Ligia Lewis. deader than dead. Performance

23.5.25, 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Südgalerie

English

Tickets are available through DANCE Festival Munich.

Ligia Lewis’ video work deader than dead, on view in the exhibition “Ligia Lewis. study now steady”, will be presented as a live performance at Haus der Kunst on two days.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” – the words spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a lament for the world serve as starting point for the opening perfor­mance of DANCE. With this work, artist and choreo­grapher Ligia Lewis uses Shake­speare’s monologue to reflect on concepts of alienation and repetition. The in­e­vi­ta­bility of fate gains political significance is explored in Lewis' work. Lewis colla­bo­rates with composer Slauson Malone, who was previously artist of TUNE residencies at Haus der Kunst.

deader than dead begins at the end. The show opens with a whispered performance of Macbeth’s final soliloquy from Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day”, as the performer moves across a dance floor, practicing and repeating a series of movements stilted in their flow. In opening with Macbeth’s reflections on mortality and the futility of life, Ligia Lewis locates the liveness of the work in direct conversation with death.

Throughout deader than dead, Lewis mobilizes repetition to flatten narrative structure and resist climax. Performers oscillate between “deadpan” – an affectless form of action designed to invoke emotional distance – and slapstick – a kind of plastic performativity that operates in hyperbole. Dancers twitch, writhe, and move in recurrent patterns punctuated by moments of stillness to a soundtrack composed of labored breathing, techno beats, and fourteenth-century choral music. “Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure” (One who laughs in the morning weeps in the evening), a ballad by the French poet and composer, Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377), soundtracks portions of the performance. Invoking the medieval tradition of the lament, the piece itself is arranged as a never-ending complaint, performed here as an exposition of the limits of progress. The performance deteriorates as it repeats, unmastering the artifice of representation.

Lewis’s danse macabre, or choreographed allegory for death’s inescapable presence, produces a resonant feeling of doom, of being trapped in the nightmare of history’s presents. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will come, and, as deader than dead suggests, attempts at progress will unwind and glitch, ending as they began – in nothingness, in absurdity, in a loop.

Tickets are available through International DANCE Festival Munich.

Tickets

“Ligia Lewis. deader than dead” is presented by Haus der Kunst in cooperation with International DANCE Festival München.