Welcome to Turtle Disco
Turtle Disco is a somatic writing studio in our repurposed living room on Three Fires Confederacy territory in the College Heights neighborhood of Ypsilanti, Michigan. We, Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit, started Turtle Disco in 2017 as part of our art/life practices, to cultivate disability culture experimentation, creative self-care, communal inquiry, connection, and awareness. We aim to provide a welcoming and supportive environment, grounded in a crip/mad/queer led ethos. We offer movement and writing sessions for local folx, as part of a small experiment in art friendship, community building, and ecological sustainability. The space is wheelchair accessible.
Turtle Disco Zoomshell launched in 2020 in response to lockdown and the worldwide Covid pandemic. We began experimenting with zoom offerings to continue to connect with our regular turtles and new friends. Turtle Disco Zoomshell offers a medium to reach out to be with each other in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, to create a space for the complex range of feelings and experiences within our predominantly disabled and queer community, and to offer vehicles for creative expression and play.
Photo of participants in Marc Arthur's workshop as part of the EcoMonsters and Somatic Takeovers Symposium, 2021
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Welcome to Turtle Disco’s eighth year!
Since fall 2023, in addition to our virtual zoomshell classes, we are offering some in person events at the physical Turtle Disco. Outside if weather permits, masks welcome. We acknowledge and are navigating the complexity of in person events during the ongoing pandemic and as a disability culture space. These in person events are small and are an experiment, with awareness that both virtual and in person events have edges to what they can and cannot hold. Turtle Disco works to be mindful of access.
Turtle Disco Offerings
Disability Arts & Culture Gathering [in person] October 31-November 3, 2024
Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Turtle Disco, and Riverside Arts Center, Michigan
Find all the info here: https://www.petrakuppers.com/disability-arts-and-culture-gathering-2024
All public events either outdoors or masked, free
Join us for a weekend of disability culture arts-based research and community building, centered on twin inquiries of environmental and interspecies gentleness, and on mad memory and archival intermedial/technological play.
Registration
For general Turtle Disco queries and to register for an in person class or to receive the zoom link for a zoomshell offering, send a note to Petra: petra@umich.edu Please note that drop-ins are welcome for zoomshell classes but registration is required for in person classes. For specific questions for Stephanie: stephanieheit@gmail.com
Turtle Disco Course Offerings
Please reference the schedule above for all the specifics.
Zoomshell Connection with Turtle Disco Kaffeeklatsch [zoomshell]
Join us to connect, check-in, and exchange about our creative lives during viral times. Low-key community space with a small group. Just email us if you’d like to join, and we’ll send you the link and password. Meetings are no longer than one hour and are free. These were started in the early days of the quarantine and continue to be a harbor for tender creative exchange.
Crip Magic: Reading/Writing Workshop with Stephanie & Petra [zoomshell]
In these generative writing sessions, we will read one or two contemporary poems together, discuss them, and then engage in writing, led by prompts provided by Stephanie and Petra. This is not a sharing or feedback-driven workshop: it’s a place to immerse ourselves in craft in connection with social justice discourses, and to get to writing (disability-led, but not exclusive to disability topics or disabled writers).
Starship Somatics with Petra Kuppers [zoomshell]
Starship Somatics engage our bodymindspirits as portals, as trancemobiles that honor pasts and jet us toward speculative futures, among the stars, in flux and transformation. Our classes will use improvised movement (inner and outer movement, as is accessible and appropriate to you), dream journeys, sounding, writing, and drawing as our transportation devices: firmly grounded in the sensory immediacy of our beds, sofas, floors and windows, and flying wide to honor ways of being of all kinds. All welcome, grounded in disability culture values.
Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice with Stephanie Heit [in person]
In this practice, we will create a laboratory of delight: move together and apart in improvisational play, awaken the senses through freewrites, witness the breath in meditation, tend to self and community. Join us to cultivate creative self-care, communal and individual inquiries, and an embodied, moving writing experience. This can be a rich training ground for touching into and being with the unknown, a useful skill for these uncertain times.
Contemplative Dance & Writing Practice is based on and adapted from Contemplative Dance Practice created and developed at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado by Barbara Dilley, who I had the pleasure to study with for many years. I honor this lineage and appreciate her invitation to adjust this “dancer’s meditation hall” to make it a living, changing thing to meet the moment.
No experience necessary, all bodyminds welcome, disability culture friendly. Bring writing/art materials you desire (journal, pen, colored pencils, etc.). Dress in layers to support movement and stillness. Cushions available.
Sonic Gardens ~ Gong Bath Writing with Stephanie Heit [in person]
Vibrate your intentions, dreams, queries, creative desires with the healing power of the gong combined with writing invitations. This practice involves people resting in whatever positions or movements are comfortable while Stephanie activates the gong, alternated with writing/drawing sessions. Join us for a relaxing practice in community. Stay for tea afterwards, if you wish.
No swimsuit needed or external water involved. Bring writing/art materials you desire (journal, pen, colored pencils, etc.). Blankets, yoga mats, cushions available, but feel free to bring your own or whatever you need to create a nest and be comfy.
Queer Dreaming with Petra Kuppers [in person]
The Turtle Disco women began this series on the anniversary of the Pulse tragedy, as a way to connect ourselves to wider webs of memory and love. Dreamers engage in a 20 minute journey, followed by open writing time. The practice is queer-led, seeks new kin and new responsibilities, and honors many different cultural pathways to lucid/shamanic dreaming (we do not engage in Indigenous appropriation).
No experience necessary, all bodyminds welcome, disability culture friendly.
Sensorial Gardens with Stephanie Heit [zoomshell]
How can we transform a zoom practice into a container garden to hold us for an hour of sensate play? No need to be glued to the screen, an offering to support us to inhabit, tend, and find pleasure in our many locations. Experiment with how different inputs (sound, touch, memory, smell, language, gestures) engage with your sensorium through invitations you can customize to your bodymind and space (inside/outside).
A note on payment
Turtle Disco operates on a social justice payment exchange. We are able to provide most of our offerings for free, especially those facilitated by Petra as she already has a regular salary as a professor at University of Michigan. Stephanie’s offerings are by suggested donation with the option of free as well. She is dedicated to economic access balanced with her personal economic situation as a disabled person not conventionally employed whose income is social security disability. All donations are appreciated.
Venmo: @Stephanie-Heit or contact her for her address if you’d prefer to send a check.
A note on accessibility
Turtle Disco is a wheelchair accessible space. We have free street parking as well as space available in our driveway for anyone who would benefit from a close parking space. We are also near a local bus route. Please be mindful to avoid bringing perfumes and strong scents into the space. Also, please note we have dogs. Trudi and Sammy are shihtzu-poodle mixes, non-shedding and hypo-allergenic but just an fyi for those with allergies. Covid info: Masks welcome. Air purifier used in space. If you are sick or experiencing symptoms, please do not come.
Turtle Disco Zoomshell: Zoom presents many access benefits as well as challenges, many of which we are unable to mitigate at this time (ASL, live remote captioning). Turtle Disco originates from a disability culture framework, and we want to acknowledge the current limits of our access provisions. We will provide audio description and pdfs of any written materials, if requested.
Please feel welcome to contact us with any access questions or requests for the physical space and the zoomshell.
A note on the directors
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and community performance artist. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an artist collective, and travels internationally to co-create disability culture worlds. She engages community participants in gentle experimental process work, and dances in women’s centers, hospices, mental health self-help groups, with youth groups, with traditional Weavers and Knitters Guilds, politicians, people labeled as ‘developmentally disabled’, cancer survivors, in National Parks, abandoned buildings, swimming pools, forests, on the beach. In these art journeys, participants use touch, mark-making, sculptural attention to material and space, sound art, installation, writing, and live presence. Petra teaches at the University of Michigan, and is faculty on the Low-Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her academic work focuses on arts-based methods, embodiment/enmindment, and disability culture. Her creative writing engages feminist experimental poetics, and speculative queer/crip fiction.
Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, teacher, and author of the hybrid memoir poem PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State, 2022) and poetry collection The Color She Gave Gravity (OS, 2017). She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Stephanie has taught poetry as a mental health worker, taught English in Chile with the United Nations, had a healing arts practice as a licensed massage therapist, and more recently, become a master rain gardener. Her art and life practices are embedded in her love of movement, water, language, the body, different ways of being, and collaboration. Her lifelong love of dance and poetry shapes her offerings along with her training in contemplative and somatic awareness practices at Buddhist-inspired Naropa University. As a queer woman with mental health difference, she creates a welcoming and supportive space that includes people with diverse gender expressions and bodymind experiences. In her classes she offers multiple modes of engagement and invites you to delight in the movement and stillness of your body, mind, and spirit.
Meet the Turtle Disco Dogs
Writing from the Turtle Disco Zoomshell: Free Downloads
Pandemic Artifacts / / from the Zoomshell
a Turtle Disco Disability Culture Production
Gift PDF: Turtle Disco Pandemic Artifacts from the Zoomshell
We are delighted to share with you this collection that witnesses the pandemic through art and writing created during Turtle Disco Zoomshell offerings. Edited by Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit, featuring work by Samar Abulhassan, Marc Arthur, Roxanna Bennett, Beth Currans, Sarah Dean, Jose Miguel Esteban, Elena SV Flys, Raven Kame’enui-Becker, Megan Kaminski, Victoria Lee Khatoon, Denise Leto, Naomi Ortiz, Hannah Soyer, Chanika Svetvilas, and Tracy Veck.
Turtle Disco is dedicated to access; you will find image descriptions with all the art work. These pieces emerged out of community arts practice and are intended to be experienced and enjoyed in the community, freely and widely. Please share this pdf at leisure, being mindful to keep artist credits intact.
Gift PDF: “Online Intimacies and Artful Life in Turtle Disco Zoomshells”
Learn about the lineage and origins of Turtle Disco and the rich engagement of Turtle Disco zoomshell in this chapter by Petra Kuppers in the book Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (Routledge, 2022).