Reviewed by:

• Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters by Petra Kuppers
• Jose Miguel Esteban

More than a mere theoretical engagement with somatic performance, Petra Kuppers’ Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters offers readers a disability-inflected methodological move toward decolonial and liberatory forms of [End Page 378] embodied study. Through my repeated attempts to define the “encounter zone” that Kuppers terms eco soma (1), I have come to recognize that the slipperiness of attaching any singular understanding to her method/theory—an embodied practice of being-in-the-world—lies at the heart of this work. Eco soma at once becomes a tangible method and an illegible series of practices through which Kuppers provokes us to join in an improvisational task of ethical imagining: “My task in this book is to unsettle myself, embrace my unstable way of being in the world and in academia, and prepare and offer nourishment, a place to be, breathe, and sense into connections” (3). Offering prompts, questions, and invitations to feel into our present embodiments, Eco Soma choreographs us into a doing of somatic performance guided by Kuppers’ own reflective practice of writing from and through the body.

Throughout Eco Soma, Kuppers shares reflections of witnessing, and thus her participation in, performances that inhabit the hauntings of being made other through the perspectives of disabled, Black, Indigenous, queer, and racialized artists. Through her writing, she reencounters and shares them with a tenderness and a critical care that has been nurtured through “a political aesthetics of access” (30). Beyond merely analyzing these performances through academic and artistic critique, Kuppers calls on us to engage in an ethic of relationality as we, too, become witnesses. Further drawing on practices nurtured through her many experiences of artistic and activist performance in disability arts and culture communities, eco soma becomes a sensual pedagogy of inhabiting the gap(s) between self and world(s).

The space of the gap is made to appear in all its radical possibility through its invocation in the very title of the book: Eco [gap] Soma. Kuppers’ emphasis of the space between “eco” and “soma” offers the possibility of moving beyond the term “ecosomatics” and its “undertones of neoliberal self-care, of White settler appropriation of Indigenous practices, a bit New Agey, a bit old ritual” (1). Moreover, she models a phenomenological practice of deep reading through speculative drifting, calling on us to return to what has been made singular and easily knowable so that we might sense into the curiosity and “the dis/comfort of being with otherness” (20). She reveals the gaps between eco and soma, between self and environment, not to create separation, but rather to pursue the connections that we can so easily take for granted. Encountering these gaps, I find myself being pulled into and held by the “tendrils and tentacles and entanglements” through which we contemplate precarious dances of understanding our embodied being (with) others in contested space (14).

We enter the gap as a physical space of distance. Kuppers calls us into the gap as a space for navigating the relationality of distance—a distance we confront through our encounters with archival videos and images of past performances, as well as through epistemological gaps between settler and Indigenous ways of knowing. She shares an image of a performance by the Ghost Net Art Project, a community collaboration between Indigenous and non-indigenous artists in Australia, by inviting us to participate in a disability culture practice of audio description (91–92). Providing us access to the multisensorial registers of an image, she further adds an eco soma twist by reflecting on the multiplicity of connections to water, to land, to climate, to non/beings, to objects, to flesh, to myth—to the conflicting stories through which we negotiate the Indigenous-settler relations that are released within different descriptions of the work.

We enter the gap as a temporal space of remembrance. Kuppers pulls us into the gap as a space of commemoration. She leads us into the cavernous...

审阅者：

• 《Eco Soma：投机表演遭遇中的痛苦与欢乐》佩特拉·库珀斯 (Petra Kuppers)
• 何塞·米格尔·埃斯特班

佩特拉·库珀斯（Petra Kuppers）的《生态躯体：思辨表演遭遇中的痛苦与欢乐》不仅仅是对躯体表演的理论参与，它为读者提供了一种残疾影响的方法论，走向非殖民和解放形式的[结束第378页]具体研究。通过我反复尝试定义库珀斯所说的“生态体”（eco soma） “相遇区”（1），我逐渐认识到，将任何单一的理解附加到她的方法/理论上是很不稳定的——一种存在于世界的具体实践——这是这项工作的核心。生态躯体立刻成为一种有形的方法和一系列难以辨认的实践，库珀斯通过它激发我们参与伦理想象的即兴任务：“我在这本书中的任务是让自己不安，拥抱我在世界上不稳定的存在方式，在学术界，准备并提供营养，一个可以存在、呼吸和感知联系的地方”（3）。Eco Soma提供提示、问题和邀请，让我们感受我们当前的身体，在库珀斯自己从身体和通过身体书写的反思实践的指导下，将我们编排成一种身体表演。

在《Eco Soma》中，库珀斯分享了她对目睹以及参与表演的反思，这些表演通过残疾人、黑人、土著、酷儿和种族化艺术家的视角，呈现出一种令人难以忘怀的“异类”。通过她的写作，她以一种通过“访问的政治美学”所培养的温柔和批判性关怀重新遇到并分享了他们（30）。除了通过学术和艺术批评来分析这些表演之外，库珀斯还呼吁我们在成为见证者时遵守相关性伦理。进一步借鉴她在残疾艺术和文化社区的许多艺术和活动表演经验中培养的实践，生态躯体成为一种居住在自我与世界之间差距的感官教育学。

通过书名中的调用，间隙的空间以其所有激进的可能性显现出来：Eco [gap] Soma。库珀斯对“生态”和“身体”之间的空间的强调提供了超越“生态学”一词及其“新自由主义自我保健、白人定居者对原住民实践的挪用的底蕴，有点新时代，有点”的可能性。古老的仪式”（1）。此外，她通过思辨漂流塑造了一种深度阅读的现象学实践，呼吁我们回到那些已经变得独特且容易理解的事物，以便我们能够感受到好奇心和“与他人相处的不适/不适”（20） 。她揭示了生态与躯体之间、自我与环境之间的差距，不是为了制造分离，而是为了追求我们很容易认为理所当然的联系。遇到这些差距，我发现自己被“卷须、触角和纠缠”拉扯和抓住，通过这些“卷须、触手和纠缠”，我们思考在有争议的空间中理解我们（与）他人的具体存在的不稳定舞蹈（14）。

我们进入间隙作为距离的物理空间。库珀斯让我们进入这个间隙，作为一个导航距离关系的空间——我们通过接触档案视频和过去表演的图像，以及通过定居者和土著认知方式之间的认识论差距来面对这种距离。她分享了鬼网艺术项目的表演图片，该项目是澳大利亚土著和非土著艺术家之间的社区合作项目，邀请我们参加音频描述的残疾人文化实践（91-92）。她为我们提供了对图像的多感官记录的访问，通过反思与水、土地、气候、非/存在、物体、肉体、神话——与我们通过相互冲突的故事来协商土著居民与定居者的关系，这些故事在不同的作品描述中被释放。

我们进入这个间隙作为记忆的时间空间。库珀斯把我们拉进这个缺口作为纪念空间。她带领我们进入了洞穴……