Water Will (in Melody)

Following tanzhaus nrw guest spots with the award-winning plays “Sorrow Swag” and “minor matter”, choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis now presents the third instalment in her “BLUE, RED, WHITE” trilogy. This intricately woven choreography involving four dancers is steeped in melodrama. Struggling with the concept and the language of “will”, this dystopian fantasy creates a space in which to negotiate desire, imagination and the feeling of impending termination. A wet and pitted landscape unfolds with playful inventiveness: It becomes a setting for a fictitious story marked by instability, new creation and catastrophe. 

Ligia Lewis opens a world in which voices and gestures, touch and movement flow like waves – at once tender and stormy. Through mimetic technique, the dancers deal with the permeability in theatre: They create a materiality that seems fantastic, devoid of metaphoric and symbolic weight. Indulging in the possibilities of haptic perception, the sense dissolves, only to reform again. Through processes of alienation, disposal and realisation, this melodrama probes for the boundaries of its own composition. In this way, it awakens its protagonists’ emotional constitution as well as that of theatre itself. 

Ligia Lewis, Factory Artist at tanzhaus nrw alongside Claire Cunningham and Choy Ka Fai, shows her work in the theatre as well as in museums, at the Tate Modern in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for example. She describes her pieces as affective choreographies, circling around questions of social inscriptions into the body. She is a recipient of the renowned “Bessie Award” for her latest play “minor matter” and was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe for “Sorrow Swag”. Shortly after its premiere at Berlin’s HAU Hebbel am Ufer, “Water Will (in Melody)” will come to tanzhaus nrw. 

Duration: 90 min.