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“DESCENT models a truth 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.” —Kevin Gotkin, Dance Magazine
The Walker Art Center and Northrop, University of Minnesota present the renowned disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light’s online premiere of the evening-length work DESCENT.
Kinetic Light’s DESCENT re-centers ideas of physicality. A collaboration between choreographer/performers, thought leaders, and disability activists Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson, the virtuosic duet is performed on an elaborate structure of slopes, peaks, and curves. This meditative thrill ride through a queer, interracial love story is inspired by Rodin’s sculpture Toilet of Venus and Andromeda. Kinetic Light artist Michael Maag’s video and lighting projections bathe the stage with starry skies, sun-dappled water, and sculptural figures, while the transportive soundscape unfolds like an epic poem. The presentation features a special postshow artist conversation.
The residency also includes a free screening of dance films including Making Where Good Souls Fear, a short documentary featuring Alice Sheppard, and Kinetic Light’s Revel In Your Body. The program (curated by Sheppard with assistance from Walker Curator Michael Walsh) also contains three short titles from the Walker’s Moving Image Collection.
This exclusive online world premiere caps off the groundbreaking, weeklong residency with Kinetic Light that includes workshops and curatorial conversations with the artists. The residency and related programming were reimagined in a digital form due to the global pandemic.
“We are so pleased to collaborate with Walker Art Center and Northrop at the University of Minnesota for this virtual engagement. We have never needed art more,” shares Sheppard. “Kinetic Light has fans and supporters all over the globe, and it brings us so much joy to be able to offer DESCENT and dance films to old and new fans, virtually.”
Founded by dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Alice Sheppard in 2016, Kinetic Light is a project-based ensemble, working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology. Performed on a custom-designed architectural ramp installation with hills, curves, and peaks, DESCENT explores the pleasures of wheeled movement and reckless abandon. Combining dance, architecture, design, and technology, this evening-length work challenges cultural assumptions of what disability, dance, and beauty can be.
The Kinetic Light artists featured in DESCENT include Sheppard, dancer, choreographic collaborator, and technology lead Laurel Lawson, and lighting and projection designer Michael Maag.
EVENT DETAILS
DESCENT Online Film Premiere
Thursday, December 3, 8pm
Postshow artist conversation
Online performance and talk available through December 5
Tickets: $18.50 per household ($13.50 Walker members)
Tickets are available to purchase in person at Northrop, or through their website. Walker members receive a discount; check your email inbox for a special promo code. Discounts are available online only. For more information, contact orders@walkerart.org or call 612-375-7600 x2. The presentation features a special postshow artist conversation.
Access: Captions + ASL interpretation + Audio Description. The Audimance custom-designed app will also be available, which enables a choice-centered rich auditory experience for users who are blind or nonvisual.
RELATED ONLINE EVENTS
Disability Aesthetics for Design in Performance
Wednesday, December 2, 3–4:15 pm
Free, registration recommended at northrop.umn.edu
Access: ASL interpretation + Captions
Join in a conversation about disability aesthetics and design for performance: learn about Kinetic Light’s work in production, projection, movement, and software design. Laurel Lawson, choreographic collaborator, dancer, designer, and engineer with Kinetic Light will be in conversation with Michael Maag, production, lighting and projection designer for Kinetic Light.
Short Films featuring Revel in Your Body
Monday, November 30, 6:30pm
Free, registration recommended at northrop.umn.edu
Access: Audio Description & Captions for Revel In Your Body and Making Good Souls Fear; Human Radio; Valentin de la Sierras; Trio A; ASL for Making Where Good Souls Fear
Available for viewing online, this selection of short films curated by Alice Sheppard is focused on arts and disability. Featured in the program is Kinetic Light’s own riveting Revel In Your Body, which captures the artists’ stunning choreography in slow motion to reveal the joy of flight on wheels.
Revel In Your Body is a film featuring disabled dancers and Kinetic Light artists Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson. Set against the Atlanta skyline, this film takes high stakes wheelchair choreography into the site-specific playgrounds of parking ramps, metal railings, and breathtaking blue sky. Revel In Your Body is directed by Katherine Helen Fisher and choreographed by Shepard, with Lawson.
Making Where Good Souls Fear features gritty virtual reality footage from New York City streets and subways and beautifully-lit performance excerpts. This 11-minute documentary short by filmmaker Dahkil Hausif follows Sheppard as she cuts a pathway from street to stage and back, exploring her approach to choreography and disability arts along the way.
Compiled almost entirely of extreme close-ups of people and animals, Bruce Baillie’s Valentin de las Sierras is an intimate portrait of working-class life in Chapala, Mexico. Baillie paired a telephoto lens with an extension tube off the back of the camera to create a very limited focal plane for this 1968 short on 16mm. This strategy, rarely used in film, achieves an immediacy necessary to capture the tenderness he feels for the village. The resulting footage focuses on the smallest details of an image at close range. To complement the visuals, the filmmaker parsed together a textured soundscape by layering clips of children laughing, mules clomping, and traditional guitar song. The film opens with an image of Baillie sitting in a tree next to a young Mexican boy as he recounts the ballad of Valentín de las Sierras, a Mexican revolutionary war hero. The short then flashes between the eyes and hands of young children at play, the daily duties of farmers at work in the field, and the aged face and fingers of Jose Santollo Nadiso, the blind musician who plays the corrido on his guitar. These intimately shot details are connected in a way that gently moves through the landscape without any disorientation.
In Mirandas Pennell’s Human Radio people dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001. The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ – people who love to dance behind closed doors.
Yvonne Rainer created the film version of Trio A in 1978. It was one of her most influential choreographed works, and was first presented in 1966 as part of the larger performance The Mind Is a Muscle, Part 1 at Judson Memorial Church. Rainer, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon performed the work simultaneously but not in unison. The piece demonstrates Rainer’s exploration of the body as an object belonging to a greater whole. It is comprised of a sequence of unpredictable movements that disregard the tempo of the music and instead unfold in continuous motion according to the internal pace of each dancer. Trio A also meditates on the gaze: the dancers always avert their eyes from direct confrontation with the audience by independently moving the head and closing the eyes or casting them downward. |
