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Stephanie Heit: Sensorial Gardens
April 1, 2023 @ 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm MDT
Join poet and dancer Stephanie Heit for a workshop of sensate play at Surel’s Place. We will explore our inner and outer landscapes (including outdoors, weather permitting) through guided awareness exercises to hone our senses, to bring attention to our bodily sensations, and to observe what we notice. Stephanie will offer creative prompts with options to respond in drawing, writing, and/or movement. There will be space to share our responses and experiences. We’ll collaborate as a group to create support, cultivate pleasure, and tend ourselves and the environment around us. Stephanie will share some examples of her own work created using this process.
No experience necessary, everyone welcome, wheelchair accessible space.
Stephanie HeitMarch - April
A queer poet, dancer, and teacher, Ms. Heit engages with her Ypsilanti, Mich., community and beyond through a disability performance collective, a literary organization for disabled poets, and the somatic writing space she runs with her wife, Petra Kuppers, a 2017 Surel’s Place artist-in-residence in poetry. Her first poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System), was a Nighboat Poetry Prize finalist and explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference. Her second, Psych Murders, is scheduled for publication in fall 2022 by Wayne State University Press. Her work has appeared in journals including Sonora Review, Ecotone, Venti Journal, Rogue Agent, About Place, Anomaly, Bombay Gin, Dunes Review, Typo, and Disability Studies Quarterly.
During her residency, Heit led a workshop on the exploration of our inner and outer landscapes through guided awareness exercises to hone senses and bring attention to bodily sensations. Heit offered creative prompts with options to respond in drawing, writing, and/or movement.
With its location along the river, the Surel's Place residency offered Heit unique support for her continued work on her manuscript Every Horizon Turns Liquid. As an ecopoetic exploration where water is at stake amidst climate change and evolutionary rigors, this residency supported and fostered play and environmental inquiries budding in the piece. The work began along the shorelines of Lake Michigan, documenting through somatic engagement the effects of Lake Michigan’s changing water levels, and now expands to include our environs along with other real and imaginary locations. Heit worked outdoors, utilizing movement and awareness exercises combined with writing to engage with place. She invited the environment to inform her work process and product through dialogue and somatic exchange with the landscapes she visited. These exercises combined with scientific research resulted in the work presented during her reading event.