Ligia Lewis
Water Will (in Melody)Thu, Jan 30, 2020–Sat, Feb 1, 2020

In this devised choreographic work for four performers, melodrama and darkness—both literally onstage and psychologically—are points of departure for wrestling with notions of the “willful” black femme figure in action. Playing with how mime both over-performs and under-describes our reality, Berlin-based choreographer Ligia Lewis creates a grotesque mash-up of natural landscape and human behavior. In Water Will (in Melody), Lewis returns to Chicago to use the MCA theater as a cavernous space for negotiating desire, imagining the future, and shifting our perceptions—a space at once rife with potential and full of impossibility, where the familiar symbolism of the body comes unhinged. Unfolding in a wet, dystopian, gothic landscape, Lewis’s disorienting fantasy undoes the senses to reform them anew, paving the way for an “othered” organization of experiencing the world, in a fiction that invites instability, re-creation, and catastrophe.

Water Will (in Melody) is the final chapter of Lewis’s Blue, Red, White triptych which began with Sorrow Swag (2014) in blue and minor matter (2016) in red. Each piece takes on a different color, texture, and emotional palette to grapple with the ways that dancing subjects show up on stage in front of an audience, by altering expectations about race, gender, and choreographed movement.