An Intimate Night with Kinetic Light: Mixed Repertory Program (2024)
Performers: Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Laurel Lawson
Music: Various Artists
Access: ASL, Audio description via live describer, 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 TiMes. 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.
Running Time: 70 minutes + 20 minute intermission
Touring Party: 3 performers, 2 tech, 2 access admin
Eternal City: Residency Island Dance Theatre & Kinetic Light
Premiering November 2027
Performers: Dancers of Resident Island Dance Theatre, with Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson
Choreography: Chang Chung-an, Fang Shih-yun, co-choregraphed by Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson
Music: ONIKHO
Access: Audio description via Audimance, dedicated haptic experience, CART, sign language interpretation, accessible seating
Eternal City is Kinetic Light’s new international disability arts collaboration, invited by Resident Island Dance Theatre of Taiwan. RIDT is led by Chang Chung-An, a low vision dancer and choreographer. Based in southern Taiwan, RIDT is a contemporary dance company known for its sustained practice in physically integrated dance, disability arts, and international collaboration.
Eternal City, a cross-cultural dance work exploring democracy, access, and resistance through movement, music, and a cyberpunk aesthetic. The work explores access as a core democratic value, challenging ableism by centering disabled artists and asking who truly gets to participate, lead, and be seen in a democratic society. This is Kinetic Light’s first formal collaboration with a physically-integrated company (disabled and non-disabled artists performing together).
Running Time: TBD, full length
Touring Party: TBD performers, TBD tech, TBD access admin
You Caught Me on Your Shoulders
Premiering Sept 2027
Performers: Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, additional performers TBA
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Laurel Lawson
Access: TBA
For their newest work, Kinetic Light collaborates with the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development to present a multi-sensory dance performance featuring a series of vignettes based on significant moments in disability advocacy and culture. Focusing on themes of access, care, and interdependence, the work draws connections across the history of justice movements in Philadelphia and throughout the country, from women’s suffrage to civil rights.
Recognized for its innovative approach to access, Kinetic Light rejects traditional assumptions that dance must be experienced exclusively through sight and makes use of captions, ASL interpretation, haptic vibration, and multiple styles of audio description for choreography, soundscapes, and score—offering audiences multiple pathways to experience the work.
Running Time: 72 minutes
Touring Party: 3-4 performers, 4-5 tech, 1 access admin
territory: Virtual Reality Experience
Performers: Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Director/Producer: Kiira Benz
Choreography: Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with Herman and Lawson
Scenography: Michael Maag
Music: Dan Wool
Access:territory is 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 Benz to transform live disability arts performance into an accessible VR experience that surrounds the audience in movement, light, vibration, and sound.
territory was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Mellon Foundation. The VR version of territory world-premiered at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in July 2025. Dome and gallery/museum installation are in development.
Running Time: 12 minutes
Touring Party: 0
The Next TiMes
World Premiere: October 9-11, New York Live Arts
Access: rich spatial audio description via Audimance, expanded accessible seating, dedicated haptic experience, ASL interpretation pre- and post-performance, curated tactile display, audience welcome to exit and enter during performance, quiet space, sensory kits.
Run Time: 75 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Performers: Tatiana Cholewa, Kayla Hamilton, Laurel Lawson, Alice Sheppard
Music: Josh Loar
Video Projections: Carlos Johns-Davila and Kate Freer
Lighting Design: Annie Wiegand
Access: Rich spatial audio description via Audimance, expanBrimming with fervent energy and luscious intimacy, The Next TiMes is Kinetic Light’s stunning new multimedia disability arts experience. As hailed by Dance Enthusiast critic Rush Johnston, “[Kinetic Light] takes us into an evening where access becomes art and we become participants in building a new world.”
Collaborating Artists Kayla Hamilton and Tatiana Cholewa join Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson in this enthralling universe — an exploration of resilience, love, power, and connection. The Next TiMes opens in the near future, a place swirling with ghosts and premonitions, and a space where survival and relationships are tenuous. This world is about secrets– what we know, what we think we know, and what can be revealed.
Featuring an original score, novel audience technology, otherworldly video projections, and vivid multitrack audio description, The Next TiMes embodies Kinetic Light’s core belief that access is art.
Running Time: 75 minutes, plus a 20 minute intermission
Touring Party: 4 performers, 4-5 tech, 1 access admin
