Ligia Lewis WATER WILL (IN MELODY) and MINOR MATTER Announced At Performance Space New York

Performance Space New York concludes its No Series with two performances by Ligia Lewis: minor matter (May 21-22)and Water Will (in Melody) (May 28-29), the latter two installments in her BLUE RED WHITE trilogy interrogating and complicating certain types of embodiment in relationship to the frame of the theater-and particularly the black box-space. The trilogy began with Sorrow Swag in blue and continued with minor matter in red; its conclusion, the U.S. premiere performance Water Will (in Melody), is a melodrama in black and white. Through her use of color, embodiment, and dramaturgical unruliness, Lewis twists ingrained symbols of the body and the theater with playful abandon. Resisting the tyranny of transparency and representationalism, she hopes to carve out a space for opacity and the state of not knowing.

In minor matter, Lewis turns to the color red, materializing thoughts between love and rage, and considers creating space for the potentials and possibilities of black life within the frame of the black box. Built on the logic of interdependence, the theater's parts-light, sound, image, and architecture-intertwine with three performers in minor matter, giving life to a vibrant social and poetic space. minor matter opens with excerpts from Remi Raji's poem "Dreamtalk"-an invitation into the space of not knowing. Sound travels across musical epochs and the histories they carry-from the early Renaissance (marking the onset of Europe's colonial project), to Ravel's "Bolero"-remixed-as-a-house-track with added excerpts of Donna Summer, Arthur Russell, and later excerpts from zeitkratzer & Terre Thaemlitz, Luc Ferrari, and more-to arrive at the poetics of the intimate present, where three performers fall into a precarious entanglement.

Water Will (in Melody) exists within the final operative color in the trilogy: white, and its relation to black. This work meshes the monstrous and grotesque with the melodrama of the Southern gothic. A cavernous landscape becomes host to a dystopian fantasy, enacted by four performers. Creative (im)possibility becomes the engine by which a state of hopelessness, darkness, and unexamined emotions are explored. Lewis describes the piece as both the "most explicit" work in the trilogy, due to its use of over-signification, excess, exteriorization, and mime-yet also the most abstract, as it creates chaos from these modes of hyper-representation.

Lewis notes the questions she asked as she conceived Water Will (in Melody) and the trilogy itself, "How can I create a complicated, monstrous thing, building a language for another kind of possibility in the theater-in this case in black and white-that at times explicitly pronounces itself, to then shy away into the unknown? I hope that the poetics of my work destabilize certain conventions of thinking and doing. I get excited by the thought of what might emerge when certain logics are set in motion. Across my work, I'm trying to resist what I feel at times can be a sort of essentialized project, particularly for racialized bodies-so I try swerving, committing myself to chaos and play, and the opacity that might transpire." She adds, "For me, the invitation to make theater is to create another possibility, without denying the many fucked up realities of the world we live in."

The No Series, comprising works that locate power and creativity in refusal, began in January, 2019, and has featured First Nation Dialogues: Kin, curated by Emily Johnson, with Joshua Pether, S.J Norman, Mariaa Randall, Genevieve Grieves, Paola Balla, and Muriel Miguel; niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa's Black Power Naps installation and performance Choir of the Slain (Part X); and Hannah Black's video installation Beginning, End, None, and Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable's performance Penumbra.It will also feature I wanna be with you everywhere, organized by Arika, Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Johnson, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard and Constantina Zavitsanos (April 11-14), and Gillian Walsh's dance performance Fame Notions (May 17-19), before concluding with Ligia Lewis' performances.

minor matter will be performed May 21-22 at 7pm, and Water Will (in Melody) will be performed May 28-29 at 7pm at Performance Space New York (150 1st Avenue, 4th Floor). General admission tickets are $25, and student and senior tickets are $15; they are available at performancespacenewyork.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.