Please join us on Friday, August 23 at 7pm to close out our summer exhibition, “The Empathy Lab,” with a performance from Ligia Lewis.
Sorrow Swag takes place in an immersive visual and auditory space. Using texts and images derived from mid 20th-century classical theater to interrogate race, authorship, gender, and grief, Sorrow Swag produces an imaginative reformulation. Thinking through the blues, this work disrupts the canonical by means of a radical bothering. With a musical score by Twin Shadow, Lewis creates a meticulously crafted hybrid body in a state of flux. While Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” and Jean Anouilh’s “Antigone” serve as the backbone to this work, the piece shifts from a state of flux to an “unrelenting scream,” —what Billie Whitelaw, the first literal mouth of “Not I” described as the core of her performance. Through this unstable figure, the theater is transformed.
Ligia Lewis was awarded the Prix Jardin d’ Europe by Impulstanz (2015) for Sorrow Swag.
Concept & Choreography: Ligia Lewis
with Musical Arrangement: Twin Shadow
Production & Distribution: HAU Hebbel am Ufer / Nicole Schuchardt
Sorrow Swag is a production by Ligia Lewis | Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and EuropeWith support from Human Resources Los Angeles, ADA Studio Berlin and Pieter Space (Los Angeles).
Other presentations have included: Impulstanz, CND Centre National de la Danse, Les Subsistances, , American Realness16’
