Queer Spiritual Drifting

Abstract

This essay charts travels to Belgium and the Netherlands as part of an Olimpias disability performance exploration of queer spiritual asylum spaces. This exploratory journey was an aspect of the wider Asylum Project: a multi-year exploration of sanctuary, edge space and communal wellbeing, led by queer disabled artists using disability culture methodologies. In this travelogue, the writer engages in score-composing in the shadows of old beguinages, women’s spiritual communities. Along the way, travelling wheels encounter environment, attitude, and emotion as well as durational aspects of pain and pleasure. The project’s focus got redirected: sites took over, and the enquiry shifted under pressure. This essay charts a performance travelogue of halts, stops and unsuspected stitching.

Notes

1 The Olimpias is an artists’ collective, founded in 1996 in Wales during work with mental health system survivors, with artistic director Petra Kuppers. Associates come from across the world, with a current US centre. We create collaborative, research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. In these environments, we can explore pride and pain, attention and the transformatory power of touch. The Olimpias is disability-led, and non-disabled allies are always welcome. Many of the Olimpias’ performance research working methods are collected in Disability Culture and Community Performance (Kuppers 2013).

2 For accounts of other parts of the Asylum Project, see Kuppers et al. 2016 (on work at Bethlem Royal Hospital, UK, i.e. the original Bedlam), Kuppers 2018a (on work in an old convent and an abandoned bank and church in Detroit, Michigan) and Kuppers 2018b (on working in abandoned mental asylums in Michigan and Belgium). The part discussed here, on finding spiritual queer community, was my personal part of the project, supported by Stephanie. Other aspects, more community performance orientated, were co-led by both of us.