In this videopoem, two humans and a tree dance, feel, see and explore together in Leadville, Colorado, a 10,000-foot-high city and Superfund site surrounded by high piles of mining waste that sit upon the water supply.

This video emerged out of a crip drift, a sensing/being/in space, in a psychogeographical exploration. Crip drifts are methods for moving through the world as disabled artists living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing in a world that is likewise disabled, compromised, thriving in complexity, shifting in the slow timeframes of remediation and toxin transformation. Stephanie, a mad activist, electro-shock survivor, poet and dancer, and Petra, a scooter user living with chronic pain, used gentle, accessible dance and poetry to explore the city of Leadville in Colorado. They danced with mining equipment outside the National Mining Hall of Fame, with closed-down mining entrances, and near the turquoise acidic tailing ponds of Climax, a giant molybdenum mine in the mountains. They use the touch/view chiasm of video to record this dance with an aspen tree.

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Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (UoMinnesota Press, 2022, open access). She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently at work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026).

Credits: movers/feelers Petra Kuppers, Stephanie Heit, and an aspen tree; poem/edit by Petra Kuppers with quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, 1964; Turtle Disco, 2024