Kinetic Light Announces Virtual Event, 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. The event will take place on October 26 at 7:30pm ET and on October 28 at 1:00pm ET. The stream recording will be available to ticket holders for 48 hours after each event. Tickets are available on a sliding scale from $0 -- $50 at the URL listed below. It will feature open captions, multiple audio description tracks, musical ASL interpretation, a call line, and transcripts. 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 imagination 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 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, 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 the 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. 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, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ferst Center for the Arts, the Flynn Center, New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New York Live Arts, and The Wilson Center. 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. Contact support@kineticlight.org with questions. Image description: Alice Sheppard, a multiracial Black woman with coffee-colored skin and short curly hair, is crawling on her hands with her knees in Laurel Lawson's footplate. Laurel, a white person, is arching her back on the ground as she is dragged along the floor. Their wheels form a figure 8. Big white letters read DESCENT by Kinetic Light against a sunset behind them along with ASL, OC, and AD access icons. Shadowy figures appear below. 
|
