Kuppers 2022

University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays: SPECULATIVE EMBODIMENT
Book Title: Eco Soma

Book Subtitle: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters
Book Author(s): Petra Kuppers
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2022)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2bgz3nb.8
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CHAPTER 4
Crip Time, Rhythms,

and Slow Rays
SPECUL ATIVE
EMBODIMENT
The rhythm of in/visibility is cut time: phantasmatic interruptions and fascinations.

Stories are propelled by this formation of inhabitable temporal breaks; they are driven
by the time they inhabit, violently reproducing, iconizing, improvising themselves.
—Fred Moten, In the Break
I, we, need to imagine crip futures because disabled people are continually being writ-
ten out of the future, rendered as the sign of the future no one wants. This erasure is
not mere metaphor. Disabled people—particularly those with developmental and psy-
chiatric impairments, those who are poor, gender-deviant, and/or people of color, those
who need atypical forms of assistance to survive—have faced sterilization, segregation,
and institutionalization; denial of equitable education, health care and social services;
violence and abuse; and the withholding of the rights of citizenship. Too many of these
practices continue, and each of them has greatly limited, and often literally shortened,
the futures of disabled people. It is my loss, our loss, not to take care of, embrace, and
desire all of us. We must begin to anticipate presents and to imagine futures that
include all of us. We must explore disability in time.
—Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip
This chapter delves into another wrinkle of eco soma, of our embodiment’s
experience in contact and in relation, in connection with others and in environ-
ments. The previous chapters invited you to coexperience, in my writing and in
your reading, somatic echoes of being-with, of sensing ourselves in edge zones
where otherness and self meet on edgy horizons. Fantasy is a core component
of these encounters: the desires and fears we (however the multiple I’s in this
“we” are positioned) have of one another and of our world translate directly into
the somatic experience.
153
154 Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays
You have already been together with me at the bottom of our breaths, under
pressure deep in the water, dreaming of salamander touch. In this chapter, I
push the fantastical even further outward, into speculative embodiment, space
travel, escape trajectories, and plant humans. I discuss Black Lives Matter’s ac-
tivist street poetics, with a focus on breathing, and on life and death in a White
supremacist world. But let’s start on the ground, in the studio.
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 con-
cern, 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 sustain-
ability 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 sci-
ence 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 dis-
cusses 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, in-

terlaced, planetwide eruption of numerous communities of a few hundred
people each, who felt moved to migrate to ruined places and work with
Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays 155
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, non-
human 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 en-
gage 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 pup-
pet: 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 au-
thenticity 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 caterpil-

lar, each with a human face. These puppets seemed to be truer represen-
tations 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
Figure 17. A close-up of participants in Turtle Disco play. Small plastic figures of dragons
climb a pink-socked foot. Two arms with tattoos of landscapes and seedlings help the
dragons climb. Photograph by the author, 2019.
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 blan-
ket 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 com-
plete 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 part-
nership 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 disabil-
ity 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 de-
livery, 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 uni-
versities 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 sur-
real 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, usu-
ally 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 specu-
lative 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 margin-
alization 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 “mad-
ness 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, nondomi-
nant 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, eventu-
ally 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 after-
noon left unattended. The time my caregivers spend loitering is negligible,
the time I spend waiting is interminable. One’s perception of time is depen-
dent 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—t wenty 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 pos-
sibilities 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 non-
general ways of being that disabled people bring to the world.
I invite you to think about your own locatedness again, this time your lo-
catedness 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 mem-
bers described her as someone with traumatic brain injury, telling a dense story
of ant poison, falling down stairs, potential parental abuse, exclusionary experi-
ences 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 fig-
ure 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
Figure 18. A shadow puppet of a small figure with feminine clothing, multiple eyes, wild
hair, bifurcated hands and feet, held on a stick behind a puppet theater screen. I call her
the Little Cthulhu Girl. True Stories of 1 in 4 performance, Dreamland Theater, Ypsilanti,
Michigan, 2017. Photograph by the author.
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 sau-
cer 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.
Figure 19. Two shadow puppets: one a (previously flying) pig, now safely inside the second
puppet, a starship with a small humanoid figure in an astronaut helmet. The two are
shipmates now and can safely escape. True Stories of 1 in 4 performance, Dreamland
Theater, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 2017. Photograph by the author.
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 abstrac-
tion. 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
Figure 20. Puppet constructor Patrick Elkins, a White man with a long beard and a cap, smiles
as he shows a puppet—w ith long tentacles, multiple eyes, and a fanged laughing mouth—
holding a hammer on the stage action side of the projection screen. True Stories of 1 in 4
performance, Dreamland Theater, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 2017. Photograph by the author.
see a woman’s authentic experience, narrated in realist terms and conventional

temporal pacing and then transformed more or less faithfully into shadow pup-
pets 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 inter-
acted 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, dis-
ability becomes a motor. Disability culture ways of telling stories shift across
bodyminds toward objects and toward audiences, pushing, pulling, and ulti-
mately shifting disability’s significatory field. In these eco soma encounters, rela-
tions 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 aesthet-
ics, Black Lives Matter, and a dance video set in the streets of San Francisco
with Deaf African American dancer Antoine Hunter. In these texts, engage-
ment 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 hold-
ing 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, shift-
ing 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
Figure 21. In this video still, three heads with shorn hair in white crumbly makeup, mouths
open, breathe or scream, full of intensity and need. A nose ring, teeth, cave mouths lined
in pink. Waking the Green Sound, 2015.
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 physio-
logical and/or emotional atunement. That argument, based on the grounds of
physiological sameness, falls down for me as soon as I think about racist, able-
ist, 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 tap-
ping 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 hold-
ing 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 psy-
chological 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 hyp-
nosis. Breathwork, plant medicine, hypnosis: these are all methods of reach-
ing 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 mean-
ing 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 find-
ing 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, emerg-
ing out of the oral transmission of Vedic culture. According to Frits Staal,
professor of philosophy and South/Southeast Asian studies, and frequent com-
mentator 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 ex-
tensively 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 ethno-
botanical 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 hallu-
cinogenic, 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 per-
formance. For instance, French performance visionary “Papa” Antonin Artaud
is a touchstone for many performance artists like me. He lived through excru-
ciating 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 trav-
elers, 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 legiti-
mize 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 devel-
oped into meditation in the Upanishads and Buddhism, not to mention
Yoga.
Figure 22. Production photo, a figure (Yulia Arakelyan) in a forest, half-submerged or

emerging out of vegetation. Photograph courtesy of Kamala Kingsley, Waking the Green
Sound, 2015.
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 bound
aries become unclear. I am in the realm of Donna Haraway’s a-k in, tech
humannatureculture, 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 differ-
ence that asks for attention and the consciousness of breath, the nongiven-ness
of grasping toes and fingers. Toward death and toward life, Butoh’s precar-
ity 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 modifica-
tion), 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 ambiva-
lently 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
Figure 23. In this video still, one of the dancers sits with a turtle shell on her head, golden
cloth wrapped around her, on her red plush throne amid lights and organic materials that
remind me of mushrooms, in a templelike setting. See Waking the Green Sound (2015).
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 move-
ments 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 con-
tributed 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 un-

usual 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 (ani-
mate) 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 moun-
tains. 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 sensa-
tions 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 surround-
ings, I can’t just release myself to the fantasy. This fantasy still remains an-
chored in the complexities of drug release, racialization, and drug criminal-
ization: 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 popu-
lar 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 pres-
sure any readings of trees and human in alignment. The Nazis were expert
at mining cultural mythology for a new philosophy of earth/human engage-
ment, 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 re-
main; 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 en-
gagement, 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 ex-
amining 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 atroc-
ity in the past, contaminating the present, making nonpoetic texts speak differ-
ently 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 mytho-
logical, with a more narratively oriented voice.22 It begins in narrative time,
Figure 24. Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Solar Maximum, 2015. Hand double spread (100–101,
106–107). Fragments of writing strewn across the pages, highlighting absences. An image
of a hand—it looks to me like a shadow, but the poet’s notes identify the hand as “Painting
of hands, Foggini-Mesticawi Cave, Glif Kebir, Western Desert, Egypt,” Roland Unger,
March 11, 2011.
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 sub-
ject’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 af-
fects 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 en-
gage 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 protec-
tion, with the desire for sheltering narrative and temporal abeyance.
Throughout the poetic sequence, humans and elements bind together, estab-
lish co-living/dying, in penetration, proliferation, holiness, and holes. Disasso-
ciation 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 con-
nections 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 West-
ern science and yet opening up avenues for non-Western knowledges to im-
pact 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 writ-
ing.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 charac-
terizes 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 read-
ing 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 vio-
lence, 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 abo-
litionist’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 intel-
ligible” (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 trans-
late 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 contempo-
rary 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 orga-
nization. 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 re-
spect 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 inter-
national actions against the devaluing of Black lives. Black Lives Matter ini-
tially 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 com-
munity. 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 im-
plicated, 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 deci-
sion 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 perfor-
mance 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 writ-
ing 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 reac-
tion, 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, shar-
ing 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 im-
ages 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 interpene-
tration without full identification. The work felt dangerous, at times appropria-
tive, 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 com-

municate 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, criminal-
ity, 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, em-
bodied 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 strate-

gies 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 offi-
cers to shoot, daring them to respond, to reckon with the officers’ culpabil-
ity, to remind them of their culpability. (2014)
This reading relies on recognition, on an understanding by the police that pro-

testors 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 gov-
ern a particular location or time, and the gesture’s slow and deliberate enact-
ment 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, de-
liberate state, holds a different message: it slows the flow of business as usual.
This sense of out-of-t ime-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 pro-
tests 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 end-
less 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 im-
agery from Afrofuturist repertoires.30
In particular, this image echoes for me the literary description of the arriv-
ing 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 gener-
ate 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 storm
trooper 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 pub-
lic 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 gen-
dered and powerful act of Afrofuturist activity, emerging from the poise and
dress choices Evans made, which align with Kimberly Nichelle Brown’s argu-
ment 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 “litera-
tures 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 of-
fered 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 choreo
politics 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 commemo-
rated 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 com-
mented 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 com-
ment 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 con-
fronted 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 relat-
ability 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 under-
ground 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.
Figure 25. In this video still, a dancer descends into a subway station, his arm swing
witnessed by a young woman with a headscarf. Behind him, an elder also descends. Make
Me Wanna Holler (United States, 2018), directed by Erica Eng, choreographed by Dawn
James and Antoine Hunter, performed by Antoine Hunter.
A Black woman and an Asian woman look at him, offering a non-W hite-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 vi-
sual patterns of skyscrapers and neoclassical facades against the grid of power-
lines 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 con-
trolled 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
Figure 26. In this video still, a dancer lies on the pavement, tucked against the walls of a
building. In front of him is a paper soda cup. Make Me Wanna Holler (2018).
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 exploita-
tion: 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 rhyth-
mic 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 differ-
ence 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, aes-
thetic products, and forms of organizing. Crip time can also refer to the tem-
poralities 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 observa-
tion, 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 con-
nectedness 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 offer-
ing 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 shape-
shifting 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 fu-
ture, 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.
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University of Minnesota Press

Book Title: Eco Soma

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Crip Time, Rhythms,

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Into Fantasy: Expressive Objects in Turtle Disco

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human and nonhuman partners to heal these places, building networks,

maybe someone is reaching out to me, or there’s a foot in my trajectory. At this

many puppets were animal/human hybrids, including a fish and a caterpil-

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Nonrealist Embodiment: Playing Monsters

I live by a different time to you.

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worlds might read like a comment on Autism Speaks iconography of missing

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see a woman’s authentic experience, narrated in realist terms and conventional

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the connections between technological intervention, plants, and the surfaces

The effects of some psychoactive substances appear to be similar to those

Figure 22. Production photo, a figure (Yulia Arakelyan) in a forest, half-­submerged or

touches and adheres in tropes of transgression; there is embodied infusion

Three disabled dancers, in ground-­level locomotion without chairs, their un-

Sun Rhythms: Poetry’s Embodiment

This collection represents my efforts to sketch out a speculative poetics —­

but reflective. I hope to invite us to meditate more intelligently upon

The effect is of slowing, halting meditations, in tension with the forward-­leaning

Black Lives Matter: Protesting Death, Living Breath

litionist’s usurpation of a Black body’s suffering, shows how empathy “fails to

Performance, Witness, Hands Up: Michael Brown

Kedhar writes about the “hands-­up” gesture’s failure to be respected, to com-

If police formations and blockades in Ferguson are choreopolicing strate-

gesture has become a choreopolitical tactic of defiance. Demonstrators

This reading relies on recognition, on an understanding by the police that pro-

Look at her posture. She is balanced, powerful, upright and well-­grounded

This reads like an embodied (maybe even dancerly) description, informed by a

Breathing Street Rhythms: Eric and Erica Garner

our classrooms, many performance actions commemorated Garner’s struggle

Make Me Wanna Holler

to the particular temporalities that emerge out of disabled embodiment and

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Figure 22. Production photo, a figure (Yulia Arakelyan) in a forest, half-submerged or

Three disabled dancers, in ground-level locomotion without chairs, their un-

This collection represents my efforts to sketch out a speculative poetics —

The effect is of slowing, halting meditations, in tension with the forward-leaning

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Look at her posture. She is balanced, powerful, upright and well-grounded