A Review of Descent, Kinetic Light

Descent, an immersive dance performance by the company, Kinetic Lights, is an eye-opening love story about overcoming disability. What makes the performance unique is its multisensory approach, its story, and its inclusivity of the disabled community.

Kinetic Lights is a company whose purpose is simply that. One of the members, Michael Maag, who is wheelchair-bound himself, is a light artist. In Descent, the stage was lit with spotlights that followed and accentuated the dancers. More spectacularly, Maag incorporated several projectors, projecting images on the background of the stage as well as the stage itself. In particular, the projectors showed images of constellations, minimalist scenery, and illustrations of the characters Venus and Andromeda from the sculpture The Toilette of Venus and Andromeda, by Auguste Rodin, upon which the story was based and reimagined. The other remarkable aspect of the performance was the physical set. The stage was custom-built, a multi-level, curved, ramp that the dancers used to tell their story of struggle and freedom. The ramp was designed especially for the dancers’ wheelchairs, which were a custom feat in their own right.

The story of the dance began with the two characters separate, each struggling to move about the terrain of the stage with little use of their legs. The dancers crawled, rolled, and slid across the grade of the stage. Soon, though, the characters find each other, and at the same time find the wheelchairs. The dancers explore the newfound freedom of the chairs and also begin to dance/wheel in sync, showing the development of their love. After intermission, the story shows the more intricate struggle between the characters and their wheelchairs, and each other. In the end, the characters re-learn to trust one another and embrace each other, as well as support each other and themselves in the balance of using their wheelchairs.

As a viewer who is not a wheelchair user, and who is overall rather uneducated in the plights of the disabled community, this was an incredibly eye-opening performance. The story told by the dancers was unlike what I had expected. Instead of a tale of struggle without a wheelchair, and then liberation with the wheelchair, the real tale that people live out every day is much more complex. While there is a certain reliance and affection for the wheelchair, and many other amenities used by disabled persons, there is still struggle. There is a struggle to trust the instrument and the struggle to learn to be at peace without it. In the end, a disabled person is more than the tools they use to help interact with the world. This is the important message I learned at this performance. The inclusivity of the performance did not end on stage, though. Part of the performance was the beta-testing of a program designed by Kinetic Lights member, Laurel Lawson (who was also one of the dancers) to enhance the experience of the performance for blind persons. One of the coolest things I saw was the excitement of at least two of the audience members who were wheelchair-bound. It helped me see the lives that this type of inclusivity touched, and why it is so important to share the stories of those with disabilities.