“minor matter” is the second part of the trilogy (BLUE, RED, WHITE) performed by three dancers. Two discursive apparatuses are at play—blackness and the black box. In this work, Lewis turns to the color red to materialize thoughts between love and rage. The work unfolds multi-directionally creating a poetics of dissonance from which questions of re-presentation, presentation, abstraction, and the limits of signification emerge.

Throughout the choreography the performers push their bodies against the boundaries of the stage while simultaneously illustrating a humble relationship between their bodies and the space that encapsulates it. The performers get exhausted as their bodies strip the stage of its formal mystique to approach its matter—black. In “minor matter”, sound travels across musical epochs to arrive at the poetics of the intimate present. Built on the logic of interdependence, the theater’s parts—light, sound, image, and architecture— become entangled with the three performers, giving life to a vibrant social and poetic space.

For “minor matter,” Lewis received the Bessie Award for Outstanding Production (2017).