Alice Sheppard’s artistic practice includes many different roles: dancer, choreographer, artistic director, speaker, writer, educator, and creator. She was recently awarded the 2019 Juried Bessie Award for “boldly and authentically inventing new movement vocabularies full of supercharged physicality and nuanced detail.” Sheppard’s dance ensemble, Kinetic Light, will embark on a tour in fall 2019. Here, she shares about her training, inspirations, and how disability impacts her work.

Where are you currently based?
I am based in Los Altos, California and New York, New York.

What is your area(s) of artistic practice?
Everything I do is rooted in disability arts; I am a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, speaker, writer, educator, and creator.

What training or experiences have shaped you as an artist?
A performance by Homer Avila first introduced me to the possibility of dance by disabled people. Homer danced with fire and such tenderness that I could not help but accept his dare to take a dance class.

I began dancing as an adult. After years of working in higher education thinking about disability in critical and theoretical ways, I took a six-week workshop which ignited my love of movement. Over the next decade, I trained in ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and performed with physically integrated dance companies including AXIS Dance Company and Infinity Dance Theater. I have been a guest artist with Full Radius Dance and have done project-based work with Marc Brew Company, including a collaboration between Ballet/Cymru and GDance in the United Kingdom.

Tell us about Kinetic Light—how it came to be, and what is happening now?
I have reached the point in my career where I can choose my collaborators and the artists I want to create with. My Kinetic Light partners, Laurel Lawson and Michael Maag, are my dream collaborators, and Kinetic Light is the place, time, and people with whom I am making some of the most creative and meaningful work of my life.

I founded Kinetic Light in 2016. Laurel and Michael are the core members. We are one of the only dance ensembles to be led by all disabled artists. We work in the disciplines of art, technology, design, and dance, and create, perform, and teach at the nexus of access, disability, dance, and race. We have presented work at New York Live Arts, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Whitney Museum, and beyond. Our first evening-length work, DESCENT, was honored at the recent USITT Design Expo and Prague Quadrennial and voted Dance Magazine’s 2018 Most Moving Performance by its readers.

Do you have any other current projects you would like to share with VSA International Network members?
Kinetic Light is embarking on our fall 2019 tour. We will perform our Under Momentum in Miami, Florida; and DESCENT in Burlington, Vermont; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. Readers can get additional information at kineticlight.org.

Laurel and I collaborated with director Katherine Helen Fisher and other talented artists on the dance film REVEL IN YOUR BODY and that continues to screen all over the world (Editor's note: REVEL IN YOUR BODY will be screened at the Kennedy Center on September 21, 2019). We are also working hard in numerous residencies, taking flight—literally—for our next work, titled WIRED.

Who or what is currently inspiring you in your artistic pursuits?
I’m reading an odd collection of books that should not go together, but of course they do. Georgina Kleege: What Blindness Brings To Art; Fred Moten: Black and Blur; Theri Pickens: Black Madness :: Mad Blackness.

How does disability influence your work?
I am a disabled dancer and choreographer. I use disability as the term of identity and also as a term of art. Disability is more than the state of my body. It is the word for the culture and aesthetic of my work.

I think people mostly know disability only as a medical situation of body and/or mind. They mostly know it as a series of deficits that come with a medical diagnosis: the things you cannot do, or the weird things your body or mind do that are beyond your control. 

I am not interested in the medical world of disability. I do not see it as a set of deficits. Nor do I work from the position of “despite;” I can do this, that, or the other, despite not being able to do.

My disability world is about the work of other disabled artists, performers, writers, filmmakers, poets, scholars, and activists. It is rooted in the political history of the disability civil rights movement and the cultural and aesthetic history of disability. Race is deeply integrated in my work; so much of the mainstream of representation of disability is so white that it is virtually unmarked. I know disability as being intimately bound up with discourses of race, gender, and sexuality.

Take, for example, Andromeda in Kinetic Light’s DESCENT. In the original myth, she is Ethiopian, but after the fifth century the vast majority of representations of her in Western European art are white. What does it mean to make space to this history to emerge in the work? In a recent solo piece, I thought through ways British colonialism has shaped our ideas of what is appropriate by reconfiguring my disability technologies in a series of ways that were inappropriate and dancing inappropriately with them. I hoped to push our understandings of how behavior and dance movement can both be curtailed by uncritical expectations of what is “proper.”

What advice would you share with emerging artists with disabilities?
Depending on who you are and where you are: get started. No, really. Get started.

Find ways to connect with other artists; study their work. Find out where you belong and where you want to push all the boundaries.

Follow Alice Sheppard at http://alicesheppard.com and on Instagram and Twitter @wheelchairdancr. Follow Kinetic Light at https://kineticlight.org and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/KineticLight.