Transmuting Trauma and ‘Alchemiz[ing] Inherited Wounds’: iele paloumpis’s disabled, diasporic choreographies of care

Abstract

In the programme notes for the premiere of In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky at Danspace Project in May 2022, choreographer iele paloumpis asks, ‘What vitality allowed our ancestors to survive generations of trauma, and what wisdoms have been passed down to us?’ Moving with and through grief surrounding various connected histories of violence, paloumpis and collaborators simultaneously find modes of tuning into various connected histories of resilience. This essay explores how paloumpis and collaborators collectively tap into disability and diaspora to transform intergenerational trauma into knowledge, power and more livable forms of relationality. Through overlapping practices of textile weaving, interdisciplinary somatic practices, audio description and sculpture, the piece enacts multisensorial choreographies of care that allow for alchemical grief processes to unfold between human performers themselves, between performers and non-human materials, and between performers and audience members.

Approaching choreographic practices as care practices and care practices as choreographic practices, I use the phrase ‘choreographies of care' to refer to disabled, diasporic relationalities in performance. My engagement with these relationalities takes cues from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's conceptions of ‘care webs' (2018), Édouard Glissant's theories of ‘Relation' and ‘opacity' (1997) and Alice Sheppard's discussions of care as an ‘anchor point' of disability culture in performance contexts (2021). A certified end-of-life doula and grief worker, paloumpis carves out room for shared mourning on their own terms through a process of what they call ‘alchemiz[ing] inherited wounds into collective care’ (2022b). In this article, I will attend to some of the ways in which paloumpis and collaborators move through this alchemical transmutation of trauma by weaving across differing but connected experiences of disability, chronic illness and diaspora.

Notes

1 On their website and in performance programmes, Danspace Project (located at Saint Mark’s Churchin-the-Bowery) offers a Land Acknowledgment and Site Acknowledgment that note that ‘it is reasonable to assume that this building where we are when we stand, sit, dance, and some still worship, was built by enslaved individuals on what is the homeland of the Lenape people’.

2 Scholar and musician Panayotis League draws an important distinction between the collaborative, relatively gender-inclusive Anatolian Greek zeibekiko and the zeibekiko in other Greek communities, ‘where it is considered an aggressive, solitary, and even antisocial dance’ (2019: 404).

3 Recent examples include but are not at all limited to ‘Audio Description for Dance with Krishna Washburn and Kayla Hamilton’, hosted by Art Spark Texas on 3 August 2023; Alejandra Ospina and Krishna Washburn’s Audio Description workshops hosted by Movement Research in autumn 2022 and summer 2023; Christopher ‘Unpezverde’ Núñez’s collaborative audio description practice with Marielys Burgos Meléndez in The Square: Displacement with no end at Abrons Arts Center in March 2023; Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley’s discussions surrounding audio description in Crip Movement Lab, hosted by Movement Research in January 2023; Krishna Washburn and Heather Shaw’s documentary screendance film, Telephone, which premiered in December 2022; and many more.

4 Some of my recent work exploring disability and relationality includes Bird bones/40th Annual Loon Count (Bearnstow, July 2023); QuickDASH Outcome Measure (The Brick, August 2022); Bird bones/‘‘You need some impact in there’’ (The Croft, July 2022); Open Reduction Internal Fixation (Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 2020–2); and my dissertation-in-progress at the CUNY Graduate Center.

5 League describes i Megali Katastrofi, or the Great Catastrophe, as ‘the death and expulsion from Anatolia of roughly 1.5 million Orthodox Christians following Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922’ (2021: 1).

6 In a phone conversation with paloumpis in March 2023, they described a portion of Act II as the ‘re-mapping score’, wherein the Core Cast remembers and ‘remembers’ scores they have already enacted in the piece, activities that they have performed earlier that day (‘or whenever’), or moments throughout the almost-five-yearlong development of the project.

7 Another moment in the performance that serves as a reminder of the Armenian Genocide and its direct connections with i Megali Katastrofi is when System of a Down’s ‘Holy Mountains’ plays leading up to the intermission.