‘Descent’ shifts dance, environment

Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “Toilet of Andromeda and Venus” depicts two figures adrift on lumps of rock, as if stranded on a tiny island in a vast sea.

“Descent,” created by Alice Sheppard’s California-based collective Kinetic Light — and inspired by Rodin’s sculpture — also places its characters on their own isolated planet. It’s a not-quite-flat earth, with sharp edges, sloping curves and mysterious negative space. Sheppard calls it a ramp, but it’s a ramp that’s been Gumbyfied, like a Salvador Dali clock.

Onstage at EMPAC Thursday and Friday — and live-streamed Friday to audiences across the country and in Europe — “Descent” activates and explores every inch of its unique environment. Sheppard and her fellow performer Laurel Lawson — artists with disabilities who dance both with and without wheelchairs throughout the piece — sometimes seem superheroic as they perch on the apex of the ramp; swerve up and down the slopes in fast, tight turns; and shift between levels with a few deft moves. Their chairs are not modes of transport as much as extensions of their bodies that often are simply along for the ride.

But at other moments, we sense their fragility — surprisingly, less so physically than emotionally. It’s their tumultuous connection that takes these versions of the classical goddesses off their pedestals, so to speak: the way they get in each other’s space, drag each other (wheels, too) across the floor, wind into one being and then push apart, neither willing to bridge the gap.

Their relationship plays out in an environment that’s rich visually and sonically. Lighting and video designer Michael Maag (the third member of the collective) bathes the ramp in images of starry skies, sun-dappled water, vibrant clouds at dawn or dusk and etched outlines of figures that hark back to other Rodin sculptures. The dancers are spotlit like sculptures themselves — limned in light along with their chairs. The soundscape melds cello, violin, electronica and percussion with clatters, hums, static and, at one point, a terrifying cracking and shattering — as of ice breaking on a pond. Through all of this, at times, comes the noise of wheels on wood or metal hitting metal.

This wealth of information was designed with the thought always in mind that not everyone in the audience has the ability to access all of it.

The performances featured ASL interpretation, audio descriptions of the work, a tactile experience of a 3D model of the ramp and a sound recording of the program. Sheppard and her collaborators are reimagining how we experience the form, and at the same time, making striking new shapes that challenge our limited ideas of what dance — and dancers — look like.

Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.