Still Not Still

Full of fathomless humour and surrealistic pictures, choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis conjures up a poetic theatre language in Still Not Still that jolts every fantasy of historic progress. The choreographic composition for seven performers* is concerned with the centuries-old and continuing exclusion of black and non-white people from historiography. Inspired by the Italian painting of a black Madonna from the 8^th century as well as by a French “Complainte” (lament) from the 14^th century, this performance addresses these voids as a “lacuna” (dark den). Ligia Lewis turns toward the dark den of the theatre space in which she negotiates the past to enable the coming of a different future.
Simultaneously a tragedy and a comedy, the dance piece avails itself of the playfully blank expressivity and dry humour of “deadpan”. Ligia Lewis, former Factory Artist at tanzhaus nrw and curator of the VOLUME UP festival, devises a world beyond time here, in which, aided by the creative force of fictionalisation, dark gaps can be detected, as the standstill starts moving. Assuming that historiography is fallible and inadequate, the question comes up what could emerge if it were buried. Still Not Still takes shape as a sustained lament and opposes history with a complaint – a musically performative objection.

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: 105 min.

“Facts are perceptions and surfaces. You go round and round and fall on the ground. What is the remedy for bad fate. What is deader than dead ?” Ligia Lewis