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.