Site-specific dance in and by Northern Michigan lakes brings Petra Kuppers experientially into a different relation to environmental materiality. Autoethnographic method merges with an attention to the materiality of art practice and the difference dance makes. It beckons: let’s merge. Dancing bodyminds in space, in change, in time. Disability, precarity, economy, indigenous and settler history. Breathe in and out with the pull of edge land, the beach, the calmness of Michigan summer lakes.

After a pilgrims’ walk in Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa, on the anniversary of the deadly quakes, A Different Light Theatre Company, comprised of people deemed to have cognitive difference, creates their own small public intervention: a Christchurch masquerade.

Disability is highly visible in contemporary performance festivals and art venues. Traveling from the disability performance ensemble work of Theater Hora and Jérôme Bel, to Javier Telléz's installation Artaud's Cave at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, and on to the Australian Back to Back Theatre's Ganesh versus the Third Reich at the Bodies of Work festival in Chicago raises the pressing questions: How and why is disability art and performance becoming so visible? And for whom?

Given the media frenzy over Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid, and the ensuing questions about the state of feminism, it seems a serendipitous moment to feature two pieces—written by the women who conceived and performed them—that offer very different but complementary takes on agency, identity, and the conflation of the public and private as one's body becomes the locus of the gaze. Petra Kuppers's dramaturgical meditation on her experiences as part of Tiresias , a disability culture performance project, investigates erotics, change, mythology, and identity. A collaboration between photographers, writers, and dancers, the project, occurring over six months in 2007, posits the body as the site at which myth might be reshaped and movement might become poetry. LiÁn Amaris critically analyzes her feminist public performance event Fashionably Late for the Relationship , which took place over three days in July 2007 on the Union Square traffic island in New York City. Informed by Judith Butler's citational production of gender, the piece focused on exposing and critiquing the marked visibility of gender construction and maintenance within an extreme performance paradigm.

How can the wheelchair be other than a placeholder for tragedy or negativity? Kuppers examines the wheelchair as a prop and as a playground of multiple intersecting narratives, desires, textures, and signs in Murderball , Guillermo GÓmez-Peña's Museum of Fetishized Identities , and the X-Men movies.