Acknowledgments

I want to thank the lands and people I have been welcomed by as I have moved across the earth to be with fellow disabled people and others who use performance for social change. I wish to express my gratitude to my old German homeland on the Niederrhein; and to Lake Michigan, Crystal Lake, the Huron River, and the lands of the Anishinaabek, as well as the elders and current practitioners who work to connect humans, more-than-humans, and the land toward new futures. I spent most of my time writing this book at the University of Michigan, which resides on the traditional territories of the Three Fire Peoples—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. As I make art, work, live, and play on this land, I keep in mind ongoing colonial state violence and the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.

These chapters emerge from my travels as a disability culture activist: I choreographed a Salamander performance with Spinn, a physically integrated dance company in Sweden; spent time workshopping with A Different Light, a theater company in Aotearoa/New Zealand (comprising people deemed to have cognitive differences); worked as a consultant to the Victorian government in Australia to set up focus groups with disabled artists; and connected with Japanese Butoh artists in Berlin to choreograph at the Holocaust Memorial. In my travels, I have met and learned from so many; I have learned different ways of being with the land—with histories and futures, in community—in respect and humility. In my career as a touring artist, I have also seen the impact of ever-expanding travel economies. So this book also charts my growing embedment in and gratitude to more local, sustainable contacts, connecting with disabled and nondisabled artists in my hometown of Ypsilanti, in nearby Ann Arbor and Detroit, and in cities a train ride away like Chicago, Toronto, and other nearby Canadian cities.

I am grateful for performance, experimental dance, creative somatics, ecopoetics, and all practitioners and artists who push what our forms can be. I am also grateful to my fellow writers who are always exploring new modes of gliding between the art forms. I am writing these comments during Covid times, where it has become clear how deeply needed our practices are. I have a skin thirst for feeling others, bodily, in dancerly grace and weight sharing. I know that this resonates for so many in our multiple communities.

My thanks goes, as always, to the supportive international wayfarers who perform with me in the Olimpias, our disability culture performance research collective. And I am so grateful to the people who come to play, dance, and breathe at Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio. This is the local instantiation of my art practice, cofounded in 2017 in our living room, with dancer and poet Stephanie Heit.

I also thank the academic environments I am embedded in, in particular my community performance, eco-arts, and arts-based methods undergraduate students at the University of Michigan, and the graduate students who have moved through my Disability Culture class over the years. I am so grateful for the stimulation and engagement with PhD students, and I want to specifically mention our research coven: Catherine Fairfield, Jessica Stokes, Sean Donovan, Christopher Kingsland, Torre Pucket, Sally Clegg, and Patricia Jewell; as well as Crystal Yin Lie, Shannon Walton, and Jina Kim. I am also thankful for my embedment in the Goddard College community, my wonderful colleagues, and the many dance, participatory performance, social justice arts, somatics, site-specific art, and eco-arts students I have had the pleasure to work with and experiment alongside in our MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts.

The chapters here have come from many different places, and many emerge from generous invitations over a ten-year period. Part of each chapter was a keynote at some point, in different disciplinary frameworks, and each of these led to many new connections, co-conspirators, and collaborators. What became the first sections of the first chapter was given and danced in 2011 at the International Federation for Theatre Research in Osaka, Japan—and I am grateful to the scholars who took up my invitation to climb onto the stage and flock around me while I was reading my “flocking” segment. The section on the Holocaust Memorial performance was a keynote for the Re-embodiment and Dis/abilities/Performance and the Repair of Public Space symposium, organized by Johannes Birringer at Brunel University in the United Kingdom in June 2021 while I was copyediting this book. A part of the second chapter was the non-Indigenous keynote of the improvisation strand at Performing Turtle Island 2015 at the University of Regina. I delivered part of chapter 3 at the Canadian Theatre Research Annual Conference 2019, as a keynote that combined a talk and a water workshop in the pool. The Salamander project was also at the heart of keynotes for the Disability Arts and Culture symposium at Eastern Michigan University in 2019 and the Cleveland Art History Annual Symposium in 2020. Parts of the fourth chapter were initially a keynote speech for Broken Puppet: A Symposium on Puppetry and Disability Performance, Bath Spa, United Kingdom, in April 2018. In between, I explored the material in many conferences, symposia, community sharings, often with participatory elements, being nourished and nourishing in turn. I particularly valued the engagement at the 2019 Performance Studies international (PSi) in Calgary; a speculative performance workshop I was invited to lead at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in San Francisco; a flocking score and talk at the American Dance Festival/Hollins College Dance MFA with Thomas DeFrantz, and a talk and postconference workshop at the 2019 American Society for Literature and the Arts.

Many people read versions of these chapters and gave immensely useful comments. I am grateful to Jennifer Scappettone’s Breathing Matters: Poetics and Politics of Air PhD seminar at the University of Chicago; Carrie Sandahl’s Disability Culture seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Jack Coleman’s Science Fiction and Fantasy research group at UCLA; the Environmental Literacy and Engagement in North Mississippi workgroup at the University of Mississippi, led by Ann Fisher-Wirth; the Ecocriticism Reading Group organized by Peter Remien in Moscow, Idaho; Smith College’s MFA in Dance group with Melinda Buckwalter; and Pamela Block’s assemblage of experimental anthropologists for a three-day performance engagement at Western University, London, Ontario. Thank you to all readers who gave me comments or discussed the topics with me, including Beth Currans, Denise Leto, my previous partner and collaborator Neil Marcus, Fintan Walsh, Anita Gonzalez, Marc Arthur, Cariad Astles, Emma Fisher, Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, Hanna Järvinen, Gwynneth VanLaven, Sharon Siskin, Ju-Pong Lin, Megan Kaminski, Margaret Noodin, Vidhu Aggarwal, Nadine George-Graves, Nanako Nakajima, Gabriele Brandstetter, Allison Hedge Coke, Charli Brissey, Stephanie Jordan, Rebecca Caines, D. J. Lee, Diana Bishop, and Seitu Jones.

The EcoSomatics Research Group at the University of Michigan was the home for much of this exploration—I am grateful to the artists and scholars who came together with codirector Catherine Fairfield and me for three multiday explorations in 2019 and 2020, funded by a Think Act Tank Award for the Embodiment and Environmental Art Practice Project, Project by the National Council for Institutional Diversity; the University of Michigan’s Departments of English, Dance, Theatre, Initiative on Disability Studies; and the Graham Sustainability Institute and the Program in the Environment, in collaboration with the Black Earth Institute. Catherine and I were honored to be joined by Rebecca Caines, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, bree gant, Sarah Ensor, Sally Clegg, and Anita Gonzalez in our two three-day symposia, by Syrus Marcus Ware, Stephanie Heit, D. J. Lee, Megan Kaminski, Charli Brissey, Bronwyn Preece, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Rania Lee Khalil, and andrea haenggi for our ten-day 2020 online symposium, and by Tomie Hahn, Aimee Meredith Cox, Meghan Moe Beitiks, and Edgar Fabián Frías for our spring 2021 workshops.

I had the pleasure of being part of the Environmental Humanities/Poetics Reading Group, led by Angela Hume, for three consecutive summers, encountering a rich reference field and fabulous discussion partners.

The book literally came together during the year I was a Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, in 2019–20. I am so grateful to Peggy McCracken, the Institute’s director, and the amazing cohort of fellows who read and commented with generosity and wit.

I give thanks to the team at the University of Minnesota Press and the editors of the Art after Nature series: Pieter Martin, Caroline Picard, and Giovanni Aloi, and to the two peer readers who wrote such insightful commentary and then removed their anonymity: Carrie Sandahl and Kirsty Johnston. So many thanks.

I am delighted that this book can go out into the world as an open-access text and that my collaborators, play partners, and communities can access my words about our shared experiences without having to pay (digital divides notwithstanding, of course). I am grateful to the University of Michigan and the TOME collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries for making this possible.

My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wife, partner, and collaborator Stephanie Heit, who read everything here, who grounds me and inspires me with her own creative practice, and who makes this art/life the most wonderful journey in place I could have hoped for.