ARTIST TALK: LIGIA LEWIS

Ligia Lewis is a choreographer and dancer. Through choreography, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Her choreographic work slides between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. The body, in and through embodied practice, meets sonic and visual metaphors materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant in her work.

Her recent performance trilogy includes “Water Will (in Melody)” (2018), a gothic tale set in black and white; “minor matter” (2016), a poetic work illuminated by red; and “Sorrow Swag” (2014), presented in a saturated blue.

Ligia’s latest major stage work “Still Not Still” (2021) was completed in April 2021 and has been produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. The work will go on tour starting in August. This piece was preceded by a smaller work for the museum context, “deader than dead” (2020), a work commissioned by the Made in LA Biennial/Hammer Museum (US). It is currently presented as a film.

Her other works 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).

As a dancer, Lewis has performed and toured extensively for artists including Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, Les Ballets C de la B, among others. She has collaborated with musical artist Twin Shadow, visual artist Wu Tsang, and with the DJ collective NON Worldwide.

Lewis is the recipient of 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); funding from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2017-18); and a Prix Jardin d’ Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2015). Lewis’ stage works are managed and produced, in part, by HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater. Her work has been presented in multiple venues and is currently touring internationally.

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