Lewis filmed A Plot, A Scandal in the historic quarters of Rimini, Italy, a site the artist sees upholding “Eurocentric ideals of (white) Man’s dominion over the land.” One recurring aspect of the landscape, the towering cypress trees in ordered rows, stands as an example. The film opens with the sonic resonance of the church bell imaged later as a towering monument, pointing to the Christian ideals that served as both a precursor to the Enlightenment and bedfellow in maintaining this hierarchical order. Weaving together multiple historical epics, and political and mythical narratives, the work uses ideas of spectacle and scandal to point toward the scandal of the continued dispossession of “Europe’s Others,” as Lewis describes them.
“Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? Is it the demand for repair? Or the otherwise brutish desire for revenge?” Lewis explores these questions by way of the stories of philosopher and slave trade beneficiary John Locke who coined the relationship between “life, liberty, and property,” the Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, and her great-grandmother Lolón Zapata.
This film was commissioned by the Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (CARA) as part of Lewis’s solo exhibition study now steady.
study now steady is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator, with production and exhibition design by Agustin Schang, and curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky.
Images by Liz Ligon
A Plot A Scandal film by Ligia Lewis
Featuring Corey Scott-Gilbert and Ligia Lewis
Scored by George Lewis Jr (AKA Twin Shadow) and Wynne Bennett
Commissioned by Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
Concept, writing, and directing: Ligia Lewis
Director of Photography: Moritz Freudenberg
Production Design: Ligia Lewis and Moritz Freudenberg. Dramaturgy for Film: Dragana Jovanovic. Composer: George Lewis Jr (AKA Twin Shadow) and Wynne Bennett. Drums: Guillermo E. Brown. Costume Design: Sadak. Research/Dramaturgy: Sarah Lewis-Cappellari. Voice over: George Lewis Jr and Ligia Lewis. Gaffer: Robert Samplawski. Light Assistants: Elisabeth Rooth and Manuel Rossi. Camera Assistant: Ferdinand Klotzky. Editor: Dragana Jovanovic. Sound Design: George Lewis Jr. Colorist: Moritz Freudenberg. Title Design: Govoi/ a23 Studio House. Produced by Céline Rodrigues Monteiro.
Special thanks: Justin Franics Kennedy, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, Joseph Wegmann, Anton Kats, Dragana Bulut, Giacomo Benni, Santarcangelo Festival, Town of Santarcangelo, Teatro Amintore Galli, Uferstudios Berlin, Dino.Berlin, FILMGERÄTEVERLEIH, See You rent GmbH, Combo.
study now steady (2023), live commission on view @ Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (CARA)
The show's live commission, study now steady, is a series of choreographic studies, exposing the scores and practices that have given form to stage and film works such as minor matter (2016), Still Not Still (2021) , Water Will (in Melody) (2018), and deader than dead (2020). “Dancing,” as Lewis says “[produces] its own theoretical framework, its own set of rules, and its own ethos, coherent to itself.”
Through dark humor and in the form of a critique, Lewis mobilizes embodied activations that act as unrelenting reminders that “ghosts don’t die so easily.”
study now steady is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator, with production and exhibition design by Agustin Schang, and curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky.
Images by Liz Ligon
study now steady (2023)
@ Center for Art, Research, and Alliances
A Plot, A Scandal film
on view @ CARA
study now steady (2023)
study now steady @ CARA
deader than dead (2020)
on view @ CARA
A Plot / A Scandal (2022) stage work
A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage. Guided by the questions of whom this pleasure is for and at what expense, Lewis's new plot explores the stage where scandals abound.
Weaving together historical, anecdotal, political, and mythical narratives − ranging from an interest in the Enlightenment thinker John Locke, Maria Olofa (Wolofa) in the slave revolt of Santo Domingo in 1521, Cuban artist and revolutionary Jose Aponte, and Lewis’s great grandmother, a figure Lewis turns to within her plot as a guide of resistance − the choreographer constructs the poetics of refusal at the edges of representation. A dance between affect and embodiment, seeing and being seen, A Plot/A Scandal is a scene in the making where the excitement for that which does not fit might find its place.
Concept, Choreography, Direction, Text: Ligia Lewis / Performance: Ligia Lewis / Assistance choreography, Performance: Corey Scott-Gilbert, Justin Kennedy / Research, Dramaturgy: Sarah Lewis-Cappellari / Research: Michael Tsouloukidse / Lighting Design, Technical Direction: Joseph Wegmann / Music Composition, Sound Design: George Lewis Jr AKA Twin Shadow, Wynne Bennett / Sound: Manuel Pessoa de Lima / Set Design: Ligia Lewis / Costume Design: SADAK / Stage Technician: Şenol Şentürk / Production, Administration: Sina Kießling / Production, Distribution: Nicole Schuchardt / Production assistance: Julia Leonhardt
Still Not Still @ HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater, Berlin
For Made in L.A. 2020, Lewis has conceived and directed deader than dead, which began with an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance. Utilizing this expression as a type of stasis, Lewis initially developed a choreography for ten dancers that remained expressively flat or dead, resisting any narrative or representational hold tied to a climactic build or progression. Lewis had relegated deader than dead to this corner of the gallery (a kind of “dead” space) where the dance would ostensibly emerge, although deadened in its repetition, limited in its fate, as it ricocheted from wall to wall. She abandoned this recursive ensemble of death due to COVID-19, reducing the cast to four performers and pivoting to a more traditionally theatrical presentation. In this new work the dancers use Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness) as the beginning of a work that unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample. The work is full of play but is also a meditation on “playing,” or acting, as well as on tragedy’s recurring cycles and familiarity within Black and brown experience; on time, as it loops; on performance; on touch, as an act of both care and violence. The work is built in the form of a musical lament, a protracted complaint on loop performed ad infinitum, decomposing itself along the way. Yet Lewis presents her grim subject—the farce of progress—with a healthy dose of humor and comedic tropes, riffing on the concept of “corpsing”—a theater term for unintentional laughter at a noncomedic moment, “playing straight” during a humorous scene, or simply breaking character. Corpsing, in the words of the philosopher David Marriott, is associated with “moments in which an actor exceeds the limits of theater and no longer is in command of a role.”1 But in those slippages in character, he states: “if black life matters, it cannot be as . . . the poetical grasp of a historical meaning, nor as the breathless emergence of a politics of ascent. For such roles are not meant for the living; they depend on the idea that blacks can only perform and perfect the role of their deaths, and that they should do so forever.”2
https://hammer.ucla.edu/made-la-2020-version/ligia-lewis
deader than dead by Ligia Lewis (concept, artistic direction, choreography, set design)
in creation with:
Performers: Ligia Lewis, Jasper Marsalis, Jasmine Orpilla, and Austyn Rich
Sound dramaturgy, design, and film score: Slauson Malone, with excerpts by S McKenna
Costume design: Marta Martino
Texts: Ligia Lewis, Ian Randolph, Shakespeare, and Ian McKellen on Shakespeare
Song: Guillaume de Machaut, “Complainte: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (Le remède de Fortune),” ca. 1340s
Wigs: Gabrielle Curebal
Film Credits
Conceived and directed by Ligia Lewis
Produced by Reza Monahan Studio and Jim Fetterley
deader than dead (2020) @ Made in LA/Hammer Museum
deader than dead (2020)
Water Will (in Melody)
“Water Will (in Melody)” is a devised choreographic work for four performers using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of "the will", this dystopic fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe.
Lewis initiates this world in which voice, gesture, touch and movement, flow like waves ––both gentle and turbulent. Through the language of mimesis, Lewis and her performers engage with the porousness of the theater by producing fantastical-like materiality translucent to its metaphoric and symbolic weight.
Surrendering to the possibilities of the haptic, sense gets un-done to get re-done, paving way for an-“othered” organization of sight and touch.
Through this process of alienation, exteriorization, and materialization, this melodrama touches the borders of its own making giving life to both the emotional landscape of its protagonists as well as to the theater itself.
Concept & Choreography/Direction: Ligia Lewis
in creation with performers : Susanne Sachsse, Dani Brown, Titilayo Adebayo
Dramaturgy: Maja Zimmermann
Sound design: S. McKenna, Jassem Hindi
Light design: Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Technical director & light technician: Catalina Fernandez
Stage design: Eike Böttcher
Costume design: sowrong studio
Assistant: Gilad Bendavid, Carina Zox
Production: Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer
Co-production: Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 / Centre D’Art Contemporain (Geneva), tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), Arsenic Centre d'art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), donaufestival (Krems), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Münchner Kammerspiele
Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe
Supported by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC)
Thanks to: Jarrett Gregory for residency support
Water Will (in Melody) @ Performance Space New York
photo by Maria Baranova
Water Will (in Melody) @ Performance Space New York
photo by Maria Baranova
Water Will (in Melody) @ PICA
photo by Sarah Maguier
minor matter 2016
minor matter is the second part of the trilogy (BLUE, RED, WHITE). Two discursive apparatuses are at play—blackness and the spectacle. The work unfolds multi-directionally, creating poetics of dissonance from which questions of re-presentation, presentation, abstraction and the limits of signification emerge.
Throughout the choreography, the performers push their bodies against the boundaries of the stage, while simultaneously illustrating a humble relationship between their bodies and the space that encapsulates them. The performers get exhausted as their bodies strip the stage of its formal mystique to approach its matter—black. Built on the logic of interdependence, the theater’s parts—light, sound, image, and architecture—become entangled with the three performers, giving life to a vibrant social and poetic space. In this work, Lewis turns to the color red to materialize thoughts between love and rage.
opening lines of minor matter are excerpts taken from Remi Raji’s “Dream Talk”
Concept & Choreography: Ligia Lewis
in creation with performers: Jonathan Gonzalez, Hector Thami Manekehla
replacement: Tiran Willemse , Corey Scott-Gilbert
Dramaturgy: Michal Libera/Ligia Lewis
Sound Design: Jassem Hindi
Styling: Alona Rodeh,
Lights: Andreas Harder, Joseph Wegmann
Dramaturgy: Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Assistance: Martha Glenn
Press & Production: björn & björn/Nicole Schuchardt - HAU Hebbel am Ufer
Production by Ligia Lewis Co-produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V.
Additional support provided by residencies at FD-13, PACT Zollverein, 8:tension/Life Long Burning and collective address
photo by Martha Glenn
http://moussemagazine.it/product/mousse-57/
minor matter @ BMW TATE LIVE EXHIBITION TEN DAYS SIX NIGHTS
curated by Catherine Wood, Isabelle Maidement, and Andrea Lissoni
photo by Martha Glenn
minor matter @ Performance Space New York
photo by Julia Cervantes
minor matter @ HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater, Berlin
minor matter @ OGR Torino
Dance is What We Make of Falling
curated by Samuele Piazza
minor matter @ HAU
photo by Martha Glenn
Sorrow Swag (2014)
Sorrow Swag, the first of Lewis’s trilogy, takes the color blue as a point of departure to work through grief and sadness. The performance uses texts and images derived from mid-century classical theater, Beckett and Anouilh, to interrogate race, authorship, gender, and grief. Sorrow Swag disrupts the canonical by means of an imaginative reformulation that prioritizes sensation. The work takes place in an immersive visual and auditory space and uses color as a synesthetic texture and emotional referent to produce a choreography that engages language, text, affect and embodiment. Sorrow Swag takes race and melancholy as points of departure for an experience that unfolds through the language of sadness.
Concept & Choreography/Direction by Ligia Lewis
created with performers Brian Getnick, Andrew Hardwidge
Light design by Ligia Lewis
Musical Score and Live Accompaniment by Twin Shadow
Sorrow Swag is a production by Ligia Lewis. Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe with support from Human Resources Los Angeles, ADA Studio Berlin and Pieter Space (Los Angeles).
Sensation 1 / This Interior (High Line Performance) 2019
For the High Line, Lewis expands her solo work Sensation 1 into an hour-long performance for six dancers, scored and performed live by Twin Shadow. The figure of a vocalist who holds her concluding note forms the basis for Sensation 1/This Interior. Lewis stretches this climactic moment into a sustained articulation of feeling and affect across multiple bodies. An ecstatic choreographed form emerges into a collective experience.
Concept / Choreography: Ligia Lewis
Live Musical Score & Accompaniment: Twin Shadow
performed by: Trinity Bobo, Jumatatu Poe, Miguel Guzman, Rebecca Gaul, Emma Cohen, Stephanie Peña
Ligia Lewis, Sensation 1/This Interior. A High Line Performance. On view July 23, 24, and 25, 2019, on the High Line at 14th Street. Photo by Rowa Lee. Courtesy of the High Line.
curator: Melanie Kress
Water Will (in Melody) @ MCA Chicago
photo by Maria Baranova
minor matter @ Converso
https://converso.online/en/archive/minor-matter
Water Will (in Melody) @ Kaaitheater
photo by Maria Baranova
Water Will (in Melody) @ Redcat Theater
minor matter @ Performance Space New York
photo by Julia Cervantes
Minor Matter @ Human Resources Los Angeles
by Ligia Lewis
with performer Kenneth Nicholson
musical arrangent WYNN
photo by Sammy Loren
so something happened, get over it; no nothing happened, get with it
Water Pressure curated by Myriam Ben Salah for Jaou Tunis 2018
Water Will (in Melody) 2018 @ Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 Centre d’Art Contemporain / Geneva
curated by Andrea Bellini and Andrea Lissoni
photo by Mathilda Olmi
Sorrow Swag @ Ufer Studios Berlin
photo by Martha Glenn
Water Will (in Melody) @ Tanzhaus Duesseldorf
Minor Matter @ HRLA
https://www.artforum.com/performance/catherine-damman-on-ligia-lewis-s-minor-matter-at-human-resources-la-50144
photo by Sammy Loren
Water Will (in Melody) @ Kaaitheater
photo by Maria Basanova
minor matter @ Hollins University
minor matter @ HAU
photo credit: Martha Glenn
Water Will (in Melody) @ Donau Festival
photo by Donau Festival
Sorrow Swag ( among other monsters) @ Jessica Silverman Gallery 2019
As part of Empathy Lab , Lewis reimagines her former stage work- Sorrow Swag, to further illuminate the politics of bearing witness to a body in flux and in a constant state of transformation. Relationally at play with the other objects in the room, Lewis uses monsters, understood culturally and racially, as a point of departure for this iteration.
Concept/Choreography : Ligia Lewis
sound: Twin Shadow
light: Joseph Wegmann
photo: Jennifer Bindman, on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery
minor matter 2016
photo: Martha Glenn
Water Will (in Melody) @ Redcat Theater
minor matter @ TATE MODERN
photo by Brotherton Lockday
$$$
photo by Kandis Williams
Sensation 1 @ Tanz im August (sommer.bar) 2011
https://www.tanzforumberlin.de/produktion/sensation-1-conviction-series/
Sensation 1 @ NGBK gallery Berlin 2015
“This single gesture of singing extended through time explodes its references to singing as such and creates a different kind of affect altogether. A sculptural choreography takes form, what is left is an abstractly sensing body articulating a particular sensation of the sensational”- Timothy Murray
The amplification and extension of a moment in time, the utterance and suspension of a final spellbinding note made mute, the gesture of a singing body in rapture is illuminated in total silence. Sensation 1 is a social study of the cult of the pop “Diva.” Over time the singular gesture potentiates the richness and expressivity of the body at work in sustained climax. The choreography is reduced to its essentials, as we witness the effort of a body wailing silence.
Concept/Direction: Ligia Lewis
Performance: Ligia Lewis (Tanz im August), Martin Hansen (NGBK gallery, Art Basel Liste Program 2014)
Music: Whitney Houston “I will always love you” (Divas Live, 1999 live performance)
produced with support from sommer.bar/TanzimAugust/Basel Liste 2014
photo by Alex Coggin
$$$ @ Tanz im August / X- Choreographen 2012
https://www.academia.edu/18145173/Movement_Sensation_Texture_Ligia_Lewis
photo by Kandis Williams
talk with Rizvana Bradley and Erin Manning / Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum (Hold Me Now- Studium Generale Rietveld Academie) 2018