Ligia Lewis

[US/DE]

Ligia Lewis is a Dominican-American choreographer and dancer whose work, described by Art Agenda as "deeply elegant and subtly orchestrated," interrogates the metaphors and social inscriptions of the body.

Raised in Miami and currently based in Berlin, Lewis probes both the new school of critical performance theory and the nuances of embodiment. "I don’t want to talk about identity within performance," she has written. "I’m more likely to think, usually, how to fuck up, fuck with, and fuck identity out of itself so long as it insists on the 'I' coming out first. Performance offers a magical opportunity to be in practice with so many things outside the self."

In her recent work minor matter, Lewis articulates a sensitive argument for minoritarian politics. Between light and shadow, reference and imagination, affect and embodiment, she opens up a vital celebratory space where ingrained symbols are twisted by the intimate poetics of the performative moment. In a time of anti-blackness, she suggests, minor matter inhabits the black box saturated with the fugitivity of black expression. Whereas sadness and the color blue stood in the foreground of her previous work Sorrow Swag (part one/BLUE), which was awarded the Prix Jardin d'Europe, Lewis here turns to the color red, materializing thoughts between love and rage.

As a dancer, Lewis has performed and toured extensively with and alongside Eszter Salamon, Mette Ingvartsen, Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Jeremy Wade, Wu Tsang, and Les Ballets C de la B. Her work has been shown at Abrons Arts Center/American Realness, New York; Impulstanz, Vienna; Flax/Fahrenheit, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Les Subsistances, Lyon; Centre National de la Danse, Paris; Theatre Garonne, Toulouse; Tanz im August, Berlin; NGBK, Berlin; Basel Liste, Basel; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Sophiensaele Theater, Berlin; and Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater, Berlin.