Alice Sheppard, Jerron Herman, and Laurel Lawson, WIRED, 2020. Photo: Grace Kathryn Landefeld
Image Description: Alice Sheppard, a dancer with light brown skin and short curly hair, suspends majesticaly from the ceiling; one arm clasped to a cable that hooks onto her wheelchair, and another outstretched straight down towards the floor. Jerron Herman, a medium-height dark skinned black man with a beard and kinky high top black hair, jumps up towards Alice’s outstretched hand. He is looking directly up at her and his right and is just shy of meeting hers. His palsied left arm clings to his chest. Silver barbed wire cascades all around Jerron’s body, encircling him in a sculptural framework.
What does art look like that does not justify itself or the existence of disabled people?
What are the intersections of disability and race in dance?
What do racialized disability aesthetics look and feel like?
How do we move to realize them?
What do I know of the cultures associated with my racial and ethnic heritages when they are not tied to racism?
And how is my racial and ethnic heritage connected to my disability history? My queerness? My gender?
How do disability and race encounter technology and design?
— Excerpt from Alice Sheppard’s Intersectional Disability Arts Manifesto. For the full manifesto visit alicesheppard.com]
PS: Performance-in-Place: An Evening with Kinetic Light Tonight at 7pm EST: https://www.the8thfloor.org/upcoming-events/2020/5/18/performance-in-place-kinetic-light