Access Praxis | Rachel Singer

About the Event

Access Praxis is an annual collaboration between the MCA and Bodies of Work, a Chicago consortium of arts organizations that focus on disability art and culture. At this event, disabled artist and occupational therapy practitioner Rachel Singer leads a conversation and collaborative workshop on the art of puppetry across experiences and practices.

Access Information

CART captioning is provided at this event. To request additional accessibility services, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.

About the Artist

Rachel Singer (she/her/hers) is a disabled, multidisciplinary artist, teaching artist, and certified occupational therapy assistant. Her practices center around the idea that we are all practitioners of being and becoming; we are all the experts in our own lives. Singer’s work in puppetry, sensory theater, devised theater, ritual, and dance explores the liminal places of barely tangible worlds where memory meets imagination. Her art often reflects her lived experience of extreme muscle fatigue and energy fatigue due to neuroinvasive West Nile virus. Living in a society that moves at an inhumane pace, she envisions a culture that slows down to reclaim time. She endeavors to live deeply inside of the rhythms, seasons, and cycles of body and earth. Much of her creative practice is influenced by liberatory practices, Jewish mysticism, nature, community, and her experience being disabled. Singer’s work is driven by collaboration and collective liberation, to open more opportunities for cross-pollination, across experiences and disciplines to enhance clinical and creative practices in the arts, care, healthcare, and disability culture.

In 2024, as a 3Arts/Bodies of Work Artist-in-Residence, Singer merged her work in the arts with her work in occupational therapy and disability culture. She developed a new puppetry and sensory theater workshop called Practitioners of Being and Becoming, to bring together community to collaborate across disciplines and experiences exploring ideas of interconnection and disability culture. From her work in this residency and Puppet Lab Chicago (2022–23), she continues to develop a show called Eve of a Great Remembering. In the latest iteration of her show, artist and friend Genevieve Ramos joins Singer on stage to explore stories of their ancestors, cultures, and experiences with disability. Through dance, shadow, and tabletop puppetry they travel in place as they traverse isolation and connection, past and present, greed and abundance. When society moves at a pace that many are unable to keep up with, a message is sent that individuals are broken. Perhaps the origin of brokenness emanates from humanity as a collective, perhaps the world is sick. Embarking on this journey, shifting into a political/relational model of disability, Singer, Ramos, the cast, and audience collectively reclaim community, purpose, self-determination, interconnection, and almost forgotten memories.