Walker Art Center Presents
OUT THERE 2024
Ligia Lewis
A Plot/A Scandal
Thursday–Saturday, January 11–13, 2024
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater
A Plot/A Scandal
Concept, Choreography, Artistic Direction, Text
LIGIA LEWIS
Performance
LIGIA LEWIS
Choreographic Assistance, Alternating Performer
COREY SCOTT-GILBERT, JUSTIN KENNEDY
Research/Dramaturgy
SARAH LEWIS-CAPPELLARI
Research
MICHAEL TSOULOUKIDSE
Lighting Design & Technical Direction
JOSEPH WEGMANN
Music Composition & Sound Design
GEORGE LEWIS JR AKA TWIN SHADOW & WYNNE BENNETT
Voice over
GEORGE LEWIS JR AKA TWIN SHADOW
Sound Technician
WYNNE BENNETT
Set Design
LIGIA LEWIS
Costume
SADAK
Stage Technician
AMELIA CHARTER
Production & Administration
SINA KIEßLING
Production & International Distribution
NICOLE SCHUCHARDT
Program Note
A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage. Guided by the questions of whom this pleasure is for and at what expense, Lewis's new plot explores the stage where scandals abound.
Weaving together historical, anecdotal, political, and mythical narratives - ranging from an interest in the Enlightenment thinker John Locke, Maria Olofa (Wolofa) in the slave revolt of Santo Domingo in 1521, Cuban artist and revolutionary Jose Aponte, and Lewis’s great grandmother, a figure Lewis turns to within her plot as a guide of resistance – the choreographer constructs the poetics of refusal at the edges of representation. A dance between affect and embodiment, seeing and being seen, A Plot/A Scandal is a scene in the making where the excitement for that which does not fit might find its place.
The work unfolds through the following parts:
Prelude
Plot 1 John Locke
Plot 2 Rebellion
Intermezzo: John Locke cleans up his mess
Plot 3: Story of Lolon / fuck up the plot
Outro: Repair ?
Accessibility Notes
Content and Sensory Notes: This performance contains graphic sexual content, nudity, fog, lights that flicker and change quickly, sudden loud sounds, and profanity. Additionally, there are a few moments where performers will perform off the stage near the front aisles of the theater space.
For more information about accessibility at the Walker, visit our Access page.
Bibliography
Bernasconi, Robert & Mann, Anika Maaza. “The contradictions of racism : Locke, slavery, and the two treatises.” In Andrew Valls (ed.), Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Cornell University Press, 2005.
Bradley, Rizvana and Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Four Theses on Aesthetics - Journal #120 September 202, e-Flux, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/.
Brand, Dionne, and Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Duke University Press Books, 2022.
D’ Olea, Dixa Ramirez. “Political Concepts: Indolence.” YouTube, 24 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg0GISYD9Qw.
Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Finch, Aisha. “‘What Looks like a Revolution’: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843–1844.” Journal of Women's History, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 112–134., https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2014.0007.
Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Glissant, Èdouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiyia : „The Plot of Her Undoing“, Feminist Art Coalition, 3. Nov. 2019, https://feministartcoalition.org/essays-list/saidiya-hartman.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Jackson, Zakiyyah. “Sense of Things.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–48.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.
Scott, David. “Preface: Evil Beyond Repair.” Small Axe, 1 March 2018
Scott, David: “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” https://libcom.org/article/re-enchantment-humanism-interview-sylvia-wynter.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, p. 64.
Welchman, Jennifer. “Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 25, no. 1, 1995, pp. 67–81., https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1995.10717405.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.
Learn More
The following is an excerpt from a conversation on family, performance, and how resistance appears through the body as traces of history between Ligia Lewis and her sister and dramaturge, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, for the Walker Reader.
Sarah Lewis-Cappellari
I wanted to continue our dialogue in the context of these pages by centering Lolón, our great grandmother, whom we never met and have remarkably little knowledge about and yet who, in a multitude of ways, becomes the ground and the spirit of the plots you construct throughout your performance. For example, within the context of the work, you address how your proclivity for trouble “has everything and nothing to do” with the role Lolón played in the Dominican Republic, in a village that Lolón’s family called Dios Dirá (God will tell). You explain how Lolón in her spiritual praxis defied a regime that wanted to obliterate all ceremonies and gatherings that did not abide by Western Judeo-Christian traditions, and how the role she played in her community, until today, is overwhelmingly framed as deviant/scandalous. Can you begin by discussing how you approximated yourself to a family member we know so very little about and yet who you knew/sensed was central to the topics you wanted to address in A Plot/A Scandal?
Ligia Lewis
I wanted to stake a claim for a deviance that I felt permeated my being, but that I also attribute to embodiment, more generally—a way of seeing and being in the (Western) world. I’m interested in resistance, not in a romantic sense, but how resistance appears through the body as traces of history. And what I mean when I say that is that, of course, I could not know about Lolón without prying—without sticking my nose into the darker corners of our family history and History more generally. Her story is made obscure to me, not only because of the more personal-familial ghosting of her life, but also because this region is rendered obscure still to a grander narrative of “civil”-ized progress. Dios Dirá is a village with histories of marronage [the process of extricating oneself from slavery] that are present in the landscape, the speech, the air, and the movement of the people who reside there. My approximation to Lolón was only possible by way of my spending time there, a few months a year over the past few years. And as you stated aptly, it could only be as a kind of orientation towards her, which does not lend the work to an actual depiction or direct translation of her life. In returning to Europe, I recognized that I had to do the work of expressing why the NO to TRANSLATION and the refusal of such terms of depiction. Instead, I wanted to point towards what renders her life obscure in late racial extractivist capitalism and how, inside my work that was mostly presented in Europe, she had to remain a ghost. I orient myself towards her opacity but with a willful claim, or demand, for another order of things. Hence my call to “Fuck up the plot!”—an invocation for all who are present in the ritual of the live performative event to do the same.
SLC
I think your refusal to translate–a term that must be disentangled from an assimilationist understanding–is so important because it gets at the heart of a Black feminist occupation with what representations perform in the cultural imaginary; in other words, what they do in meaning making. To translate the unknowable story of, or to try to depict, Lolón would inevitably lead to an expected/preferred reduction, so for me the methodology you apply that attends to the “traces of history felt in the body” gets at this notion of orientation that I’m so interested in. Such an approach inevitably begins with an act of resistance, a refusal to tread upon well-worn paths and to actively attend to those who threaten a dominant order and are, therefore, made to disappear, i.e., are ghosted.
LL
Yes. And rather than propose a transparent factual account, which is neither made available to me nor offers what I am after, in conjuring Lolón, I stick to the mess of not knowing her and not being able to in ways that are privileged. As diasporic people, we are permanently in a condition of feeling loss. There is nothing for us to return to or recuperate. We can only meditate on a becoming that holds space for those whose loss is not meant to matter.
SLC
That meditation reminds me of Édouard Glissant's proposal in Poetics of Relations—it's not about grasping, trying to get at, or trying to possess the irretrievable. The idea of possession now leads me to your portrayal of John Locke.
In this piece, you play with the concept of revenge with dark humor as you “drag” the character of Locke by depicting him as the embodiment of supreme, insatiable individualism––a neoliberal fever dream. Locke’s theory of property rights, grounded in what he considered the “laws of nature” and presented as a universal authority, essentially argues that these laws enable individuals to claim, utilize, and have dominion over things in the world, such as land and other material assets.
LL
As much as I wanted to orient myself towards Lolón, I also admittedly expose myself as a product of a world that is overdetermined by Enlightenment theories, Lockean concepts in particular. So, yes, in this pseudo-biographical work, I am Locke, I am Lolón, I am who I have yet to know, and more.
Read the full article in the Walker Reader here: Sarah Lewis-Cappellari in conversation with Ligia Lewis (walkerart.org)
See More
Starting February 29, Ligia Lewis' work deader than dead will be on view as part of the Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance (walkerart.org) exhibition taking place in Target and Friedman Galleries.
About the Artist
LIGIA LEWIS works as a choreographer and dancer. Lewis’s works, often marked by expressions of physical intensity and humor, seek to animate subjects through physical forms of expression that disrupt normative conceptions of the body while negotiating the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the unknown. Through choreography, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Utilizing affect, empathy, and the sensate, her work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment. Lewis recently finished works including: “A Plot / A Scandal” (2022), “Still Not Still” (2021), “deader than dead” (film and live performance) (2020), the trilogy including: “Water Will (in Melody)” (2018), “minor matter” (2016), and “Sorrow Swag” (2014).
Her other works include: “Sensation 1/This Interior” (High Line Commission, 2019); “so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it” (Jaou Tunis, 2018); “Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama” (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo, 2015); $$$ (Tanz im August, 2012); and “Sensation 1” (sommer.bar, Tanz im August, 2011 and Basel Liste, 2014).
Her work was presented in multiple venues across Europe and the US such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Tanzquartier, Vienna; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kaaitheater, Brussels; Arsenic, Lausanne; High Line Art, New York; Performance Space, New York (2019); OGR Torino; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; TATE Modern, London. Her work has also been presented at festivals and biennials such as the Ruhrtriennale, Bochum, Germany; Tanzplattform, Germany; Politik im Freien Theater Festival, Frankfurt; Liverpool Biennial; the Side Step Festival, Helsinki; Biennale of Moving Images / Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Diver Festival, Tel Aviv; American Realness, New York; The Donaufestival, Krems, Austria and Julidans, Amsterdam.
Lewis is the winner of the German Theater Award Der FAUST in the category Performer*in Dance (2023) for the production “A Plot / A Scandal”. She received the Tabori Award in the category of Distinction (2021); a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants Award (2018); a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production for minor matter (2017); a Factory Artist residency at tanzhaus nrw (2017-19); and a Prix Jardin d’ Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2015).
Out There 2024
Join us in the McGuire Theater for the rest of Out There 2024, which highlights new innovations and radical approaches to theatrical live performance. The long running, multi-month series captures the Walker’s vision to present multi-disciplinary artforms and bring forward some of the most thought-provoking and leading-edge artistic experiences being created today.
Up Next:
Aya Ogawa: The Nosebleed, January 25–27
Big Dance Theater: The Mood Room, February 8–10
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor, February 22–24
Living Land Acknowledgement
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Walker Art Center Acknowledgments
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