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When Alice Sheppard left her professorship to become a dancer, she embarked on a mission to change the field of dance altogether.

“Even now, nearly 15 years later, people often ask why I dance. I tell them because of the way it feels, because of the pleasure, because I can,” she told the New York Times in 2019.

Founded in 2016 by Shepard, Kinetic Light is an ensemble of four disabled artists: Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, Michael Maag, and Jerron Herman creating at the intersection of technology, queerness, and dance – the first of its kind in North America. Kinetic energy is a scientific way of saying “bodies in motion, stay in motion.” It’s fitting inspiration for a dance company committed to showcasing the power, innovation, and nuance of the disability arts movement.

DESCENT, the collaborative’s premiere work, inspired by the 1890 Rodin sculpture, Venus and Andromeda is a glorious meditation on duality and the natural world. In this work, Sheppard and artistic collaborator Laurel Lawson swerve, spin, and turn in their wheelchairs with a kind of celestial fluidity. For Kinetic Light, access is not just a given, but as Lawson says, a “creative force.”

The collective is remarkable for their adoption of aesthetic equity, the belief that every audience member has a right to experience moments of awe and wonder from live art. With the debut of DESCENT, Lawson developed an app that allowed users to select the style of description (screenplay, sounds of the dancers’ bodies, a poetic rendition) that suited them best.

“What really struck me was how they think about process and how they think through creative work, how elements of legacy and scholarship, access, and architecture come through,” Jerron Herman, dancer and choreographer collaborator says of their unique approach.

With the premiere of their first aerial production, WIRED, the collective continues to take disability arts to new heights.