Ligia Lewis in conversation with Faustin Linyekula

When festival curator and choreographer Ligia Lewis went to see the Statue of Loss performance as a visitor, the foundation was laid for the VOLUME UP festival. In this talk with the choreographer, Ligia Lewis details how attending this performance made a lasting impression on her, inspiring her in her own artistic action. Together, they talk about how they transfer and transform the experience of past violence into the now via their art.

Faustin Linyekula lives and works in Kisangani, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Together with Opiyo Okach, he founded the Gàara Company, Kenia’s first contemporary dance group, in Nairobi in 1997. In 2001, and back in the Congo, he created a space for dance and visual theatre in Kinshasa, offering training programs as well as support for research and productions, in the form of the Studios Kabako. He deals with the effects of decades-long wars, terror, fear and the economic collapse of himself, his family and friends. Faustin Linyekula regularly teaches in Africa, Europe, and the United States.

Ligia Lewis, choreographer and dancer, 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 was a tanzhaus nrw Factory Artist and won numerous awards, most recently the Tabori prize.

Duration: 90 min. / in English