Accessible Audiencing: Planting Disabled Futures (VR & Performance)
January 14–16, 2026
Disability Cultural Community Center
Hearst Field Annex D-25, Berkeley, CA 94720
Calling Up Justice is honored to provide Accessible Audiencing for Planting Disabled Futures, in collaboration with DJ1 Crip Reliance Hub and Disability Justice Culture Club.
As part of this collaboration, Claudia Alick is a featured dancer within the VR experience, contributing embodied movement and crip futurist presence to the project’s living, immersive world.
About the Project
Planting Disabled Futures is a queercrip intimacy installation inviting audiences into a multisensory environment of healing plants, plush critters, shared rituals, and virtual worlds shaped by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing.
Through live performance and virtual reality, the project explores crip joy, pain, care, and ongoingness—asking how technology can support non-extractive intimacy, energetic touch, and connection with plant elders in a time of climate emergency and ongoing COVID realities. Rather than fantasies of overcoming or disembodied mobility, this work centers disabled bodymwindspirits exactly as they are.
Public Events & Schedule
Wednesday, January 14 | 5:00–7:00 PM
Public Performance & Dream Journey
A shared performance featuring projections, collective witnessing, and a closing ritual. This event uses minimal VR and is designed as an open invitation into the world of Planting Disabled Futures, encouraging participants to return for deeper, more intimate VR experiences.
Thursday & Friday, January 15–16
Intimate VR “House Parties”
1.5-hour sign-up slots
Up to 6 participants per session
Each participant will have time inside the VR “tree world,” with multiple visual and audio options available. These sessions are designed as low-key, supportive hangouts—gentle, spacious, and relational.
One slot per person.
Access & Care
Multiple access modes are provided. All events are wheelchair accessible.
We invite participants to share access needs in advance so we can support your experience fully.
Accessible Audiencing with Calling Up Justice includes support for local attendees to attend a COVID safe house party
Project Credits
Presented by The Olimpias
Director: Petra Kuppers
Dramaturg: Alexis Riley
Access Doula: Stephanie Heit
Planting Disabled Futures is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, with funds from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and Democracy Fund.
Co-sponsored by the Othering & Belonging Disability Faculty Research Cluster and the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative (Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry), Entanglement Series.
Personal Reflection on Planting Disabled Futures
with Petra Kuppers & Lisa Wymore at UC Berkeley
Attending Petra Kuppers’ Planting Disabled Futures with Ray, and Jesenia was an overwhelmingly accessible, thoughtful, and soothing experience. From the Berkeley side, the accessibility was extraordinary: it’s already an accessible site designed for us by us. We were at the campus Disability Culture Center with truly accessible parking. Petra emailed clear directions, the event was free, there were multiple ways to engage with the work, and there was a clear sense that access was not an afterthought, but a central design principle. The engagement with the art felt soft, comforting, and invitational. It was not rushed. It was not extractive. It felt like being cared for while being invited into an artistic world.
Jesenia and I attended as part of our Disability Justice Culture Club collaborative work and Accessible Audiencing programming. We visited the space a day early to scout the route and confirm access services. We arranged guests to attend and offered travel subsidies as needed. This program allows us to attend work in community—and it gives us community to reflect on the art afterward, which enriches the experience.
Art That Refuses a Single Box
I am drawn to art that resists being put into a single category—maybe it’s my persistent demand for autonomy. Planting Disabled Futures does exactly that.
Is it a crip ritual? Yes.
Is it a dance experiment? Yes.
Is it an invitation to reflect on colonialism and how it has produced climate change and negative human impact? Yes.
Is it an opportunity to enjoy and be in relationship with nature? Yes.
Is it digital experimental art? Yes.
It is visual art. It is sound art. It is theater. It is ritual. It is environmental storytelling.
It is only a theatrical experience when you are inside it—and then again, maybe that’s not entirely true.
So much of my own work plays with presence and performance. I am constantly asking: What are the spaces where we can be together and have life exchange? But also: how do you negotiate loss of physical ability and safety challenges in shared physical space? What makes something theatrical—physical proximity, shared time, emotional exchange?
I’m obsessed with group audience experience: the unique affect that only happens when a group of people makes a thing together and experiences a thing together, live, in real time.
I don’t believe physical presence is always necessary, but physical embodiment must always be acknowledged. In this piece, my entry point was a live theatrical invitation into a VR digital experimental environment. That invitation mattered. It grounded the work in relational presence. And there was also a crip-time entry point: a video emailed to me after the performance. This is asynchronous group presencing.
A Different Show for Every Group
One of the things I loved most is that this is a different show for everyone who experiences it. You could take the same headset and bring a different circle of disabled people through it, and it would be a different play.
The world is designed as a forest without clear signage. There isn’t a map telling you, “Go here to see this piece.” That lack of signage invites play and discovery. It allows the world to feel large and not completely knowable.
If everything were labeled, I would immediately want to “complete” it—to see all 15 pieces. Petra told me it would be impossible (or at least very difficult) to experience everything, because some pieces are 20 minutes long. That is delightful. It resists productivity logic. It resists completionism. It lets the world remain bigger than me.
Being Outside, Being Held
We experienced the VR outside, with our feet in the grass. They made sure we had comfortable chairs and were close to bathrooms and everything we needed. It was the perfect spot to engage with this work. The access doulas anticipated needs and met them seamlessly.
The grass was a little muddy from the rain, and I found it slightly difficult to walk on with my cane. But it was also very cool to be in the grass and nature. I was grateful the experience was mostly seated, so I could be present without having to navigate unstable terrain too much.
The headset was wireless—not tethered to a computer—which made a huge difference for accessibility. I often find tethered VR extraordinarily inaccessible: standing on a platform, cords attached to a computer, navigating someone’s home setup. This was different. This was a standalone headset. We sat in chairs outside. The tech worked perfectly.
They also had different handsets. I shared that I prefer a wrist loop, since my hand will sometimes unexpectedly release what it’s holding. For others, that same loop can interfere with assistive devices. This project had both options. That kind of choice-based access matters.
As a Performer in the Piece
Seeing Petra in person is a big production for me. Going out into the world is always a big production now, because I’m very disabled. It requires more planning, more gear, more energy. It is a big deal—and also a fun, meaningful thing.
The invitation to spontaneously produce a piece of work while visiting on the pier was the most accessible way to include me as a performer. If we had tried to formally schedule a specific dance time and location, I don’t think it would have happened. This happened because capacity aligned, desire aligned, and nature was there.
I love living in the Bay Area because the nature is here. I don’t take that for granted. The fact that physical beauty is accessible to me in so many locations is a gift. It genuinely makes me feel better.
There is something deeply moving to me about performing a dance that lives inside a computer system and travels without my body. I have been losing physical capacity. I have been losing the ability to move the way I used to. This project archives my body in a state of being able to move. It sends my body across the country to encounter other audiences. It moves me—and allows me to move others.
My consciousness does not travel with it—it’s like a little clone of me, out in the world doing something cool. From a disability aesthetics perspective, this feels miraculous. It allows my body to do things it is finding difficult to do right now. That is a gift to me as a performer.
Access as Aesthetic and Practice
I initially did this WHY MASK engagement with Berkeley to guarantee a level of masking and safety for myself—and it turned out to be completely unnecessary, because Petra’s practice already had a deep COVID safety weave throughout. Both Lisa and Petra immediately said yes to the WHY MASK collaboration.
We made a special sign for the event with imagery of plants and cyber bodies dancing, with everyone masking. We also shared free masks as part of the display. This digital art project invites people in physical space to add themselves to the digital gallery—resisting necropolitics and affirming community health.
Sound, Captions, and Sensory Access
The captions inside VR were incredible. I loved them. Often in VR or video games, you get sound without language describing what the sound is. I need that information.
My brain is constantly processing multiple data streams: environmental sounds, nature sounds, body sounds, spoken language. I am always sitting in a wall of noise and plucking out what is salient.
The captions helped my brain make sense of the soundscape. Petra’s voice as a consistent through-line was also grounding. The printed language, audio descriptions, and visual descriptions supported wayfinding and sense-making.
There was an echolocation feature—like whales and bats locate—sending out a sound and following where it returns from. I didn’t fully grasp how to navigate successfully using it, though I’m told some users love it. For me, it was more of a video-game-like experience than a functional navigation tool. Since I live in a constant state of finding my way and being a little lost, it was fine. It was explained to me well, and that helped. I found the echolocation very fun, and I think I would learn to use it over time.
Tree Stories & Crip Memory
The tree stories shared in our circle were powerful. People shared memories of pomegranate trees, honeysuckle bushes, sitting and sipping sweetness as children. I shared my story of sitting on a rock and making music with grass—and the video Sun and I made learning from the redwoods.
I am constantly near plants. Touching plants. Thinking about plants. Organic systems teach me so much—and they make me happy. My brain is full of flowers, bushes, trees, mountains. Sometimes I will just stop next to a bush and think: yeah, that’s fucking nice. Three days ago I stood next to a bush with beautiful white flowers just so I could memorize it and carry it with me.
We talked about native oaks and redwoods that were moved inland through colonial ideas about what redwoods “mean.” We talked about how some of those redwoods struggle in inland Berkeley because they belong on the coast. These conversations braided ecology, colonialism, and memory.
Crip History, Loss, and Grief
There was also a moment of shared crip history—connections through Sins Invalid and overlapping lineages. These kinds of connections are often invisible, especially when relationships are mediated through computers. It was meaningful to have that history acknowledged in the room.
There was also space to acknowledge the loss of disabled leaders. On the drive home, my colleague and I reflected on how being disabled means constantly living in relationship with grief—grief for people, grief for capacities, grief for futures that shift.
The disabled community lives closer to death. I have lost many beloved colleagues and friends in the last five years. Climate change adds another layer of systemic grief: system collapse, mass death, billionaires refusing to change. These realities are always present.
Planting Disabled Futures held that grief gently. It did not deny it. It did not sensationalize it. It made room for it.
On “Futures”
A small personal quibble: while the piece was aesthetically and emotionally successful,I don’t think VR technology itself is the future. But moving disabled performers across the country through this technology—that is the future. Familiarizing ourselves with it, experimenting with it, letting people see what’s possible—that is future-making.
Good art always makes futures by expanding imagination. I imagine some people will experience this and think, oh, that’s what’s possible, and then make their own work. In that way, it is planting disabled futures.
I wish I had the capacity to experience it again. I am frustrated that my body limits how much I can do. I am also deeply grateful that I got to do this and the ideas that were planted in me.