The story of Venus and Andromeda, as a choreographed by Alice Sheppard, and in collaboration with disabled dancer Laurel Lawson and disabled lighting and video artist Michael Maag will ask new questions about social justice, movement and embodiment. Descent was conceived in response to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, Toilette of Venus and Andromeda. Though never linked in a single Greek or Roman myth, Rodin depicts these women together; perhaps in acknowledgment of the ways the lives of both are defined by mythological ideas of beauty. Descent not only restores Venus and Andromeda’s racial and ethnic backgrounds through Lawson and Sheppard’s own, but invents a story for them, exploring the women’s relationship with each other, the effects of heterosexual, masculinized notions of beauty on their lives, and the injustices that accompany beauty into the world THE WORLD PREMIER IS SCHEDULED FOR THE BRITT FESTIVAL IN JACKSONVILLE, OREGON IN SEPTEMBER 2017. WWW.KINETICLIGHT.ORG “I believe we need work made by disabled artists for the disability community writ large. We need art that explicitly acknowledges the work of disabled artists of colour not just in an inclusory way but in a manner that challenges the uniformity of disability narratives we have thus far promoted to the non-disabled world. My current choreographic and performance preferences lean towards investigations of native disabled movement–that is, movement arising directly from impairment. I mix this with what I know of classical dance vocabulary and the many traditions of black dance; I allow the influence of disability studies and disability arts and culture to register where I can and think consistently about the ways race figures in the reading of my body and the shaping of my work.” ALICE SHEPPARD
