Ligia Lewis

Full of dark humour and surrealist imagery, Ligia Lewis’ work “Still Not Still” evokes with poetic force a unique theatrical language, disrupting any fantasy of historical progress. The choreographic composition for seven performers deals with the centuries-old and ongoing exclusions of black and non-white people from the historical record. 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 the “complainte” – a prolonged lament or musical poem. 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.

 “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