Two dancers are suspended high on the stage, and a shadowy light shines from the hand rims of their wheelchairs. They hold long strands of barbed wire that stretch like webs across the proscenium. As the haunting a cappella score gains momentum, you slowly twist down through the semi-darkness until your chair rests on the floor.
At least for me as a healthy person. We experienced the first moments of Kinetic Light’s “Wired”. But like all the work his ensemble creates, there are countless other ways to come across this work of art for the disabled.
Pre-show tactile exhibits allow you to explore the show’s sets, props, and costumes. Some seats feature haptic technology, allowing audience members to feel the vibrations of the soundtrack. A dedicated app can be used to play different formats of audio commentary in different combinations. audienceIncludes detailed expository prose by artist and filmmaker Cheryl Greene and an original poetry collection by Lia Lakshmi Piepuzna Samarasingha.
Kinetic Light’s work is defined by disabled bodies and perspectives. Its four core members – choreographers and performers Alice Shepard, Laurel Lawson and Jeron Herrmann, and lighting, video and projection designer Michael Marg – are disabled. So do almost all of our collaborators. Any audience is welcome, but the group’s art is specifically geared towards disabled people.
In addition to promoting a for-us-by-us approach, Kinetic Light is part of a broader movement led by artists with disabilities that positions the needs of people with disabilities as a source of inspiration and innovation. It is a performance philosophy in which every element of the work, from the lighting to the audio commentary, is intended to reflect the artistic integrity of the whole, enabling a rich experience of the work for all participants.
Kinetic Light Founder and Artistic Director Sheppard said: “And it’s not just us. The disabled arts community is just doing a massive experiment.”
Wired, August 25-27 at Shedd, applies these principles to a story of barbed wire. After going through a transformation with a sculpture by Melvin Edwards “Pyramid Up and Down Pyramid” (1969) At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sheppard began researching the complex history of iron fences.barbed wire is “Wired” A dance piece that touches on race, immigration and disability. And the performers themselves are wired together — Aerial Rigging: Shepard, Lawson, and Herman all fly off over the course of the piece.
Ahead of Wired’s New York debut, the four Kinetic Light members took to Zoom to discuss what it means to have access to a work of art and how that question guides their creative practices. talked. Below is an edited excerpt of the conversation.
How does barbed wire relate to the themes you explore in Wired?
Alice Shepard The piece is literally, figuratively, figuratively full of wires. you can’t escape it.
Michael Marg In the course of my research, I found over 2,000 patents on various types of barbed wire. It’s everywhere and has shaped the world in truly amazing ways. It is used in agriculture and in imprisonment. Used to keep people out and keep people locked up.
Jeron Harman Barbed wire as a technology is one of those containers that can hold multiple floors.
How do you define access and how does it shape your storytelling?
shepherd Let’s start with what most of the world generally means for access. It is what must be done to enable people with disabilities to participate, enter spaces and enjoy works of art. It is sometimes phrased, “What do I need to do to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?”
It’s all about what must be done retroactively to works of art that have already been created so that people with disabilities can experience it. But artists with disabilities already take on injustice and injustice.
Laurel Lawson We are working on this from a completely different location. Access is not separate.access is of thing. Thus, art itself can be accessed in ways that do not prioritize being, experiencing, or entering art.
hermann It is embedded in the aesthetics of the work in the same way that it identifies the dance genre.
MAAG For example, when I think about visuals, I also think about how to express them. As it all flows together, what are the verbal poems associated with the visuals that I am presenting? Of course, all of this corresponds to the beautiful embodiment of these dancers on stage.
So does access also affect the act of creation?
shepherd All things considered how this works in different ways. Could the verbal form be an artistic whole in itself, a sound form, light and projection, and poetry? Each form expresses the fullness of the work.
Lawson To further complicate matters, access is not a panacea. We have all these pieces, and people may combine different elements.
How does that affect your approach to audio commentary?
Lawson Audimance was designed as an interactive application. This is different from the live explanation. “Here’s the content. You can listen to it or not, but the choice is yours.” You can choose and control your experience, just like anyone else in your audience. increase.
shepherd One question that arises is what audio content is appropriate or best describes the work. At some level you have to be able to know what is going on. You have to be able to turn, fly, land, hug, what the costume looks like, what the set looks like when you need it… but that’s not enough. Explaining something, no matter how beautiful, is a displaced encounter.
After that, things get more complicated as the issue becomes one of interpretation. Do you say “she raised her arm”? Did you say “she raised her arm slowly” or “she thrust her arm up”?
What Audimance can do for us is give an explanation for several different kinds of movements. So, in a poetic and dramatic way, it can really convey not just what is happening, but the inner and emotional core of what is happening.
Michael, how do you design lighting from that perspective?
MAAG Lighting is about controlling what you see. That is, where the shadows fall, where the light hits. I make it my default to improve the experience for performers with disabilities. The straps, the sparkle of the wheels, it’s all beautiful to me. I want you to see how the shadows fall on the body, which is fastened to the harness so that it stands upright on the chair.
A very big aspect of this is exploring ways to design lighting and projection in a way that is fair to a nervous audience. A lot of this is pretty well known, like not strobing. But it’s all about creating art that doesn’t rely on problematic things.
shepherd As such, access is often described as a set of “don’ts”. Michael’s work here pushes us into the space of how when you know what a ‘don’t’ is, how you move beyond it and how it becomes art. I’m here.
Is dance a particularly interesting medium for this kind of inquiry because it involves so many forms of sensory perception?
Lawson Some say Kinetic Light is not a dance company. Yes, the dance is going on, but just as important as the embodied dance is the lighting and the design — not everyone in the room experiences it, hears it, reads it, sees it, feels it. It is work to do. can Experience it all.
shepherd And with that diversity, what we’ve done is separate access from failure. We say, “This is for the blind. This is for the deaf.”
Herman One of the great things about this research and development is breaking down the siled experience in disability culture. I’m saying that you don’t have to embody a particular disability or have a particular disability story to “access access.” The experiments being conducted at this company may advance in someone else’s work, and we are informed and influenced by others.
Have you seen any changes in your approach to accessing the wider dance world?
shepherd There has been a shift away from access as a phenomenon of the built environment. Pre-pandemic, when you say “access,” people would say, “Oh, I got a lamp, okay!” Well, yes, you can enter the building, but does entering the building give you access to the work? It’s a good, necessary change. But the conversation changed faster than field awareness.
What about those hosts and theaters who say, “I can’t afford that.”
shepherd That’s a complicated question. If you haven’t made the show accessible and you show up at the venue and say something like “OK, we need two of her ASL interpreters and three of her audio commentators to make this show work” Well, that’s a late point to look for. for access funds. So what we need to consider is a funding strategy that will allow creators access to their work from the start, and be budgeted for in all grant applications, all venue budgets, and presenter budgets. is to A point that registers as costing money is a point where it is not planned.
What is the next access frontier?
Lawson One of the major areas of research and investigation is haptic interfaces. [interactive devices that simulate touch]It details how multiple senses of touch can be used not only to manipulate the skin, muscles, joints, and even the brain, but to produce actual movement itself. This borderline of is kind of an odd place to sit. It gets seriously geeky really fast. But how charming!