A new show coming to Manhattan next week will feature a dance troupe performing routines soaring through the air, with the two central dancers in wheelchairs.
Kinetic Light has been around since 2016. It is an ensemble led by disabled artists, who create, choreograph and perform the work.
“We reject the idea that there is normal and there is other,” said Laurel Lawson, who is Kinetic Light’s choreographic collaborator, engineer and a dancer.
Practice and preparation drive Alice Sheppard, who is the group’s founder and a fellow performer.
“Something like this is not random,” she said, referring to their upcoming aerial performance.
Both Sheppard and Lawson use wheelchairs.
What You Need To Know
- Kinetic Light is a disabled dance troupe that has performed around the country and the world
- Its latest performance, "Wired," will feature dancers in wheelchairs, hooked up to wires, doing their routines in the air
- It has taken several years to get from the idea to the rollout of the performance
- Kinetic Light will perform at the Shed in Hudson Yards from August 25-27
At a warehouse in Sunset Park, Lawson, Sheppard and their team practiced for their next performance. It’s called “Wired.”
“Wired” is a show incorporating aerial dancing and barbed wire to tell stories about race, disability and gender in America.
“It has grown and taken off literally into an incredible immerse, intense, immense experience,” said Sheppard.
Kinetic Light has mesmerized audiences around the world through dance in their wheelchairs for years.
“You will often hear about people talk about adaptive dance. That is already saying that positions us as needing to be adapted to as often considered as a lesser form which is flatly false,” said Lawson.
To Lawson and Sheppard, this is not about inclusion. It’s about equity.
“Inclusion is about taking one and jamming it in another in a system that is not welcoming,” said Sheppard. “Equity asks us to actually make change across the board so that all people can experience and participate in whatever is going on without being included in whatever is going on.”
Sheppard and Lawson said they hope everyone takes in their show and thinks about how it impacts them.
“There’s the expectation that after a show you can be able to verbalize, talk, but actually why,” said Sheppard. “Why have we come to expect that? What would it mean to let the work settle and grow in you as it has with us? We have grown in this in years. What would it mean for it to grow in you?”
The show will take place at the Shedd in Hudson Yards from August 25 to August 27. It is free.
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