Ligia Lewis in conversation with Sorour Darabi

In this talk, choreographers Ligia Lewis and Sorour Darabi discuss the role of grief, ambivalence, and humour in their works. How does one find the forms for the complexity and the pain in topics? What are the similarities and differences in their individual choreographic approaches? In it, they strongly draw from the performances Still Not Still by Ligia Lewis and Sorour Darabi’s Savušun نوشووـــس.

Sorour Darabi is a self-taught Iranian artist living in Paris. Sorour Darabi was a member of the underground organisation ICCD back in Iran, and their proprietary festival Untimely already presented several of their works. During their studies at the CCN de Montpellier, Sorour Darabi shaped the Subject to Change solo, a performance that takes on the topic of temporal and spatial questioning. At the 2016 Festival Montpellier Danse, Sorour Darabi created the solo Farci.e that deals with terms like language, gender and sexual identity, and sexuality. Their new work Mowgli celebrated its premiere in 2021.

Ligia Lewis develops expressive concepts that lend shape to movements, language, affects, thoughts, relationships, expressions and to the bodies that carry them. Given cohesion by the logic of reciprocity, of chaos und play, she shapes space for that which emerges, and for the undetermined. In the and through the embodied practice, the body encounters aural and visual metaphors that materialise the enigmatic, the poetic and the dissonant factors in her work. Ligia Lewis won numerous awards, most recently the Tabori prize.

Duration: 60 min. / in English