Ligia Lewis: Water Will (in Melody)

HAU Hebbel am Ufer
HAU1, Stresemannstr. 29, 10963 Berlin
HAU2, Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 Berlin
HAU3, Tempelhofer Ufer 10, 10963 Berlin

T +49 30 25900427
tickets@hebbel-am-ufer.de


After the great success and a worldwide tour of “minor matter,” HAU presents the new work of dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis. Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of “the will,” this dystopic fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation and catastrophe. Lewis initiates this world in which voice, gesture, touch, and movement flow like waves—both gentle and turbulent. Through the language of mimesis, Lewis and her performers engage with the porousness of the theatre by producing a fantastical-like materiality relieved of metaphoric and symbolic weight. Surrendering to the possibilities of the haptic, sense gets un-done to get re-done, paving way for an “othered” organization of sight and touch. Through this process of alienation, exteriorization and materialization, this melodrama touches the borders of its own making giving life to both the emotional landscape of its protagonists as well as to the theatre itself.

Ligia Lewis is a dancer and choreographer. She creates affective choreographies while interrogating the metaphors and social inscriptions of the body. Lewis’s work continues to provoke the nuances of embodiment. Her work has been shown at various venues and festivals, such as Abrons Arts Center/American Realness (New York), Flax/Fahrenheit (Los Angeles), Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Tanz im August, presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest stage work, “minor matter“ and was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe for her work “Sorrow Swag”. In 2018 she was granted 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. As a dancer, Lewis has performed and toured extensively with and alongside the following: Eszter Salamon, Mette Ingvartsen, Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Jeremy Wade, Wu Tsang, and Les Ballets C de la B.


Production: Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Co-production: Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 / Centre D’Art Contemporain (Genf), tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), donaufestival (Krems), Arsenic Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Supported by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC).