2014, Eric Garner was put in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo because he was suspected of selling unlicensed cigarettes. In a video shot by a bystander, Garner repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while lying face down on the city sidewalk before falling unconscious and dying.31 This killing initiated large-scale antipolice protests in many U.S. cities. Garner is reported to have had asthma. “I can’t breathe” became part of the repertoire of antipolice violence protests nationwide and of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. Performance actions in classrooms and in the streets commemorated Garner’s struggle to breathe as he lay endangered in common urban space. Images of these actions were posted online and circled the globe, exploiting social media’s capacity for wide and rapid contact and reproduction. Garner died. Life and death enter complexly into the international cultural machines: protests galvanized many people, fostering new movements. (Usually White-owned) image machines circled into action, living and breathing with the powers unleashed by Black death. In the streets, shared through social media, and in our classrooms, many performance actions commemorated Garner’s struggle to breathe—actions and images that were shared worldwide and that inspired moments of enactment. Protesters nationwide taped their mouths shut and wrote “I can’t breathe” on the tape—an action that disabled activists have commented on as complicated to enact and, at times, endangering to protesters.

Breath is central to many considerations of access in protest movements—see for instance this widely cited blog post by disabled blogger Geeky Gimp (a collective of writers led by Erin Hawley), which offers pointers for how to make social justice protest actions more accessible (and note how prescient the comment is in light of the police aggression against protesters during the Covid-19 crisis): “While we strive for safety at all events, protests can pose health risks for disabled people. Tear gas or pepper spray can lead to breathing problems” (Crip the Resistance 2017).

This issue of disabled access to protest actions came to a deeply sad point in the December 2017 death of Eric Garner’s daughter, racial justice activist Erica Garner. She died of a heart attack brought on by an asthma attack. Some media outlets connected her death to her tireless work in protests and on the street, the stress she lived under as a result of systemic racism and the physical stress of protest actions.

For the years between her father’s death and her own, at twenty-seven, Erica Garner lay down in the street, outside the store, on the spot where her father was killed, in the performance form of the “die-in.” The action was a form of private mourning, coded into and through the performative politics that have become associated with contemporary antiracist actions, themselves linked with deep histories of embodied political gestures. She spoke in an interview about these actions and about her relationship to public responses:

Since her father’s July 17 death, Erica Garner has held twice-a-week “die ins” on the Bay St. sidewalk in Tompkinsville.

“I feel the love and energy from around the world, but on Staten Island it’s been emotionless,” the 24-year-old told the Daily News after Thursday’s regular demonstration in front of a beauty supply store where cops confronted her father.

“I felt his spirit when I was walking down to the spot,” she said. “I’ve been doing this every Tuesday and Thursday since my father’s death. I do it without cameras there. I do it with cameras there, and I’m going to keep doing it.” (Friedman, Parascandola, and Hutchinson 2014)

As she said, some of these actions happened without cameras, many with them. Private mourning rituals intersected with public actions, activating audiences like my students in the “Space and Site” class. In the field of social media, some audiences responded, co-felt, enacted, embraced the recognizability and relatability of her bodily actions; others were unmoved, even hostile (and I refrain from citing some of the hateful responses to Erica Garner’s death, which link racialization and disability discourses in utterly predictable and painful ways).

Make Me Wanna Holler

My last discussion foregrounds breath as artful living as a human on the street. Antoine Hunter, who identifies as an African, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, Two-Spirit dancer, moves on the streets of San Francisco in Make Me Wanna Holler (2017), a four-minute video dance directed by Erica Eng and choreographed by Dawn James. The publicity material of the video sums up its subject matter in this way: “‘Make Me Wanna Holler’ poetically depicts the daily struggles and frustrations that challenge a homeless man living on the streets of San Francisco. Starring the deaf dancer/performer Antoine Hunter” (Eng 2017). Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/205247231.

How does the city appear to you? How do you feel as you watch the city rhythms and Hunter’s observations of his environment? How does the sound of the transportation system affect you? How does the music move you? How does it feel to watch the watchers? What happens in your bodymindspirit when the lyrics swell up, when Hunter bursts into his first backbend?

In the video, Tyler McPherson’s camera moves along with Hunter on his day in the city—from arriving via subway to descending again into the underground in evening light. The first shot is inside a BART car, and the bars of the light fixtures whoosh rhythmically across the screen, alongside the sound of BART rails. Audio/movement cues merge throughout the video, potentially pointing to Hunter’s Deaf way of communicating and witnessing the world. In the next shot, Hunter moves from a dark silhouette in the glass reflection to a direct shot, lingering on his face and his mobile eyes, calmly taking in the world around him, with a hint of a smile inside the black beard. Soon, he gets up. A Black woman and an Asian woman look at him, offering a non-White-centric perspective on public life.

Visual rhythms abound throughout the video: the pattern of the escalator versus the still stairs, people walking fast against Hunter’s slow tempo, the visual patterns of skyscrapers and neoclassical facades against the grid of powerlines overhead. Soon, the music starts, and beats syncopate against the visual rhythms. Hunter keeps looking around himself, observing a hectic world that moves at a faster pace than his own speed. At one point, he lies down in the street, in the position familiar to many homeless people—head on his folded hands and coat, a soda cup in front of him to collect money. He looks at the camera, which is at ground level with him. Does the camera placement alleviate a sense of distance, of voyeurism?

The dominant feature of the film is temporality, and the difference in time signature between Hunter and the rest of heaving San Francisco. He is controlled in the way a dancer can be both quiet and radiating with energy. When he explodes into wide, spiral movement, Hunter’s expressive face speaks of frustration. And at one point, his arms are spread wide, and his hands gesture toward his chest in what I read as a “this is me” gesture.

Shared humanity is at stake, across slowed movements, different rhythms, against Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” The context of the song is exploitation: the visual rhythms speak to finance, commerce, inhuman temporalities of rushing and narrowing (see Plate 15). “Rockets, moon shots, spend it on the have-not’s / Money, we make it, before we see it, you take it / Oh, make you want to holler . . . No, no baby, this ain’t living.”

In the context of my eco soma thoughts, I see this dance video as a rhythmic exhortation to slow down, spend time, breathe, see co-humans, as well as other living creatures, like a flock of pigeons that take flight against Hunter’s movement arc. I read the movie from the perspective of a racialized disability critique, a notion of Deaf Gain (Bauman and Murray 2014),32 of adding what is missing, what is lost, and what needs to be excavated beneath the monetized cityscape.

This dance video is a form of hypnosis, offering a view of crip time’s difference that asks for attention and the consciousness of breath. I read it in relation to the particular temporalities that emerge out of disabled embodiment and enmindment: somatic differences that leave traces in political struggles, aesthetic products, and forms of organizing. Crip time can also refer to the temporalities of hallucinatory drugs, to what happens when you take narcotic pain killers. Time jumps. The world shivers. Altered states are a way out, a star flight.33 I think of expansion, of unboundedness, the opposite of carceral urban logics that constrain movement. I think of cameras in urban landscapes that move with humans, celebrating their presence, rather than policing and quantifying them.

Somatic dis/coherence appears in connection with crip time in Anne McDonald’s words. I cite again her words about slow rays, about fantasies of how to influence a world so that she could fully be in it: “I am forced to live in your world, a fast hard one. If slow rays flew from me I would be able to live in this world” (McDonald n.d.). “If slow rays flew from me”—if she could touch the world with energy, if she could influence a fellow nervous system, if she could align, transmit, entrain others. Slow rays—something of this is what a dancer does. That’s what music can do, of course: influence through rhythm, a temporality that transmits itself through bodily sensation, rays, and vectors of influence. Humans entrain themselves through rhythm, taking on someone else’s pulses.

In Make Me Wanna Holler, a shivering of time happens in the waiting time, in the out-of-flow time, in the meditation on the purpose of the city’s antlike activity. The temporal signature of a dancer allows for time-outs, for observation, and for developing an articulation of one’s own expressive modalities—the wide swing of arms and legs in arcs against the linearity of the city. Fred Moten writes about Duke Ellington’s swing, about not answering to any one category, of surplus and rhythm:

Where’s swing come from? What drive? My People: the rhythm of this performance, a resistance to the question that is erotic. Yet he was black, he did have and was in a band, inside the band that invaginatively envelops him, his comping marking that rhythmic disruption that animates swing, out of which swing emerges, before meaning. (2003, 27)

Rockets and moon shots, animated by swinging arms: Hunter’s aliveness is not contained in any one trajectory, either, in his dance video, in the production framework of shots selected, honed, caressed.

Crip time is not just about slowing rays; it is also about altering temporal perceptions, creating a caesura in rhythmic patterns, inserting a difference, a wing’s stroke, with a new beat.

Breath is rhythm, repetition, an openness to somatic influence, and a connectedness to the world. Social media imagery and video material can influence these rhythms and alert audiences to aliveness (even as it can also reinforce fungibility and toward-death-ness in the endless circulation of gasping dying humans). Rhythmicity and its syncopation, weakening strong beats, and offering weaker ones to come to the fore in new alignments are central to theoretical framings that seek ways forward (and outward) for Black people living within White supremacy. Rhythm and its contagious quality, in the form of attention to lived temporalities, have also become central to the ongoing articulations of crip time in disability studies. Crip futures align with Afrofuturist heritages through an emphasis on being around, on being alive in the future, and not being biopoliticked to death. Aimee Meredith Cox writes the following in her ethnographic work with a young Black women’s dance group in Detroit:

They worked through and beyond the space of empathy to do the shapeshifting political work of creating spaces to challenge [their limited and conditional citizenship] and imagine more life-affirming possibilities. (2015, 232)

Moving out from reference fields of deathliness toward life needs to be central to an ethics of interracial criticism. There are futures here to be shaped by Black girls, racialized people, and Deaf people—not just felt in other bodies.

In this last section of chapter 4, I investigated performance responses to killings of Black people and Black precarity. They reached their participants and audiences in class inside a church, on the street, and through social media. I witnessed performances that relied on slowed rhythms, the labor of breath, and the out-of-time-ness of homelessness. These actions intertwine with the escape trajectories and alien alivenesses with which I opened the chapter: eco soma imaginations that see new futures in crip time, with pain, sadness, anger, and joy, in layered sensings, in holes, in wholes.

All these actions vibrate: fields-in-touch that transmit aliveness into the future, the next beat, the next breath. My hope is that your body and mine are on the line here, too, in an eco soma assemblage: history, narrative, pain, inclusion and exclusion, theorized at the level of skin and breath.