Theatre Journal

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...