Spazi di attrito (Spaces of Friction)

Ligia Lewis


10–11–12 september  | 2.30–5.30 pm
Teatro India
Advanced training practices for dancers and performers

Choreographer and visual artist Ligia Lewis invites dancers and performers to develop the imaginative, expressive and cosmic potential of a choreographic form of the “non sequitur”, creating friction between sense and non/sense. Through an approach that combines movement and voice, using a score inspired by the logic of physical storytelling, Lewis leads participants to explore the creation of fictional images at the limits of representation. The disorder and the indeterminate, the poetic and the dissonant will be experienced in a system of interdependencies and dynamics of attraction/repulsion capable of raising critical questions about the body.

In collaboration with DA.RE. – dance research.


Short Theatre 2023 workshops are free.
To register send an email to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com indicating in the subject workshop title, name, surname, phone number and a few words to introduce yourself.

Registration deadline: 25 August


Ligia Lewis works as a choreographer and dancer. Lewis’s works, often marked by expressions of physical intensity and humor, seek to animate subjects through physical forms of expression that disrupt normative conceptions of the body while negotiating the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the unknown. Through choreography, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Utilizing affect, empathy, and the sensate, her work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment. Lewis recently finished works including: A Plot / A Scandal (2022), Still Not Still (2021), deader than dead (film and live performance) (2020), the trilogy including: Water Will (in Melody) (2018), minor matter (2016), and Sorrow Swag (2014). 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). Her work was presented in multiple venues across Europe and the US such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Tanzquartier, Vienna; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kaaitheater, Brussels ; Arsenic, Lausanne ; High Line Art, New York; Performance Space, New York (2019); OGR Torino; Stedelijk, Amsterdam ; TATE Modern, London. Her work has also been presented at festivals and biennials such as the Ruhrtriennale, Bochum, Germany; Tanzplattform, Germany; Politik im Freien Theater Festival, Frankfurt; Liverpool Biennial; the Side Step Festival, Helsinki ; Biennale of Moving Images / Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Diver Festival, Tel Aviv; American Realness, New York; The Donaufestival, Krems, Austria and Julidans, Amsterdam. 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); and a Prix Jardin d’Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2015).


Spazi di attrito (Spaces of Friction) is part of RECIPROCITY, a section of Short Theatre that experiments with models of reciprocity and intersectionality between belonging, widespread origins and knowledge through bodily practices, narrative grafts and playful universes.

To Ligia Lewis is dedicated PRISMA 2023 – Complaint, A Lyric. PRISMA is a refraction project involving different locations and partners in the attempt to travel through the transdisciplinary work of an international artist who has radically modified the spectrum of performing arts.

ph. Moritz Freudenberg