Ligia Lewis in conversation with Erin Manning and Rizvana Bradley about ‘minor matter’ Ligia Lewis
Rizvana Bradley, Ligia Lewis, Erin Manning

The second part of Lewis’s triptych BLUE, RED, WHITE, ‘minor matter’ (2016), materializes thoughts between love and rage. Lewis and two performers engage in a complicated entanglement with the black box and themselves. In minor matter, sound travels across musical epochs to arrive at the poetics of the intimate present. Through a dynamic interplay of the theatre’s parts – sound, light, image, and architecture – minor matter gives life to a vibrant materiality.
Artist statement Ligia Lewis:

With my choreography, meticulously crafted forms of embodiment meet sonic and visual metaphors that give space for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. Trying to achieve an embodied dramaturgy in a field of play, I hope to allow for perceptions to shift from the familiar to the unfamiliar, stretching the capacities to care for and therefore give care to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. In doing so, I hope to make the stage a site to materialize the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant.

Ligia Lewis is a choreographer and dancer. She has worked in multiple contexts including that of the theatre and museum. Engaging with affect, empathy, and the sensate, her choreography considers the social inscriptions of the body while evoking its potentiality. Her work can be described as experientially rich and complex. Within her practice, Lewis continues to provoke the nuances of embodiment. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest stage work, ‘minor matter’ and in 2018, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in the field of dance. Both her stage works ‘minor matter’ (2016) preceded by ‘Sorrow Swag’ (2014) continue to tour internationally. www.ligialewis.com