The Olimpias present: Planting Disabled Futures: Public Performances 

February 16th - 17th, 2026

Please join the artistic research collective The Olimpias (artist statement) for part one of this two-day presentation of Planting Disabled Futures (part two).

Planting Disabled Futures explores virtual reality (VR) technologies with fellow disabled choreographers/film-makers/dancers, to ask questions about access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play. They play with VR techniques in community performance settings to create an immersive experience that offers disabled and non-disabled audiences opportunities to move with disabled dance artists and visualizations of future plants, engaging communally in delicious movement rituals. The focus of the project is on enjoyment and enrichment, with collaborative debugging, aesthetic access, and tech/life integration as tools toward the playful immersive community potential of VR.

This project aims to comprehend VR’s affordances and their gendered, racialized, classed and ableist histories, to come up with new models, and to imagine them playfully and critically in a just world and in interaction with many different people. 

In the development of the Virtual Reality (VR) components of the project, we ask: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?

February 16th (Monday) 1:30 - 2:30 PM (Allesee Studio Theatre, Old Main, 3rd floor)

Join The College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts (CFPCA) and Theatre and Dance at Wayne for this special Public Performance of Planting Disabled Futures with Projections, Dream Journey and Sharing Ritual.

February 17th (Tuesday) 2:30 - 3:30 (Center for Gender and Sexuality, Student Center, 6th floor)

Join Petra Kuppers, Artistic Director of The Olimpias, for a Crip Drift “house party.” Crip Drifts are methods for moving through the world as disabled people living with pain: touching, being-with, sensing in a world that is likewise disabled, compromised, thriving in complexity.

This event is designed as a low-key hang-out taking place in a supportive environment. We will go on a dream journey and move meditatively, respectfully, and playfully in response to the Center space, the air, ground and land that surrounds and supports us. No experience is necessary; all are welcome. You are welcome to participate or to witness.

This event will be followed by a Q&A reception with Petra Kuppers until 4:30pm.

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Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, writer, dance video maker and community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses somatics, performance, speculative writing, visual arts and media to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.

She teaches at the University of Michigan as the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture.

She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s (first in her native Germany, then in Wales, UK; Aotearoa/New Zealand; and since 2001 in the US). She continues to lead workshops internationally, in these forms as well as in disability-culture adapted social somatics. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Three Fires Confederacy Territory, colonially known as Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

Multiple Access Modes provided: please let us know of any specific access needs in advance of the event you wish to attend. All events are Wheelchair accessible.

Presented by The Olimpias, director: Petra Kuppers, dramaturg: Alexis Riley, access doula: Stephanie Heit. The Planting Disabled Futures Project is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and Democracy Fund.
 

Co-Sponsored by The College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts (CFPCA), Theatre and Dance at Wayne, and the Center for Gender and Sexuality (CGS).