Introducing Fall 2024 3Arts/Bodies of Work Artist in Residence Rachel Singer:
“We are all practitioners of being and becoming.”
Rachel Singer (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Jewish and disabled artist, blending and embodying the realms of puppetry, theater, dance, and occupational therapy. Singer’s practices are deeply rooted in breath, body awareness, and the principles of communication and interconnectedness. Her approach is holistic, weaving together embodied practices for connection.
Singer is a certified occupational therapy assistant, performer, designer and teaching artist. Rather than being disparate practices, she sees them as intertwined. Singer explained that occupational therapy, historically focused on client centered crafts and creative practices, has shifted towards a medical model, creating a lack of training, time and funding to facilitate deep and meaningful experiences through the arts. One of her goals through the 3Arts Bodies of Work (BOW) residency is hosting space for people to come together for collaboration and becoming.
One of Singer’s artistic mediums is puppetry, a craft she has been refining since 2007, and most recently in the Chicago Puppet Lab incubator and residency program with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, cohort of 2022-2023. Puppetry, she explains, is a collaborative process which in her work occurs through shared breath and presence. Rachel offered me a demonstration of her work, lighting up at the opportunity to show her process, describing it as she takes a brown piece of textured paper, an object, and endows it with life. Her face turns serene, as she turns a simple object into one that is life-like, playful and engaging. Her face on Zoom fades into the background, as her character takes attention.
“There’s this moment in puppetry where nothing becomes something, and it’s like magic,” she says, with childlike wonder, after retiring the character to an object once more. This process, to an outsider, does seem like true magic. It was astonishing by how quickly the person faded to favor the character, and how seamless Singer’s practice made the process.
Her BoW artistic project, planned for debut in late Fall 2024, is an evolving project that she hopes to continue developing. “I thought I was going to have to put this project on pause for longer.” The Bodies of Work fellowship enables Singer to bring all of herself to her artistry for the first time, instead of putting aside pieces of her identity to focus on a particular niche. Being a BoW fellow she gets to be everything she enjoys: being an artist and occupational therapy practitioner, exploring disability studies concepts as they occur in the academic world, engaging in disability culture, working with mentors and fellow artists, to further her commitment to access.
Singer’s commitment to accessibility is clear in how she engages in the artistic world in her work with children and people with disabilities. Recently, she has become involved with K’ilu, a sensory theater company founded by Jonathan Shmidt Chapman. This theater company focuses on creating immersive, sensory experiences for young audiences, and people with disabilities. The theater’s name means “as if” (you were there) in Hebrew, breathing out creativity and imagination from the onset. Singer is fascinated by the ways in which theater can be made more inclusive. The creation of theatrical spaces allowing for movement, touch, and sensory engagement captures her own imagination, eschewing the traditional expectation of sitting still and watching silently as she creates delights for all to enjoy.
By merging sensory theater, physical theater, puppetry and dance, Singer hopes to cultivate spaces where audiences and creators of all abilities can feel connected and engaged. In her work as a disabled teaching artist and occupational therapy practitioner, she is exploring techniques that enhance clinical and creative practices. For her, theater is not just a space for performance but also one for ritual, human connection and collaboration. The one thing we can expect, as the project develops, is that she will create a space that feels like you can connect, breathe, and remember the present through the natural world.
As she continues to develop her practice, Singer’s work is at the intersection of art, disability, and embodied experience, offering space to live, create, and connect. Through her dedication to art as both a personal and collective process, Singer is not only making space for herself but also for the broader community of artists and individuals whose voices often go unheard because, as she believes, “We are all practitioners of being and becoming.”
Amelia-Marie Altstadt, M.A. (they/she) is a PhD Student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a Pipeline to An Inclusive Faculty Fellow originally from San Diego, California (Kumeyaay land). They are researching disability culture, children of disabled adults (CODISA), higher education, and theatre. At UIC, they are the Chicago Coalition for Autistic and Neurodivergent Students (CANS) Coordinator, a teaching assistant for DHD 101: Disability in U.S. Society, and support projects by Bodies of Work. She is a proud hermana of Sigma Omega Nu (ΣΩΝ) Latina Interest Sorority, Incorporated. Amelia-Marie is most recently the recipient of a 2024 Disability Visibility Fellowship for The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy.
They also have two adorable cats who make the best co-authors, love seeing new plays and creative works in Chicago, and enjoy watching Dimension 20 shows. To keep up to date on Amelia-Marie, find them on social media @ameliamariewoo, and their website www.ameliamariewoo.com.