Still Not Still.
Facts are simply perceptions and surfaces. You go round and round fall on the ground. What is the condition of bad fait(h). What is deader than dead?
Lewis develops a choreography for seven performers, a composition that emerges out of the dark space that is history for black and non-Western subjects. In response to this exclusion from the past, Lewis leverages darkness as a site for critical imaging and imagining. She makes use of the Early musical form of a “complainte” – a prolonged lament or musical poem. Through the confluence of comedy and tragedy, Lewis evokes with poetic and comedic force a unique theatrical language full of dark humor and surrealist imagery, disrupting any fantasy of historical progress. Thus, Lewis imagines a world out of time, a world at a standstill.
Can a history full of bad faith, gaps, and holes, particularly for those that fall outside its purview, be left to the past? Can history then, or a particular form of it, be deadened, exposed as a corpse, and stripped of reason? Given history is fallible and insufficient, and overdetermined by its victors, what might emerge once it is laid to rest? “Still Not Still” emerges from these conceptual questions, and, in response, makes an attempt to step to the side of the past.
* Production: Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer
* Co-production: tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Black Box Theater (Oslo), Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER (Ghent), Gessnerallee (Zürich), Dance International Glasgow / Tramway
* Funded by: Capital Cultural Fund (Berlin)
Concept, choreography, direction
Ligia Lewis
In process with and performed by
Boglárka Börcsök, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust, Corey- Scott Gilbert, Cassie Augusta Jørgensen, Justin F. Kennedy, Nasheeka Nedsreal, (Jolie Ngemi), Damian Rebgetz
Text
Ligia Lewis in collaboration with the performers
Dramaturgy
Maja Zimmermann
Outside Eye
Dragana Bulut
Lighting design & technical direction
Joseph Wegmann
Set design
Claudia Besuch (Gali)
Costume
Marta Martino
Sound design & composition
S. McKenna
Acoustic & electric guitar
Joey Gavin
Assistance
Lissa-Johanna Volquartz
Sound technician (tour)
Max Eilbacher, Neda Sanai
Stage technician (tour)
Şenol Şentürk, Jachya Freeth
Production management
Hannes Frey, Vera Laube (HAU Hebbel am Ufer)
Management, production & distribution
Godlive Lawani–Stane Performing Arts Management
Photos
Photos 1, 2 & 4 by Moritz Freudenberg. Photo 3 by Brian Hartley