Ligia Lewis works as an artist, choreographer, dancer, and director. She presents her work on stage, in a gallery or museum, through film or exhibition format. Lewis's works are often marked by physical and emotional intensities by which comedy and tragedy collide. Through her work, the performer and audience confront a confluence of processes that disrupt normative conceptions of the body. Her work slides between the familiar and unfamiliar. At the same time, she negotiates the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the un/known. Her expressive concepts form movement, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, and utterances within a highly defined choreographic landscape. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space(s) for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work, sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant. Lewis's work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment. For Lewis, choreography is the movement of ideas across bodies meticulously conceived, crafted, and directed— a political act, a writing against the grain of the racial regime of representationalism and (black) erasure.
She recently finished works including: "A Plot / A Scandal" (2022), “Still Not Still" (2021), "deader than dead" (2020). In Fall 23’, Lewis opened her first solo exhibition, "study now steady" at Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (CARA) in NYC (US), which includes the newly commissioned film “A Plot, A Scandal” (2023) departing from the stage work of the same name. A survey of her stage works was presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, DE) under the title “Complaint, A Lyric” in November 2023, which included the trilogy: "Water Will (in Melody)" (2018), "minor matter" (2016), and "Sorrow Swag" (2014). Further commissions include "Sensation 1/This Interior" (High Line Commission, 2019); "so something happened get over it; no nothing happened get with it" (Jaou Tunis, 2018); "Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama" (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo, 2015); $$$ (Tanz im August 2012); and "Sensation 1" (sommer. bar, Tanz im August 2011 and Basel Liste, 2014). Lewis is one of the participating artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.
She’s presented her work in multiple venues across Europe, the US, and abroad, including the MOCA, Los Angeles; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Tanzquartier, Vienna; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Spazio Griot/Mattatoio, Rome; Mudam Museum, Luxembourg; Wien Modern, Vienna; Kaserne, Basel; Redcat Theater, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; beursschouwburg, Brussels; Kaaitheater, Brussels; Arsenic, Lausanne; High Line Art, New York; Performance Space, New York; OGR Torino; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; TATE Modern, London, and Cordova, Barcelona; and Human Resources Los Angeles, LA. Her work has also been presented at festivals and biennials such as the Short Theater Festival (Prisma artist), Rome; Ruhrtriennale, Bochum, Germany; Tanzplattform, Germany; Spring Festival, Utrecht; Festival Otoño, La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Politik im Freien Theater Festival, Frankfurt; Liverpool Biennial; My Wild Flag, Stockholm; Joao Tunis; Side Step Festival, Helsinki; Biennale of Moving Images / Centre D'Art Contemporain, Geneva; American Realness, New York; The Donaufestival, Krems, Austria and Julidans, Amsterdam.
Lewis is the recipient of the German Theater Award Der FAUST in the category of Performance in Dance (2023) for "A Plot / A Scandal," the Tabori Award in the category of Distinction (2021); a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants Award (2018); a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production for minor matter (2017); a Factory Artist residency at tanzhaus nrw (2017-19); and a Prix Jardin d' Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2014). Her work has been presented in multiple venues across Europe and the U.S. and is currently touring.
"A theater is perhaps a kind of vise, a mechanism for durational holding. The best artists working in the form understand that whatever is placed between the proscenium's jaws—sound, light, language, bodies, movement—is so clutched to facilitate the material's irrevocable transformation, often via brute force. Ligia Lewis is one such artist." - Catherine Damman (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University) on Ligia Lewis