Still Not Still

Ligia Lewis comments on the exclusion of Black and Non-White people from historical records with gallows humor, her unique choreographic language, and the musical form of the lament. Still Not Still stages a world beyond the reckoning of time as a somber swansong for the idea of progress.

Full of dark humor and surrealist imagery, Ligia Lewis’ Still Not Still evokes with poetic force a theatrical language that disrupts fantasies of progress. The choreography for seven performers addresses centuries of exclusion of Black and non-White people from the historical record. In response, Lewis uses darkness as a site for critical imaging, drawing on the early musical form of the complainte – a prolonged lament. She imagines a world out of time, at a standstill. Can a history built on bad faith and gaps be left to the past, exposed as a corpse and stripped of reason? If history is fallible, insufficient, and overdetermined by victors, what emerges once it is laid to rest? Still Not Still arises from these questions, attempting to step aside from 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