Build Viewing Publics Through Digital Arts Access

Innovation in digital platforms to deliver cultural and artistic content has increased wildly since 2020. While the mass substitution of streamed for live events early in the Covid-19 pandemic was new, the platforms themselves and thoughtful strategies for their use were not. Building more caring and equitable arts and cultural institutions necessitates drawing on digital technologies to strengthen accessibility. Digital access technologies need to be modular and adaptable to the needs of diverse audiences whether in person or virtual. But rather than just providing “virtual” access to “live” events, the access technologies themselves are part of shifting understandings of the “live” that spans in-person and digital platforms. This essay revolves around Kinetic Light, an interdisciplinary disability arts company whose filmed dance DESCENT was screened online by Northrop at the University of Minnesota in December 2020. In their work, Kinetic Light both celebrates the sensuousness of live performance and modulates modes of access itself as art, while using digital technologies to stretch and expand the notion of liveness. Arts and cultural organizations should take the lead from artists such as Kinetic Light in comprehensively conceiving programs that encompass both in-person and digital events that maximize both accessibility and aesthetic innovation. Kinetic Light’s work constitutes a form of care that seeks to provide opportunities for inclusion and engagement, and which moreover poses questions about the politics and aesthetics of new accessibility initiatives within institutions that have traditionally neglected the needs of disabled people.

Remote arts and cultural programming impacts different people in different ways. While for me, as a tenured faculty member, being able to watch a symposium on global art history while breastfeeding on my couch let me keep up with recent developments in my field in a period of intense caring responsibilities, when I shared the recordings of the same event with my students, it gave them an unprecedented experience of a scholarly event across the country that most would not have had the money or cultural capital to attend.1 A particularly special experience of online viewing for me was watching a streaming version of DESCENT in 2020, an evening-length duet performed by dancers Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic Light, with a set by scenographer and lighting designer Michael Maag. DESCENT is a sensuous dance that takes inspiration from Auguste Rodin’s 1886 Toilette of Andromeda and Venus, reimagining it as a queer interracial love story with Andromeda danced by Sheppard, a multiracial Black woman with dark brown skin and short curly hair, and Venus by Lawson, a short-haired white woman with powerfully muscular arms.

The dance takes place on a specially designed ramp, across which Sheppard and Lawson dance both in and out of their wheelchairs.2 The tempo and tone of their movements varies from rollicking rolls in their sleek chairs across the dips of the ramp, to another moment in which Sheppard crouches over the top of one of its curves. At points in the dance, Sheppard’s and Lawson’s individual bodies constellate into spectacular architectural configurations. At one such moment Sheppard lies on her back, supporting Lawson, while Lawson holds out her arms in a soaring, flight-like stance. In another, the dancers form their wheels into a figure 8 facing the audience with Lawson leaning backward, her arms thrown above her head along the ramp in a gesture of openness and vulnerability, and Sheppard facing downward, her feet near the top of the 8, supporting herself on her forearms while her thighs rest on Lawson’s calves. Emotionally, the dance evokes moments of intense connection and joy at interdependence with another person, but also flashes of rejection and rupture, rendering a complex picture of the risks and riches of intersubjectivity.

Sheppard, Kinetic Light’s artistic director, obtained a doctorate in medieval studies from Cornell and was tenured at Penn State University before becoming a dancer. Inspired by a 2004 encounter with disabled dancer Homer Avila at a disability studies conference at Emory University, she enrolled in a dance class. Despite her claim that she initially “sucked,” Sheppard became intensively engaged with dance, going on to study modern dance and ballet with Kitty Lunn and eventually joining AXIS Dance Company, an integrated company of disabled and nondisabled dancers.3 Sheppard founded Kinetic Light in 2016. In her description of DESCENT, Kinetic Light staff member rachel hickman highlights the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of their work, and the role of that interdisciplinarity in putting disabled audiences first: “Kinetic Light is a disability arts ensemble; our work emerges from disability culture, history, politics, and aesthetics and we imagine disabled audiences as primary—always. We not only make art in the ways we move, but also in the ways we design.”4 That design, hickman specifies, is geared at maximizing wheeled movement and pleasure, putting disability pleasure and joy of movement front and center in the work.

Two especially important dimensions of DESCENT’s design in this respect include the ramp on which Lawson and Sheppard dance, and Audimance, Kinetic Light’s innovative app for blind and low-vision audience members that aims to relay visual elements of dance, thereby building a nuanced, user-directed auditory adventure.5 The ramp is a complex structure made of twenty-five pieces of shaped wood, which are bolted and screwed together by a stage crew, making DESCENT labor intensive to install.6 The ramp is an example of what design historian Bess Williamson calls “crip design,” a movement of the 2000s onward in which disabled artists and designers seek to reject the legalistic functionality of accessible design as mandated by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. As Williamson argues, crip design focuses in particular on reassessing ramps as ambivalent symbols of accessibility, by imagining new forms that engage beauty and sensuality in order to point out the insufficiency of defining access simply in terms of measurable architectural elements.7 Sheppard has discussed DESCENT’s ramp in very similar terms, as something that transforms the “ugly,” metallic object usually hidden at the back of a building into a beautiful object.8 Sheppard moreover states that this beauty is key to DESCENT’s social justice message, because it highlights how functionality is not all there is to access. The choreography of DESCENT emerged from the structure of the ramp itself, because the ramp enabled Sheppard and Lawson to create a new movement vocabulary.

The Audimance app is a prime example of modularity-as-access, offering audience members the ability to tailor the experience based on their own needs. Kinetic Light created it when it became clear to them that typical audio description for blind, low-vision, and nonvisual audiences provided at best an impoverished impression of dance.9 Audimance enables users to select and combine audio tracks that communicate different senses of the dance, including sounds of the dancers’ bodies, movement over the ramp, an ambient soundscape, different styles of description, and a poetic rendering of the bodily and emotional dynamics of the dance. The app is designed to be compatible with users’ own phones or tablets, instead of requiring specialized equipment. In effect, audience members exercise agency through Audimance’s modularity by shaping their own experiences of the performance, enjoying freedom from the more typical style of audio transcription in which they listen to a single aural interpretation of what someone else is seeing. It might be considered part of a longer history of contemporary art practices that have used audio in close dialogue with individual audience members’ experiences to activate new layers of perception of the surrounding environment or sociopolitical context. Other examples include Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s audio walks of the 2000s onward, experienced by listeners wearing headphones, or Rimini Protokoll’s 2008 Call Cutta in a Box, in which audience members in Berlin entered a room alone to engage in phone conversations with call center workers in Calcutta, who seemed to display an uncanny knowledge of the surroundings in which the audience found themselves.10 Kinetic Light’s use of a similar participatory approach with Audimance is simultaneously sensual, as suits DESCENT, and highly political, as it stakes a claim in the right to pleasure for audiences who cannot access the performance via sight. The modular and participatory approach that gives audience members control over their experiences moreover echoes Kinetic Light’s wider framing of their work on access as an ongoing, evolving dialogue with their audience members.11 In this sense, their access work is a kind of care for the audience that is simultaneously a practice of intellectual and aesthetic openness and ongoing learning.

Audimance provokes a rethinking of notions of what constitutes live presence in performance. Sheppard has written vividly about the experience of performing live before an audience: “Being on stage is sometimes surreal. For one brief evening, I am connected to several hundred people at once. We are in a conversation that frequently has no words. I cannot see them, but I can feel them. Sometimes, I know we are breathing together.”12 While on one level, Sheppard’s description might read as a celebration of the unmediated nature of live performance, Kinetic Light’s approach to liveness resonates with and extends scholarly interrogations of presence in important ways. In these debates, scholars have highlighted how documents of performance—photographs, audio and video recordings, leftover ephemera—are not secondary stand-ins for past live events, but do conceptual and aesthetic work in and of themselves. Amelia Jones has argued that the relationships between performing bodies and documentation powerfully disrupts the fantasy of a fixed, normative modernist subject, and challenges the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classism, and heterosexism built into that fantasy.13 Jones encourages an approach to performance that is attentive to how “liveness” itself is already mediated by constructs and fantasies of the subject. Philip Auslander argues along parallel lines that performance documents function as performances themselves, which, instead of giving viewers access to some stable past reality, create a sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of performance artworks on their own terms.14 Across this scholarship, central is the question of desire: what particular viewers and historians desire from performance and how those desires get mapped onto our ideological concepts of liveness and documentation. Modular digital access technologies like Audimance can extend individual audience members’ desire from the level of viewing or subjective perception into the actual crafting of a particular personalized “live” that responds to their own needs and what they seek to get out of a performance.

DESCENT embraces the joy of live copresence while also fostering an awareness of how viewing experiences are mediated, both by normative constructs of the body and by different technological configurations (including digital platforms and sound and lighting design) that make it possible for people to experience performance. Audimance is a particularly powerful demonstration of the ableism inherent in many notions of viewing performance, which revolve forcefully around the visual. Technically a kind of “document,” it blurs the boundaries of that genre through its modular participatory dimension. Rather than positioning audio transcription as a supplemental layer to the performance, Audimance demonstrates how any experience of the performance’s liveness will be partial based on the variation in audience members’ own embodiments. In this respect, it resonates with the “political phenomenology of impairment” that Jonathan Sterne elaborates. Sterne seeks to make room for accounts of impairment that do not ask impaired subjects to “position themselves in respect to (or aspire to being) an idealized, whole, integrated, self-consistent person.”15 Audimance embraces the partiality of perception and the differentiated nature of the pieces of sensory information that that make up the “live” of a performance.

My experience of watching DESCENT at home was permeated by questions of surface contact and its implications for intimacy, which stemmed both from the dance itself and from my viewing conditions. Watching Sheppard and Lawson embrace—and roll and crawl sensuously over the alive-seeming surface of the ramp—activated thoughts about how bodily surfaces and our ability to explore them are so crucial to intimacy. At the same time, their repeated acts of contact with each other and the ramp seemed to allude to the search for a kind of fusion of subjectivities, a dissolve of individuality into the intimate bond, which is impossible to achieve. I viewed the performance on my laptop in my pajamas late at night after an exhausting day of childcare, lying on the couch and covered in a blanket. This experience fundamentally remapped my bodily posture and attention from the forms typical of viewing in a theater, which almost always has audiences sit upright and asks that they immerse themselves in a performance for its duration. Whereas for me as a nondisabled viewer the experience of being able to sit on the couch was easier and more comfortable in a moment when I was so totally tapped out from parenting that going to a theater would have been more of a burden than a joy, considering the performance in retrospect also makes me conscious of my own ability to access in-theater events without unbearable physical pain or burden.

Moreover, while viewing DESCENT from home was characterized for me by bodily ease, that ease was enabled by extensive labor on the part of the staff of Northrop, who collaborated with the Walker Art Center to premiere the film. It also depended on the labor of Kinetic Light, not just artistically and physically but in terms of their work in obtaining the panoply of grants necessary to support such a complex project. To create the film that Northrop and the Walker premiered online, Kinetic Light used a five-camera shoot of the dance that they had in their archives, and then edited it to function as an accessible filmic experience. Because Kinetic Light has always had a digital dimension to their work, this did not constitute a pivot for them.16 That was not the case for Northrop, which due to Covid had to undergo an urgent rethink of its 2020 season, necessitating that staff step into new roles and learn new skills as programming shifted online.17 Digital cultural offerings are changing American audiences’ viewing habits: Culture Track’s April–May 2020 survey of 124,000 people found that 40 percent of people using art museums’ online offerings had not physically visited a museum in the past year. Though that statistic is not broken down to explain the reasons why, the report quotes some individual survey participants, who cite cost, schedule, and disability as reasons they enjoyed digital offerings. Kristen Brogdon, Northrop’s Director of Programming, noted that she thinks conversations about digital offerings have tended to conflate access, conceived as barriers of geography or cost, and accessibility—that is, the specific supports that disabled audiences need to experience events.18

Going forward, it is essential for arts and cultural organizations to have conversations about digital programming that recognize how those areas are interrelated yet distinct. Those discussions should acknowledge problems with historical and current lack of equitable access, while also attending to how these newly normal forms of viewing are shaping evolving notions of the live event. Kinetic Light’s rigorous accessibility aesthetic offers audiences a live experience made up of a constellation of different sensory and informational inputs, with the acknowledgment that it will give rise to hugely varied experiences for different audience members. Anchoring that constellation of experiences is the question of desire, both in the erotic subject matter of DESCENT and in terms of what artists and audiences want out of the experience of viewing performance. An attention to the modular nature of access technologies and opportunities can help more diverse audiences have experiences of “live” art that correspond to their own desires. Simultaneously, the increasingly widespread uptake of notions of accessibility and disability among mainstream arts organizations makes me wonder about how that tendency might play into institutions’ own fantasies of being able to reach boundless audiences, and (more cynically) their desire to signal to nondisabled audiences about their own inclusivity. Disabled artist and writer Carolyn Lazard has noted that one person’s access will often impede another person’s access.19 Lazard’s statement is an important reminder of the fact that access is not utopian. Instead of providing an endless expansion of audience, modular access technologies enable the exercise of different forms of desire that in themselves can serve as a reminder of how accessibility will always involve power negotiations between specifically situated and embodied subjects.