Private Project

INCLINATIONS

Choreographed, directed and shot from disability perspectives, this dance-on-video short contrasts the playful connections when disability aesthetics, community and a ramp meet the institutional histories and discordant inclinations that can lurk just below the surface.

Note: The screener for this short film includes both the film and the audio described version of the film shown back to back.

  • Danielle Peers
    Director
    G.I.M.P. Bootcamp, And the Rest is Drag, New Constellations, and Otherwise
  • Alice Sheppard
    Director
  • Lisa Niedermeyer
    Assistant Director
  • Danielle Peers
    Producer
  • Alice Sheppard
    Producer
  • Alice Sheppard, in collaboration with dancers
    Choreographer
  • Alice Sheppard
    Dancers
  • Harmanie Taylor
    Dancers
  • John Loeppky
    Dancers
  • Danielle Peers
    Dancers
  • Mike Robertson
    Camera Director & Editor
  • Bob L’Heureux
    Camera Assistant & Lighting Design
  • Lindsay Eales
    Production Assistant & Process Doula
  • Julie Ferguson
    Production Coordinator
  • Dan Wool
    Sound Design and Score
  • Cheryl Green
    Audio Description
  • Thomas Reid
    Audio Description
  • Janita Frantsi
    Set Assistants
  • Angela Sekulic
    Set Assistants
  • The Film and Video Art Society of Alberta
    Equipment Rental & Insurance
  • The Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, University of Alberta
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Dean Budynski
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Kassidy Bullock
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Janelle Downing-Bake
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Brian Gatrix
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Cheryl Harwardt
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Hania Kura
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Alyssa Pietucha
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Andrew Smith
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Omar Yusuf
    Facilities & On-Site Support
  • Canada Council for the Arts
    Funding Support
  • Disability Dance Works, LLC
    Funding Support
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 33 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 4, 2019
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival
    Chicago
    United States
    April 6, 2019
    Public Preview Screening
  • Northwest Fest
    Alberta
    Canada
    May 7, 2019
  • All Bodies Dance Project
    Vancouver
    Canada
    June 1, 2019
  • Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    June 27, 2019
  • Ability Fest 2019
    Chennai
    India
    September 9, 2019
  • F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement)
    Vancouver, BC
    Canada
    September 19, 2019
  • National Dance Day at Kennedy Center
    Washington D.C.
    United States
    September 21, 2019
  • Superfest International Disability Film Festival
    San Francisco
    United States
    October 12, 2019
Director Biography - Danielle Peers, Alice Sheppard

DANIELLE PEERS is a community organizer, an artist, and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta.

They have made seven activist-oriented films, co-curated three art shows, and co-founded two arts collectives (KingCrip Productions and CRIPSiE). They have co-choreographed three dances, and have performed for eight years as a dancer with CRIPSiE, The Good Women Dance Collective, as well as dancing for choreographers Lindsay Eales and Alice Sheppard.

Danielle is the Director of the Media in Motion Lab, which supports creative methods for producing and sharing knowledges about human bodies in motion. DaniellePeers.com

ALICE SHEPPARD took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs.

Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton.

As an emerging, award-winning choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference. AliceSheppard.com

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

INCLINATIONS began as a moment of ‘crip’ play. Alice Sheppard and Danielle Peers finding themselves on a 90-foot ramp on “social street”: the main entrance of the Kinesiology building at the University of Alberta. After a lifetime of climbing awkward, ugly ramps hidden away behind buildings with barely enough room for one chair user, this wide-open slope-scape sent us both literally somersaulting over the rails in our wheelchairs for nearly an hour.

Drawing on Sheppard's work more broadly, the disabled body, enabled by the ramp, becomes a source of creative movement. Dancers can move in ways that they cannot move on flat surfaces and the ramp itself becomes an artistic object, transformed albeit temporarily into an environment that reveals connection, trust, beauty, and desire.

Choreographed, directed and shot from disability perspectives, this dance-on-video delves into the playful connection enabled where disability, community and ramp meet, as well as the institutional histories and discordant inclinations that lurk just below the surface.

ACCESS INFO

Subtitles: Both film and score have no text and therefore no subtitles.

Audio Description: As creators of film who live disability as a culture and aesthetic we are committed to creating accessible film through audio description.