Director and autistic artist Alexis Riley and disabled dance filmmaker Kym McDaniel invite disabled and non-disabled artists to a personalized digital portrait session customized around your stims or repetitive movements. You will receive a copy of your digital portrait and can also contribute your footage to the In Search of Lost Stims film, which will premiere at the Center for Mad Culture (Chicago, IL) in March 2028.

This drop-in event invites artists to join Riley and McDaniel for 15-minute filming periods. Participants will be directed by Riley through conversation and movement improvisation scores to create these short, video portraits.

Everyone is welcome, including autistic/neurodivergent, mad/mentally ill, disabled people, and allies. 

ABOUT IN SEARCH OF LOST STIMS

In Search of Lost Stims is a community-created disability dance film that moves and moves with disabled bodyminds beyond medicalization.

Throughout, we explore stims: repetitive bodily motions such as rocking, flapping, or spinning, often associated with autism and neurodivergence. Stimming is a form of crip wisdom; our stims can express joy, create pleasure, and foster regulation. Even so, stimming is routinely medicalized in public spaces, interpreted as anti-social, disruptive, or threatening—particularly when those stims are enacted by trans, queer, and negatively racialized people. In order to survive these conditions, we often learn to suppress our stims, severing our relationship to our bodyminds and our communities.

In response, our project embarks on a search for our lost stims through engagement with disability dance.

Our film activates this divergence by weaving footage of contemporary disabled people stimming with images of midcentury dance writing authored by people held at Oregon State Hospital. These authors record how “dancers swung and swayed in the evening breeze,” imbuing their writing with a kind of rhythmic sensibility reminiscent of a stim. By taking up this rhythmic sensibility, our final film aims to both activate a deeper lineage of disability cultural movement practices—and make that lineage available in the present.

ABOUT ALEXIS

Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white disabled/autistic psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary performance artist from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). Her written and performance-based projects investigate how people who identify as mad, neurodivergent, and/or disabled experience and use their bodies—and how those bodily practices can point us toward more supportive and sustainable ways of being.

Their work activates these ways of being through participatory and community-created performance events that blend disability culture, creative movement, and improvisation to celebrate the wisdom of divergent bodies. This work has been presented nationally and internationally at the Center for Mad Culture (Chicago, IL), the Cohen New Works Festival (Austin, TX) and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Edinburgh, UK), as well as at numerous universities. Critics have described these performances as “revolutionary,” and “theatre of the future.”

A 2021 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow and recipient of a 2023 President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in theatre and drama, Alexis is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also offers courses in the Disability Studies Minor. To learn more, visit www.madmoves.org 

ABOUT KYM MCDANIEL

This event is presented in partnership with Calling Up Justice and The Network of Ensemble Theaters.