Still Not Still

“Liga Lewis has focused her practice on creating other possibilities for viewing and sensing the world in order to reflect on relation and empathy.” – Frieze Online

Liga 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. 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 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.