The Choreography of a Beginning

The Choreography of a Beginning

Image description: Alice Sheppard balances on her hands, arms straight and on a pair of silver crutches, lifting her lower body and wheelchair high. Alice's head is tucked and her short curly hair peeks out from behind her strong arms. She is a coffee-skinned multiracial Black woman, wearing a shimmery gold bodysuit. Set against a black background, light reflects off her costume, chair, and crutches. Photo by Mengwen Cao.

How do we enter space?
How are we connected to each other?
What does it mean to move again during and after a pandemic?

Bessie Award-winning choreographer Alice Sheppard creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference. 

“The Choreography of a Beginning” workshop series will consist of three meetings:

Tuesday, June 8, 2021 @ 5:15 pm (ET) – ~60 min: an initial “Tea Time” where we Meet, Talk, Dream and Think, and begin to frame the community workshops.

Two follow-up meetings will workshop movement:
Tues, June 15 @ 5:15 pm (ET) – 90 min
Saturday, June 26 @ 1:15 pm (ET) – 60 min.
These will be spaces to nurture our intersectional disabled arts and culture movement. 

On a dare, Alice Sheppard resigned an academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. She toured nationally with AXIS Dance Company and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton. In addition to performance and choreography, Sheppard is a sought-after speaker and has lectured on topics related to disability arts, race and dance. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and in academic journals.

Founded by Alice Sheppard in 2016, Kinetic Light is an intersectional disability arts production company, working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology. Through nuanced investment in the histories, cultures, and artistic work of disabled people and people of color, Kinetic Light promotes intersectional disability as a creative force and access as an aesthetic critical to creating transformative art and advancing the disability arts movement.