Kinetic Light to Present DESCENT: Online & In-Depth

The internationally-known disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light announces an upcoming virtual event, DESCENT: Online & In-Depth, streamed October 26 and 28. This accessible online offering will include a Kinetic Light artist conversation and screenings of DESCENT, featuring dancers Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard, with lighting and video design by Michael Maag.

EVENT DETAILS

DESCENT: Online & In-Depth, an online event featuring screenings of DESCENT and a conversation with Kinetic Light artists.

Thurs, October 26 7:30pm ET

Sat, October 28 1pm ET

Stream recording will be available to ticket holders for 48 hours after each event.

Tickets: available on a sliding scale $0-$50, details here. https://buytickets.at/kineticlight

Access: Open captions, multiple audio description tracks, musical ASL interpretation, call line, and transcripts. Contact support@kineticlight.org with questions.

Founded by dancer/choreographer/artistic director Alice Sheppard in 2016, Kinetic Light is a disability arts ensemble working at the intersection of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology. Inspired by the work of Auguste Rodin and performed on a custom-designed architectural ramp installation with hills, curves, and peaks, DESCENT explores the pleasures of wheeled movement and reckless abandon. The character of Andromeda is embodied by Alice Sheppard, restoring the racial heritage that Rodin himself erased. Venus is assumed by Laurel Lawson, who both challenges and realizes Rodin's imaginations of Venus and ideals of feminine beauty. Kevin Gotkin, for Dance Magazine, commented, "DESCENT models a truth that is rarely understood among dance audiences: Disability does not signify incompleteness. In fact, it offers novel pathways to several movement styles, each of them whole and generative of unique choreographic forms."

For this event, Kinetic Light integrated a new iteration of musical artistic American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation that goes beyond orchestration to reveal how sound and light are at the heart of the piece. The company worked with celebrated Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL), Alexandria Wailes, and Joey Antonio and Nicole Cartagna, a Deaf Interpreter/Hearing Interpreter team. This event will also include three versions of DESCENT from which audiences can choose an experience; including two different forms of artistically and aesthetically equitable audio description. In the newest audio description track, Cheryl Green delivers an evocative emotional audio description with emphasis on plot and the internal world of Andromeda and Venus.

DESCENT was filmed in 2018 at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY). The film version of DESCENT premiered in 2020, presented by Walker Art Center and Northrop at the University of Minnesota and was part of the Hong Kong No Limits Festival in 2021.

DESCENT has been performed at BRITT Music & Arts Festival (OR), the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY), Ferst Center for the Arts (GA), The Flynn Center (VT), New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NJ), New York Live Arts (NY), and The Wilson Center (NC). DESCENT was voted 2018's most moving performance by the readers of Dance Magazine and won a production design award at the 2019 USITT Design Expo and Prague Quadrennial.

MORE ABOUT DESCENT

Inspired by the sensual writings and art of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, DESCENT premiered in 2018, the first evening-length work created by Kinetic Light. The work gives the mythological characters of Venus and Andromeda new life as interracial lovers. The sensuality of this work is palpable, and risk is interwoven throughout as wheels fly precariously at the edge of the ramp.

The ramp installation is nearly six feet tall and spans 24 by 15 feet of stage space. It is more than a set piece, offering an entire alternate universe for Venus and Andromeda to explore and inhabit. The ramp was designed by Sara Hendren, a Massachusetts-based artist, design researcher, and writer, along with physics professor Yevgeniya Zastavker and a team of first-year engineering students from Olin College. Working with Kinetic Light, Hendren ensured that the ramp would be a work of art by designing for beauty and wheeled movement potential, not for ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance.

ABOUT KINETIC LIGHT

Founded by Alice Sheppard in 2016, Kinetic Light is a disability arts ensemble working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology. Through nuanced investment in the histories, cultures, and artistic work of disabled and/or Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), the company promotes intersectional disability as a creative force and access as an aesthetic critical to creating transformative art and affirming the disability arts movement.

 

Photo by Jay Newman/BRITT Festival. Image Description: Laurel Lawson, a white person, balances on Alice Sheppard’s footplate, with arms spread wide, wheels spinning. Alice, a multiracial Black woman with coffee-colored skin, opens her arms wide to receive her in an embrace. A starry sky fills the background, and moonlight glints off their wheelchairs.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.