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 Sheppard, Kinetic Light is a disabilty arts ensemble creating at the intersection of technology, disability, access, race, 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 signature approach to artistically and aesthetically equitable access. With the debut of DESCENT, Laurel Lawson developed an app that allowed users to select the style of audio description (screenplay, sounds of the dancers’ bodies, a poetic rendition) that suited them best.

With the premiere of their first aerial production, Wired, the collective continued to take disability arts to new heights. That stage production has now been transformed into territory, a disability-centered immersive virtual reality experience.

The company's latest creation is The Next T.i.M.es, a new work that wrestles with solidity, uncertainty, and the fragile mysteries of the human body in an exploration of resilience, love and connection.