Book Review: Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, Petra Kuppers

Abstract

This book review considers Petra Kuppers’s (2022) most recent book, Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters. In this accessible text, Kuppers describes a method, eco soma, for ethical, relational being with the world, each other, and ourselves. Like dance, water, and bodies, the eco soma method is unfixed and calls for audience engagement, grounded in somatics, performance art, and disability culture. Working to take eco soma and this book’s arrangement to heart and practice, this review considers lineages and provides glimpses of the encounters described within, which are woven with experiences and myriad theoretical tentacles. It concludes by echoing Kuppers’s call for un/bounding disciplines.