Alice Sheppard with Kinetic Light (KL) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) are collaborating to create The Next T.i.M.es, a collaborative dance project using disability access as a creative and generative practice as well as an engine of organizational justice and social change. The collaboration will encompass a month-long residency for the artists at YBCA, a performance, and an ongoing sonic installation.
Choreographer Alice Sheppard is the founder and artistic lead for Kinetic Light, a project-based ensemble of four disabled artists committed to intersectional disability aesthetics and culture and to accessibility as central parts of their art and creative process. Sheppard creates movement to challenge conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. The artists write, “Each of us in KL is a disabled artist; several of us live into identities that are richly intersectional with disability. All of us know that time (literal, figurative, and metaphorical) works differently for us. Albeit differently, all of us inhabit a world that is not designed for us and that is always true for our experience of time.”
The Next T.i.M.es is being developed in several phases and during the Creative Work Fund-supported phase, KL plans to focus primarily on working in sound. Through this project, YBCA will bring accessibility strongly into its equity practice, providing rehearsal space and technical support for recordings of the sound work, spurring ongoing community participation, and producing culminating moments for the community to experience The Next T.i.M.es.
Image shared: Alice Sheppard, a multi-racial Black woman with coffee- coloured skin, blonde, copper, and red striped curly hair gazes towards the camera. She wears a black shirt; her face rests in the palm of her hand, her elbow (not visible) sits on her thigh, and a gold necklace gleams at her neck. Photo by Beverlie Lord.