minor matter
Ligia Lewis turns to the colour red – in between love and rage – while asking questions about (re)presentation, abstraction, and the limits of signification. Three performers push their bodies against the boundaries of the theatre while simultaneously showing their humble relationship with it. Exhaustion reaches increasingly high levels on a journey to the stage's essential matter: black. Lewis was awarded the prestigious Bessie award for minor matter.
• With minor matter, the Dominican-American choreographer Ligia Lewis presents part two of a triptych about blackness. While the first part, Sorrow Swag, (2015, Prix Jardin d’Europe) uses the color blue, in minor matter, Lewis turns to the color red to materialize thoughts between love and rage. We previously saw her in Kaaitheater as a dancer in Mette Ingvartsen’s 7 Pleasures and Eszter Salamon’s MONUMENT 0.
‘For the second year in a row, Ligia Lewis, offered the most vital new work in the American Realness festival: a beautiful, blistering trio.’
– The New York Times
‘The dancers threw themselves into knots, hoisted each other up against the walls. […] By the end of it all, Lewis had blood dripping from her knees, and the three were entirely out of breath. It felt like a celebration.’
– Art F City
'It turns out utopia is going to have to coexist with apocalypse and that both have been with us all along. Lewis’s work offers a kind of oblique blueprint for how joy, hope, anger, and despair are all always the case, using the paradigmatic fact of blackness.' – 4Columns
concept & choreography Ligia Lewis | with Ligia Lewis, Corey Scott-Gilbert, Tiran Willemse (in creation with Hector Thami Manekehla, Jonathan Gonzalez) | musical dramaturgy Michal Libera, Ligia Lewis | sound design Jassem Hindi | sound technician Neda Sanai | styling Alona Rodeh | light design Andreas Harder | light technician Joseph Wegmann | dramaturgy Ariel Efraim Ashbel (assistance Martha Glenn) | touring and distribution HAU Hebbel am Ufer / Nicole Schuchardt
minor matter is a production by Ligia Lewis in co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. Additional support provided by residencies at FD-13, PACT Zollverein, and collective address.
The presentation in Brussels is supported by the Nationales Performance Netz/International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Ontmoet Ligia Lewis na de voorstelling op 10/03