Melissa Harris-Perry: This is the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry thanks for being with us.

[music]

Alice Sheppard: The metallic jumpsuits glow. Slow I'm scooped into the air from hell. On a wave, they reach towards each other, scooped through arms, bending over their heads. Stay in a separate world. Stay in a separate world. Stay in a separate world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What you just heard there is a description of a performance by the Disability Art Collective Kinetic Light. It's the voice of Alice Sheppard, the artistic director and founder of Kinetic Light. She's also a dancer.

Alice Sheppard: A spiral's on over her eyes. Then, as ace this world, hell opens her arms in a wide gift to embrace.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: In February, Alice and her dance partner Laurel performed a chair duet called  Under Momentum at Lincoln Center in New York City. In the intimate space of the Clark Studio Theater, the duel glided and danced and move between their wheelchairs and the floor, and they used of ramps designed by artists and design researcher Sarah Hendren. Here's Alice describing it.

Alice Sheppard: We use the ramps to leverage our bodies up and down to ride in our wheelchairs up and down, to push hard up the hill that ramp and glide down or fiercely attack the down, down the ramp up [unintelligible 00:01:55] Each ascent and descent becomes more desperate. Then let the down and the speed and the torque and the momentum spin us out. It's a study in wheeled motion and gravity and momentum but it is also a journey in intimacy and relationships because under momentum follows the relationship of two characters. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.

An ineffable rocking, exchange-like waves lapping off beach [unintelligible 00:02:38] sits in their chairs, go on and off the ramps.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: These audio descriptions that you've been hearing, they're not just an add-on to the show, but a full and complete way of experiencing the performance for people who are blind or have low vision. It's also an experience curated by disabled performers for a disabled audience. Kinetic Light worked with Lincoln Center to provide several access points to the show.

Miranda Hoffner: I'm Miranda Hoffner. I'm the associate director of accessibility at Lincoln Center. This was audio description through four different tracks so people could decide what perspective and how deeply they wanted to take the audio description experience, and it also really appreciated the skills that it takes for folks who are blind or have low vision that listen to screen readers and listen to podcasts at probably twice as fast as I would listen to it because they receive information differently based on the way they experience the world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There were also deaf and hearing ASL interpreters, captioning for hard of hearing or deaf folks, and haptic wires that people could touch to feel vibrations during the performance. There was a quiet room for people who might become overstimulated and there was a choose-what-you-pay model for tickets because cost is also a barrier to accessing art.

Miranda Hoffner: Lincoln Center is meant to be a place for everyone. We want to expand who we show on our stages to really reflect disability artistry. I hope that the work with Kinetic Light is working towards this goal of really having disabled artists that want to come to us and trust us to try new things, trust us with their artistry and trust that we will honor the integrity of their work within our stages.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hold right there. We'll be right back with more on Kinetic Light, a disability art collective.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway.

Alice Sheppard: Reaching to the air and down with a turn, a weighted rocking rhythm up [inaudible 00:05:01] to the air, back down and turn and turn and turn.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What we've just heard there is an audio description from Kinetic Light, a disability art collective that performed a dance piece called Under Momentum. The audio describes the visual experience of performance for those who are blind or have low vision. We also have an audio description of the founder of Kinetic Light, so you can picture what she looks like.

Alice Sheppard: My name is Alice Sheppard. I am the artistic director and founder of Kinetic Light. I am a multiracial Black woman with dyed blonde, wildly curly, natural hair, coffee-colored skin. So you could imagine me in the situation that I'm currently in, I am wearing a brown pair of fuzzy pants, a brown fuzzy sweater, a light gray scarf, and golden fuzzy socks. I'm seated in my wheelchair, which is black.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Alice, talk to us about what first got her into dance.

Alice Sheppard: At the time that I first thought about dancing as a disabled person, I was at a conference. I was a professor and I was at a conference and I met a disabled dancer there Homer Avilar who asked me to read text for his performance. I did. Afterwards in the bar, we were talking and spent some time together and at the end of the evening, he issued a dare. Take a dance class a day, so I take a dance class. I said yes because we'd been in the bar and there had been alcohol consumed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] Always a good time to get a yes to a dare. [chuckles]

Alice Sheppard: Right, but six weeks later, he was dead and I felt like the dare was what I wanted to honor, and so I did.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Then what happened as you took that dare, as you moved in to dance, what caught you? What captured you?

Alice Sheppard: The body. There's just no other word for it, the body. All of a sudden, when I started going to dance classes, I had a body that was intuitive about some stuff, recalcitrant about other things. I was innately curious about how does this body work? How does it express? The feeling of being in my body and moving and crafting and working with it every day to communicate ideas is almost inevitable. It is just fantastic to be able to be in a relationship with Laurel and Michael, as we are on stage to be connected to [unintelligible 00:07:56] to be connected to the audience in this way. It's incredible. The body is endless, an endless series of joys.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Such interesting language that the body is an endless series of joys. I am both the younger sister of a dancer, the auntie of a dancer, I see my sister and my niece experience their bodies in that way. I must say that despite taking many a dance classes as a child [laughter] and one or two as an adult, I have never thought of the experience of my body as an endless series of joys. [laughter] At 50, I definitely give it an endless series of crinks and cranks and sometimes battlegrounds.

Alice Sheppard: Those two?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Because I was like really an endless series of joys, what else is happening? Because if there is something in that, that is accessible to a human experience of embodiment, is there a way that our bodies can feel more joyful to us even if we are not called to be dancers in the way that you are?

Alice Sheppard: We all come with bodies. We all arrive in the world, and we are in these sacks of things. We have to live in them and they fail on us and that is our way out of the world. In between the arrival and the departure, it's almost as if we have to learn to negotiate. Sometimes we say navigate our own experience of our bodies. Some of that is private experience. By private, I don't necessarily mean shameful but we have experiences that are known only to us every day. For example, I am sitting here having a private moment where I am deeply aware that my hands are touching the soft carpet. What are you touching right now?

Melissa Harris-Perry: I guess my hands are touching quite different from a soft carpet, the hard metal laptop in front of me. My feet are on a bare wood floor in front of me.

Alice Sheppard: Wow. Do you see what I mean? We have these private bodily experiences that we hold. You are here, you're touching the floor and your laptop, and I am dimly aware that I am hungry, that I haven't had enough coffee yet. These are our private bodily experiences. Our bodies live in worlds where there are systems of interpretation about the body. We have to contour between the private knowings of our bodies, the systems that tell us or tell each other certain things about certain bodies. The fact that the body is not neutral. The body is capable of interpreting the world, experiencing extreme joy and extreme pain.

It demands food, it demands shelter. This is something that I think dancers know, but bodies are also deep sources of emotion. You can be in a position and that position can change your emotions and your feelings. If you have been in a place where someone says to you, "Oh, you look defensive right now," and maybe you're there with your arms folded across your chest, that is a position of defense of self-comfort maybe. A body can express and also create a feeling. I know that being in certain positions are positions of joy or safety or comfort for me.

Moving through those positions gives me safety, peace, joy, comfort, anxiety. The body is tremendously expressive. Part of what I do as a dancer, part of what we all do as dancers is stop and listen and figure out what is the body communicating here?

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it mean for access to be art?

Alice Sheppard: This is something that I'm going to say, and it is completely obvious. I'm also going to say it took a long time to get there. I'm going to say it now and perhaps it will make some sense because it also brings with it a second question. That is, it's one thing to say access is art, but you cannot make that statement without then having to do something about the statement. Here we go. For the people who come to your film, your dance performance, your theater, your museum, your gallery, your whatever it is, the way that they experience your work is the way that they experience the art of your work.

People experience art in so many different ways. There are two questions involved here. One, if access is the art, then access the art is access. If I'm paying $20 for a ticket and there aren't many venues that you can pay $20 for a ticket for, I want to experience the art. Does it matter whether I experience the art visually, orally, or through touch, by haptics? Does that matter? If I am experiencing it in any one of those ways, it has to be artistic.

He wouldn't offer the art visually, and say this and have the person experiencing it visually be, "Oh my goodness, it's so gorgeous and so intense and so overwhelming, or whatever it is," but offer someone who's experiencing it sonically something different. A one-sentence version, because that is how they're experiencing the work. In many ways it's simple. Access is the art because those who are using access are using it as they're expecting to find art in that moment. The real question is, if access is the art, how are you going to live in and create in those spaces?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is this the work of the artist? Of the exhibitor?

Alice Sheppard: It's everybody's work. Access is everybody's responsibility. These are the two answers to that, access is everybody's responsibility because access is what brings us into relationship and into community with each other. How do you make a work accessible? However it gets done, it should be artist-led because the artist knows the work, the artist created the work. Access is merely asking the artist to create, expand the process of creation, essentially to offer the work in one form and then to offer the work in a different form.

It is done only by the exhibitor or the presenter or the gallerist or whoever. That person is going to hire someone, a service provider who's going to come in at the last minute, do their best efforts to make it accessible, but not have time to be in the rehearsal or creation process, to not really have time to understand the work. When we think about audio description, which is one of the things that Kinetic Light is being known for, audio description for dance is tremendously complicated, but it cannot be done at the last minute.

Because if you hire an audio describer, that one person is faced with the challenge at dress rehearsal say, of understanding the work, figuring out what to describe, describing that one thing when 600 other things are going on on stage. A single person can't do that. You can only describe one thing, but meantime, all of the other things have gone on, and because it's last minute and impromptu, it's not necessarily going to be the same experience for an audience member who is not looking for a description of the work, but an experience of the work.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Absolute clarity with that. Beautifully rendered. Thank you. What is next for you creatively?

Alice Sheppard: Kinetic Light is in rehearsal and development, which is all of the wild and beautiful things that happen next. I have ideas for new works but part of what we have to do is go back to the studio and try some what-ifs. How can we? Should we? Can this happen? Who can this happen with? How does this happen? When you see a polished piece, you're seeing something that seems effortless to take us back to the beginning of our conversation.

What you don't see is that for 18 months beforehand, a lot of trial and error and stretching and experimentation is on the way. We are filming, we're exploring, and we will hope to bring some new works to the stage soon.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there anything I've missed that you want to be certain that you share?

Alice Sheppard: Kinetic Light's approach to audio description is one way of doing this, but what I think we are moving towards and living in right now is a tremendous shift in the field where more and more artists are recognizing that access has to be aesthetic. We are seeing experimentations in different kinds of access. I think we are growing a world where it will be a more equitable aesthetic experience of dance for certain, but all different kinds of art forms.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Alice Sheppard, founder, and artistic director of Kinetic Light, also a choreographer and dancer in the company. Alice, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

Alice Sheppard: Thank you. This is an absolute pleasure. I have really [huckles] enjoyed being here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you. I feel the same way. It's been lovely to have you. Thank you so much.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.