KINETIC LIGHT

About

Kinetic Light is an innovative, internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble. Working in the disciplines of art, technology, design, and dance, the company creates, performs, and teaches at the nexus of access, queerness, disability, dance, and race. Founded by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Alice Sheppard, Kinetic Light is led by disabled artists and disabled artists create, design, and perform the work: thrilling award-winning worlds of movement, light, and sound. Access is integral to the art and creative process. The company’s work speaks to and emerges from disability aesthetics and disability culture, and it is connected to the rich traditions and exciting contemporary conversations of disabled artists in all artistic fields. In Kinetic Light’s work, disability is a powerful, intersectional creative force.

NTP TOUR SUPPORT AVAILABLE.

Image descriptions in alt text.

#KineticLight #PentacleRoster

Artist's Website >
Press Kit >
Workshops and Classes >

Repertory

The Next T.i.M.es

PREMIERING 2025/2026
Run Time: 75 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard, Kayla Hamilton
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with The Next T.i.M.es performers
Music: In Development
Access: ASL, rich spatial audio description via Audimance app, expanded accessible seating, haptic soundtrack interpretation, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance.

The Next T.i.M.es opens into the near future, a place swirling with ghosts and premonitions, a space where survival and relationships are tenuous. With the principle of equitable aesthetic access for audience and artist at the center of its creation, T.i.M.es wrestles with solidity, uncertainty, and the fragile mysteries of the human body in an exploration of resilience, love and connection. In solos, duets, and quartets realized in conversation with the materiality of their props, the performers rediscover the fragility of the body and the precarity of relationship as they wrestle with solidity, resilience and the uncertainty of human connection.

With otherworldly video, projection-tracking, and dedicated new score, T.i.M.es is a multi-media work that can be experienced in light, sound, movement, text, and vibration (haptics). T.i.M.es exemplifies Kinetic Light’s core belief that access is art.

In development, available for the 2025-26 season. Artists can work with venue to create associated gallery or lobby installation.

territory – Virtual Reality Headset Experience

AVAILABLE 2025/2026
Run Time: 12 minutes
Performers: Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Director/Producer: Kiira Benzing
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Herman and Lawson
Scenography: Michael Maag
Music: Dan Wool
Access Direction: Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard
Access: territory will be accessible in multiple ways, including audio description, haptics, and creative captioning.

In a world bordered by barbed wire, the grounded Guardians of the World and aerial Agents of the Wire live in a tense truce, facilitated by a Herald—their go-between. When the Wire uncoils, the balance of power shifts and everyone including the Witness is vulnerable.

territory is a ground-breaking multi-sensory VR artistic experience, featuring the artists of Kinetic Light in a potent aerial and contemporary dance performance to tell a story of race, gender, and disability, that explores how the technology of barbed wire disconnects humans from the world around them and each other. Utopic and dystopic all at once, this immersive virtual reality experience envelops the audience member in a disability-centered, accessible universe.

NOTE: This new project is a reimagining of Kinetic Light’s stage production Wired, a potent aerial and contemporary dance experience that tells race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States. Kinetic Light partnered with award-winning XR company Double Eye Studios and producer/director Kiira Benzing to transform live disability arts performance into an accessible VR experience that surrounds the audience in movement, light, vibration, and sound.

The VR version of territory is awaiting premiere. Dome and gallery/museum installation are in development.

Intimate Night with Kinetic Light

(Mixed Repertory Performance)
AVAILABLE 2025/2026
Run Time: 70 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Laurel Lawson
Music: Various
Access: ASL, rich spatial audio description via Audimance app, expanded accessible seating, haptic soundtrack interpretation, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance.

In this intimate night, Lawson and Sheppard perform stunning solos, reset excerpts of Kinetic Light’s signature work, DESCENT, as well as a sensual duet from the company’s newest work, The Next T.i.M.es. The performance is set in a dynamic, flexible new lighting design by Annie Wiegand that defines an intimate space in which the audience are as much as part of the theater as the artists. We invite you to experience KL’s luscious partnering and daring dancing in the intimate settings of your gallery museum, lobby, or black box stage.

Wired (2022)

(NTP Fee Support Available)
Run Time: 80 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Choreographed in collaboration: Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Lighting, Projection, Scenic & Production Design: Michael Maag
Music: LeahAnn “Lafemmebear” Mitchell, Ailís Ní Ríain
Scenic & Prop Design: Josephine Sales
Access: ASL, audio description via Audimance app, expanded accessible seating, haptic experience, tactile exhibit, sensory kits, quiet space, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance

Wired is a passionate and potent aerial and contemporary dance experience that tells race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States. The dancers of Kinetic Light trace the fine line between “us” and “them” as they explore the contradictions, dangers, and beauty of barbed wire.

Immense and intimate, Wired meditates in sound, light, and movement as it questions and ruminates on power, belonging, abolition and deinstitutionalization, sexuality, art, community, and connection—all through the powerful lens of disability as a creative and cultural force.

Wired was named among the “Best in Dance 2022” by the Chicago Tribune.

DESCENT (2018)

Run Time: 60 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Laurel Lawson
Scenographer: Michael Maag
Music: Joan Jeanrenaud, Karen Tanaka, Cornelius Dufallo
Access: ASL, rich spatial audio description via Audimance app, expanded accessible seating, haptic soundtrack interpretation, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance

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. Inspired by the sensual writings and art of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, DESCENT gives the mythological characters of Venus and Andromeda new life as interracial lovers.

Under Momentum (2018)

Run Time: 55 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Laurel Lawson
Lighting: Michael Maag
Music: Joan Jeanrenaud, Michael Wall, Blue Dot Sessions
Access: ASL, rich spatial audio description via Audimance app, expanded accessible seating, haptic soundtrack interpretation, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance

Under Momentum is a duet that celebrates the joys of continuous motion, the allure of speed, and the beautiful futility of resisting gravity. Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard of internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light perform on a series of ramps designed by artist and design researcher Sara Hendren, creating a world of exhilaration, sensuality, and play.

Virtual Programming

Virtual Presentations

Contact Pentacle for Details. Access coordination will be an integral piece of each of these offerings.

Engagement Activities

Dance Technique Classes

Introduction to Wheelchair Technique
Come learn the fundamentals that started it all.
Audience: Anyone wanting to learn how to dance in their wheelchair; no prior dance experience necessary. 20 students max. Format: 90-120 minutes. Requires sound system and wheelchair accessible studio with professional dance floor (wood or marley – ideally sprung). Outcomes: Experience foundational ideas about the relationship of body & chair as well as principles of wheeled movement: pushing, pulling, weight shifting, balancing, turning, & other techniques that support disabled dancers in their work.

Introduction to Technique
Want to dance? Come learn some of the fundamentals of disabled movement.
Audience: Disabled artists; no prior experience required. 20 students max. Format: 90-120 minutes. Requires sound system and wheelchair accessible studio with professional dance floor (wood or marley – ideally sprung). Outcomes: Participants gain experience with some basics of dance and the specifics of moving with their particular Bodyminds.

Integrated Dance Workshop Level 1
When disabled and non-disabled movers enter the space, what can we create together? This workshop invites you to explore your body in different ways in an integrated environment.
Audience: All are welcome; no prior movement experience needed. 20 students max. Format: 90-120 minutes. Requires sound system, wheelchair accessible studio, professional dance floor (wood or marley – ideally sprung). Outcomes: Learn the basics of integrated technique through deep investigation of our own moving bodies.

Repertoire Workshops

Dance DESCENT
This repertory dance masterclass shares some of the lyrical floorwork and intricate, yet powerful, partnering work from DESCENT.
Audience: Experienced non-disabled & disabled dancers. 10-12 dancers max. Format: 90-120 minutes. Requires sound system, professional dance floor, + wheelchair accessible space. *class does not take place on ramp. Outcomes: Guided by Laurel Lawson & Alice Sheppard, discover how to embody these stunning lifts and balances in your own body.

Inside Disability Arts & Wired: For Artists and Cultural Workers
Get an insider’s view: Alice Sheppard opens up about Wired’s world by sharing bits of her research and choreographic processes, as well as secrets about the making of the work.
Audience: Disabled artists & arts cultural workers. 20-30 participants. Format: Seminar. Requires projector (in-person), ASL interpreter/CART, and describer. Outcomes: Learn the history of barbed wire and the disability and race stories intertwined with American barbed wire culture. Understand how these stories inform the making of Wired.

Disability Aesthetics

Inside Disability: for Artists and Cultural Workers
Discover intersectional disability history, aesthetics, and culture.
*Offered at all Kinetic Light performance venues
Audience: Open to all. 20-30 participants. Format: Seminar. Requires projector (in-person), ASL interpreter/CART, and describer. Outcomes: learn about current thought leaders and cutting-edge artists, develop an intersectional disability lens, and learn the differences between current best practices in the United States and United Kingdom.

Production

Introduction to Product Design
Interested in innovative product design? Laurel Lawson, CTO & head of product design at CyCore Systems, brings a practical approach to software, hardware, and program design backed by real-world implementation.
Audience: Advanced undergraduate, graduate, professional, and professional UI, product, and access engineers. Customizable level. Format: Lecture + discussion. Outcomes: Using Kinetic Light’s Audimance as an example, this talk engages user-focused design processes, research, user interface design, and product architecture.

Press

“Sheppard and Lawson are remarkably precise, electric performers.”

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Critic
“Kinetic Light, a disability arts ensemble whose work is made by and for disabled people, has an ethic and aesthetic of access that is exceptionally thoughtful and thorough.”

Brian Seibert, The New York Times
“Kinetic Light allows disability to transform everything about the working process and the product.”

Emily Watlington, Art in America
“This ensemble of disabled artists is on the rise”

Brian Seibert, The New Yorker
"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.”

Kevin Gotkin, Dance Magazine