Ligia Lewis - Still Not Still

“Facts are simply perceptions and surfaces. You go round and round fall on the ground. What is the condition of bad fait(h)? What is deader than dead?” - Ligia Lewis

Ligia Lewis develops a choreography for seven performers, a composition that emerges out of the dark space that is history for black and non-Western subjects. In response to this exclusion from the past, Lewis leverages darkness as a site for critical imaging and imagining. She makes use of the Early musical form of a “complainte” – a prolonged lament or musical poem. Through the confluence of comedy and tragedy, Lewis evokes with poetic and comedic force a unique theatrical language full of dark humor and surrealist imagery, disrupting any fantasy of historical progress.

Thus, Lewis imagines a world out of time, a world at a standstill. Can a history full of bad faith, gaps, and holes, particularly for those that fall outside its purview, be left to the past? Can history then, or a particular form of it, be deadened, exposed as a corpse, and stripped of reason? Given history is fallible and insufficient, and overdetermined by its victors, what might emerge once it is laid to rest? Still Not Still emerges from these conceptual questions, and, in response, makes an attempt to step to the side of the past.