PRISMA 2023 : LIGIA lEWIS

Complaint, A Lyric
Ligia Lewis in the city of Rome

PRISMA 2023 is dedicated to the choreographer and visual artist Ligia Lewis, an expansive and refracted project involving different places and partners that offers the city a chance to transverse the work of an international artist. Complaint, A Lyric connects a series of actions by this transdisciplinary artist, investigating her choreographic production, audiovisual experimentation and deepening her aesthetic as well as political reflections in a talk. During her stay in Rome, Ligia Lewis will come into contact with various communities that inhabit the city, through an intensive workshop aimed at performers and artists in training, plus a series of appointments with CivicoZero, to practice the geometries of reciprocity together.

Ligia Lewis explores those ghostly traces of history that, juxtaposed with the new oiled engineering of inequality, besiege blackness. At the crossroads of dance, theatre and visual arts, she weaves together scenic writings imbued with colour, imperceptible whispers and lamentations, mixing references to a base materialism of the body that appeals comically to tragedy. She plays with the monotony of duration and with the violence that can arise from repetition.
In her shows, Ligia Lewis works by cracking forms, decomposing movement layer by layer; obsessed with falls and collisions, with the ghosts that haunt gesture; attracted by uncomfortable intervals and pauses, where an unexpected dynamism gives way to an impassivity that threatens the threshold of inaction. To keep away from ideas of bodily integrity, which does not concern black people, themselves always considered in pieces, more flesh than bodies, Lewis proceeds according to a tactic of compositional disassembly.
All of her research over the last years questions dying, starting from the fact that not all deaths are the same, that there is a death that surpasses the physical one, a death that has always been attached to certain bodies. She insists on this until reaching the irreducible core of bereavement, and it is there that her complaint becomes anti-cathartic, because there is nothing to reconcile.