Kinetic Light

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The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To describe Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson as dancers is to name only a small sliver of their creative portfolio. To be sure, they are proficient, trained dancers and have created and performed several works for Kinetic Light, the disability arts ensemble that Alice founded in 2016 and continues to lead. In Kinetic Light’s first piece, titled “Descent,” Alice and Laurel danced in their wheelchairs on a raked stage with a large ramp and since then have proved to be increasingly adventurous in exploring their relationship to gravity. In recent pieces, they have boldly moved into the vertical axis, sometimes flying into the air — in or out of a wheelchair — thanks to ingenious mechanisms, likewise created by Laurel.

Because accessibility is central to Kinetic Light’s artistry rather than a supplemental consideration, Alice and Laurel have also become accessibility and technological innovators. Kinetic Light is a disability arts company created by disabled artists for audiences with disabilities, and as such every performance is created from the ground up for everyone to fully enjoy. For instance, the company’s lighting designer, Michael Maag, who uses a wheelchair, lights mobility devices with the same care he lights a human body and also pays attention to the needs of neurodiverse audiences; some seats are equipped with haptic devices to allow an audience member to feel the vibration of the score; and Laurel has developed Audimance, a multi-track audio-description app that gives blind and visually impaired guests control over how to experience and enjoy the performance. 

In this interview, Alice and Laurel describe the path that led them to Kinetic Light and explain why artists and institutions, rather than viewing accessibility as a requirement or need, would be wise to embrace it as an aesthetic principle.

Pier Carlo Talenti: Clearly you don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to access in your creative productions, so can you give me an example of how you change your approach to accessibility from one piece to another? What did one piece require that perhaps another piece did not? Or how did you have to adapt differently according to the project’s needs or requirements?

Laurel Lawson: Backing up even one stage before that, because we’re not thinking about accessibility needs as something that belonged to a project, we are making art in a way that is imagined in these accessible, multisensory, multi-channel formats from the beginning. It’s a subtle shift, but we’re not thinking about changing our approach to access. We work from a set of principles, and in each project, we may alter the way that those are executed, we may do things in different media or different formats, but we’re working from that same approach across projects and perhaps evolving our practice, evolving collaborating artists, certainly evolving our technology.

Alice Sheppard: In support of what Laurel’s saying, the primary shift to make is that it’s not an accessibility need. If you start identifying access as a series of needs, I think it puts you in a spiraling place where you are trying to think, “Oh, have I done X to meet Y need? Have I done Z to meet A need?” You get into this sort of list approach to thinking about access. 

But if you think about access as the actual work itself and the work gets crafted as accessible as you’re making it and the contours and the parameters that you might think of as defining access are simply part of the creative process or the particular form that you’re working in, be that a visual form or an audio form or a tactile form, if you think about what is there in each of these experiences, you’re not making an access need. You’re crafting your art in a number of different ways that are accessible.

That in many ways answers your question because you’re not adjusting for each project; you’re not even adjusting around an imagined person. You’re actually crafting with access as the aesthetic in the first place.

Pier Carlo: You’re both trained as artists, but you both also had to become trained as experts on disability. What you may have once thought accessibility meant to you may not be what accessibility means to a blind person or a neurodivergent person. How did you go about making sure that your artistic umbrella was as broad as it could be?

Alice: People tell us.

Pier Carlo: Which makes me want to ask about Kinetic Light’s founding. Laurel, you talked about its principles. Alice, when you founded Kinetic Light in 2016, what was the original mission? And what had you yet to learn or discover?

Alice: There’s a short story and there’s a long story, and we’re probably going to have to narrate a little bit in between and toss it backwards and forwards. We didn’t actually found Kinetic Light with a mission, straight up from the top down. Laurel, Michael [Maag] and I gathered to make work, and we found principles, concepts, beliefs and ideas growing together in our conversations and our artmaking practices. 

Imagine us meeting in July of 2016 in person for the first time. What we coalesced around was the idea that we don’t take the non-disabled world as a point of reference, that we are disability-centered, that disability aesthetics, culture, politics and history inform the work to begin with and that we imagine a disabled audience is primary. This is now later language. I think back then I was saying, “I want our work to find home with disabled people.” So that’s July. Laurel, how about December/January?

Laurel: One of the things we often say about Kinetic Light is that Kinetic Light is not a dance company. It is true that dance, that movement, that embodiment is a central method of our public work. And as a disability arts company, we’re also deeply rooted in technology, in research, in writing and speaking practice.

We say principles because access is never one-size-fits-all. Access is not a checklist. We begin from these ideas, and then it will be necessary in each situation, yes, for each work, for each kind of organization, even for each venue to make adjustments. And there are some ways we can make that simpler. Particularly in that first few years, from beginning to create “Descent” in 2016 until it premiered, we learned vast amounts about what did and did not work.

Pier Carlo: Can you give me an example?

Laurel: Well, here’s one of the ones that we talk about a lot with audio description. It was that December/January span that Alice tried to toss over to me. We were doing our first public-ish showing of sections of “Descent” in San Francisco, and we had invited basically everybody, all the disabled people we knew: our friends, our teachers and mentors and students, colleagues, enemies and frenemies. We invited everyone. We packed as many disabled people as we could into this little theater. We were in that dead week just before New Year’s so that the theater was dark and we were able to get the space cheaply, in no small part as a favor.

One of the things that came from that performance was the aftermath with our blind friends and colleagues. We had an audio describer for the show, a very, very good one, but any single audio describer can only do so much. Vision is broadband. You can take in a lot of things simultaneously, and you have a lot of choice in how you choose to use vision, whether you’re looking at the room or the people or the whole stage or even focusing in on a single dancer or just a gesture. One person talking is narrow-band. There is only so much that can be communicated in that form.

After the show, some folks came up to us and said, “We could hear people gasping, and we could feel them — they were leaning forward in their seats, they were excited or anxious — but there just wasn’t anything all that exciting in the audio description. What did we miss?” That was one of those really critical points that led to the development of the Audimance platform and our approach of multi-channel audio description, understanding that for an audio experience that is as rich and complex and offers as much agency and experience for a non-sighted audience, it is absolutely critical to offer multiple channels, multiple layers, multiple kinds of audio description. 

That’s now become a practice where for most works we offer anywhere from, say, five to 15 channels of audio description that people can themselves mix, layer, choose according to their own wants.

Pier Carlo: That sounds revolutionary. Is this the first of its kind?

Laurel: It is. It is.

Pier Carlo: Wow, you must be very proud. That’s incredible. Do you have to train a blind audience member who plans to use Audimance before a performance?

Alice: In many ways, it’s not a “How do you train people to use the app?” question. It’s a question of “What is your listening practice?” And “How does your listening practice mesh with the thing that is known as audio description mesh with what we are creating and offering?” Sometimes, if what you’re expecting is a single track, a single channel of description that is fact-based about what’s going on, then this kind of experience is sometimes overwhelming. But at other points, if you have a listening practice where you are navigating a number of different audio sources and your choice is to be able to mix and match and detect and listen to this kind of richness of contrasting over conflicting sounds and words that make an entire experience versus a single description of what’s going on, then you can have that experience. The question is, “What is your listening practice? What is your desire at the moment that you come to a show?”

Laurel: And understanding that the role of design is to get out of the way. I have been working in tech for even longer than I have been dancing professionally, and a good user interface should disappear. Software that you have to learn to use is actually a problem. That means that there are design issues, and as a product architect, sometimes that’s unavoidable. As features, as software becomes more complex, that becomes very hard, but the best design is something you can just pick up and use. Technology should accommodate to the human; we should not accommodate to the tech.

Pier Carlo: Laurel, you said you came to dancing post your engineering/design work. I’d love to hear your dance origin stories.

Laurel: Both of us came to dance as adults, and right now at least, that’s a very, very common experience for disabled artists because it’s very difficult. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to go to ballet class because every other little girl in kindergarten went to ballet. It was something that my friends did, and I wanted to fit in, and it seemed like they were having fun. But at that time, little girls in wheelchairs didn’t go to ballet class.

While things are slowly shifting, there is a real problem in that there are very few people in the world who are actually competent to teach wheelchair-dance technique. You can’t just go to your little neighborhood dance studio that exists in every small town in the United States to find wheelchair-dance teaching. 

But yes, I began dancing professionally in 2004. I trained with Full Radius Dance in Atlanta and danced with the company until 2020.

Pier Carlo: You were also trained as a designer along the way, as an engineer?

Laurel: I began working in tech in 1996 [post-interview correction], and yes, I was working independently as a contractor through that time. At about the same time — I think technically the paperwork was just a little bit after — I moved into founding a boutique engineering consultancy with my business partner.

These are parallel pathways. I was essentially dual-careered, and I still am in some ways. There are aspects which are purely choreographic and performance-based and aspects which are entirely in the tech world, but I understand that my actual core practice is that of artist-engineer in the spaces of innovating both artistically and technologically. Depending on the exact context, I may be showing up as a choreographer, I may be showing up as a product architect, or I may be showing up and really always am as entirely both. 

I’m not the only one. We are out there. It is not super-common because there are challenges to having these kind of side-by-side professional specialties.

Pier Carlo: Alice, what is your dance origin story?

Alice: I came in really differently. I had a non-disabled childhood, and I worked as a classical musician, often doing pit work. 

Pier Carlo: What was your instrument?

Alice: I played the flute in some situations and piano in others, and there was a bad sax moment, but there we go. [She laughs.]

Dancers were the people thunking around above me, and I had no desire to be one of them whatsoever. Over time, instead of going to music college, I went to university, and I got a PhD, came to the US — not in that order — became a professor of medieval studies and then began to do work when I became disabled in disability studies, so I have an intensely deep academic research background in disability studies and in languages. 

My pathway to dance was pretty abrupt. I met a disabled dancer, Homer Avila, at a performance in a conference on disability studies in the university. At the end of the night, long story short, Homer dared me — and I accepted the dare — to take a dance class. Then six weeks later, I learned that he was dead, and I spent some time trying to then figure out, how do I honor the dare?

Finding a dance class that would take me was one challenge. Finding a dance class that would teach me was a different challenge. Eventually I was able to train with Kitty Lunn from Infinity Dance Theater in New York and joined AXIS Dance Company and began dancing that way. I got tenure, and a couple of days afterwards I resigned and committed to try and learn to be a dancer, without really knowing what that would mean or what kind of career pathway would be out there, because at that time there really was no obvious career pathway and there still really isn’t. I decided I was going to do this and did it, and now here I am, which is not to say that this was plain sailing, but that’s to cut a long story short.

Pier Carlo: That’s incredible. You resigned from a tenured position a few days after receiving tenure?

Alice: I did.

Pier Carlo: I love to talk about artistic spirit and motivation. Where did that kind of courage or conviction come from?

Alice: I have a dear friend, Daniel Sherman, who after hours of long conversation just finally got fed up with me and was like, “Are you going to live your life or not? Are you going to commit to living and working and striving for beauty or not? If you do, here are some things that you can do, and if you don’t, this is what your life is going to look like.” [Laughing] I was like, “OK, that was easy enough and clear enough.”

Pier Carlo: That’s a good friend, a good and somewhat frightening friend to have.

Alice: Daniel’s adorable. He’s adorable. I wonder if he’ll actually hear this. I’ll send him this.

Pier Carlo: OK, good. I hope you do, a good testament to how helpful he was. 

I think an ableist way to interpret accessibility and technology used towards accessibility is to think about it as, “Oh, this is technology meant to overcome disability.” But clearly you center disability in your work. Do you ever as a company, as a collective, discuss amongst yourselves how not to let technology eclipse or overshadow the disabled body and the disabled experience?

Alice: This is a really complicated question. We do talk about all of those things, but let me back out a little bit. I think the words are slightly more pernicious than your question describes. And I do mean pernicious in a very deliberate way, because I think an unspoken understanding is that it is not so much overcome or outshine a disabled body or mind but that the access to technology is to bridge the gap between disabled and non-disabled worlds. And that the person who then has a technology — once that technology is given, acquired, made — that person is supposed to function as a normative person. So, I think, “Right, right, you’ve got your wheelchair? OK, off you go. Got your hearing aids? OK. Got your cane? Off you go and go live a non-disabled life.” Boom.

Pier Carlo: Right. “Enter my world.”

Alice: Right. So it’s not so much overcoming as erasure. It’s a dirty underside to the question that you’re asking, which we do talk about. We talk about both faces of that question a lot because technology — and I think Laurel and I have different language on this — does not overcome or enable you to overcome a disability. I think the question for me is, if it is being seen as overshadowing or seen as eclipsing us, that says an awful lot about the lens through which we are being interpreted. It’s not about us; it’s about the viewer. And I’m going to pause there for a second. 

Laurel: Perhaps the core difference in the way that we approach it is understanding access as culture, as aesthetic, as a driver of innovation. We’re prioritizing the ways in which disabled people exist, embody, communicate, experience, and heightening those aspects that are important and powerful and joyful. 

One of the things that means is that rather than thinking that access is something that creates this kind of single normative environment for everyone, in our world, what someone might term access actually is not something that a non-disabled person can use. Audimance is a great example of that. If you’re in this kind of full multi-channel thickly layered rich audio environment, that’s something that a lot of non-visual people greatly enjoy. I mean, this is their world. It is not the world of most sighted people, and in fact it is for many people extraordinarily overwhelming, even unintelligible. We are not making access that attempts to proximate a non-disabled experience. 

You brought up “Wired” and the idea of flying wheelchairs. Why do that? Isn’t it irrelevant? Wheels are meant to roll on the ground. We are doing it because these are our bodies. Why wouldn’t we fly in our wheelchairs? When I’m teaching dance, I often talk about the unique privilege of certain disabled dancers is that of multiple embodiments, which carries with it the necessity and the labor of learning multiple techniques. 

Pier Carlo: Could you explain what you mean by multiple embodiments? I don’t think I understand it.

Laurel: Our wheelchairs are not an access mechanism. They’re not things that we just get in to get from point A to point B. They are part of our bodies. This body is as much metal, carbon fiber, as it is flesh and blood and bone. Now, at the same time, we also work out of our chairs, dancing largely on the floor or even sometimes with crutches or in other ways. That is no less a whole and complete embodiment. 

I often joke, if I get out of my chair and I push my chair six feet away, it’s not like I’ve been disemboweled. That becomes weird to think about, right? But these are two fundamentally different bodies with completely different dance techniques so that we have to learn these multiple forms and techniques in these different ways. But yeah, why wouldn’t we fly in our chairs? Because those are simply our bodies moving through space.

Pier Carlo: As you might know, the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, which produces this podcast, operates within the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, which is a world-class conservatory. How would you like accessibility to be taught or incorporated in art-school syllabi for able-bodied and disabled students alike?

Alice: [Excited sing-song] I have been waiting for this question; I’ve been waiting for this question!

Laurel: Try to keep yourself contained, Alice.

Pier Carlo: I’m sorry I kept it to the end. I kept the best for last.

Alice: You did, you did. 

So I have a very serious question for you, and of course, it’s not something that you can necessarily affect, but I really think that this question is a problem. So I’m going to ask a different question, and that is: Are you admitting disabled students? How many disabled students are you admitting? What kinds of courses are they admitted to? What kinds of support do you have for disabled students? Do you have disabled faculty? Do you have faculty who have expertise in disability culture, in disability and disabled performance, in disabled techniques?

The reason that I’m asking those questions, because it’s not that your question isn’t a worthy and noble question, it’s just that it assumes that ... . I want to take the whole thing down and build it back up. It’s like, admit the students, find and hire the teachers, identify the work. Don’t just tack on a couple of things about access in the syllabus, right? Reroute, recenter, build disability culture into the structure, the values, the people-dom of the institution, and then we can talk about how to teach access. Does that make sense?

Pier Carlo: Yes. Approach it the way you approach Kinetic Light. It makes absolute sense.

Alice: Well, yes, except that I’m not talking about the kind of ideal, principle-driven way that we’ve been able to build Kinetic Light. I am simply talking about, what does it take for a disabled dancer to gain entry? What does it take for a disabled musician? The notion that you are world-class often means that simply that phrase, world-class, means that you don’t necessarily look at disabled applicants. Do you know what I mean? That self-image.

So few disabled students are able to access, be accepted to conservatory educations. And that is not about us; it’s about the institutions themselves. I want to be able to find a way in which there’s sufficient institutional self-awareness and change that students can be admitted, and once admitted, they can be taught and have access to a training and education so that they can go on to become faculty. You know what I mean? Yes, we have to teach access, but really we actually need to change the institution. And so my question is, are you open to institutional change?

Pier Carlo: It’s a good question, and I’m not the person to answer that.

Alice: I know, but I had to ask it anyway.

Pier Carlo: I love you asking it. Laurel, do you have anything to add?

Laurel: I mean that really is the core of it. I mean, yes, absolutely, every university-trained degree dance student should be graduating with at least some minimal education in how their work can be accessible, some amount of understanding the very basic. What is audio description? Competence in being able to describe their own movement, understanding that videos need to be captioned, that things need to be interpreted. There are these very, very basic kinds of things that honestly universities and conservatories are simply utterly derelict in right now because people aren’t using these absolute fundamentals.

At the same time, you cannot claim to be a complete institution, I don’t think you get to claim world-class status if you are excluding disabled students, and realistically, that is exactly what is going on. It is no different from excluding students from any other protected or marginalized category. We’ve had institutions go through these kinds of reckonings of racial integration, of people really calling out exclusion there. 

Let’s identify and call out the exclusion of disabled students. Yeah, we’re centering the disabled students who aren’t there, and you’re also graduating classes and classes and classes of artists who have never worked with a disabled artist, who don’t understand that they exist in the field and by virtue of their “world-class education” are going to come out and treat disabled artists as less than because they have been excluded from that particular kind of education.

Is a conservatory education necessary? No, clearly not. And it is still important as an educational route, because the way Alice and I both did it is really hard. And it shouldn’t have to be that hard.