Sarah Lewis-Cappellari in conversation with Ligia Lewis

Coming from a creative family that includes the musician Twin Shadow and artist collective LEWIS FOREVER, Ligia Lewis has established themself as a singular artist, director, choreographer, and dancer who conceives and directs experimental performances. Lewis’s works are often marked by physical and emotional intensity through which comedy and tragedy collide.

In advance of their newest Walker commissioned work A Plot/A Scandal, opening this January, as well as their work deader than dead being presented in the exhibition Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance this February, Lewis joined her sister and dramaturge, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, for a conversation on family, performance, and how resistance appears through the body as traces of history.

Sarah Lewis-Cappellari

I wanted to continue our dialogue in the context of these pages by centering Lolón, our great grandmother, whom we never met and have remarkably little knowledge about and yet who, in a multitude of ways, becomes the ground and the spirit of the plots you construct throughout your performance. For example, within the context of the work, you address how your proclivity for trouble “has everything and nothing to do” with the role Lolón played in the Dominican Republic, in a village that Lolón’s family called Dios Dirá (God will tell). You explain how Lolón in her spiritual praxis defied a regime that wanted to obliterate all ceremonies and gatherings that did not abide by Western Judeo-Christian traditions, and how the role she played in her community, until today, is overwhelmingly framed as deviant/scandalous. Can you begin by discussing how you approximated yourself to a family member we know so very little about and yet who you knew/sensed was central to the topics you wanted to address in A Plot/A Scandal?

Ligia Lewis

I wanted to stake a claim for a deviance that I felt permeated my being, but that I also attribute to embodiment, more generally—a way of seeing and being in the (Western) world. I’m interested in resistance, not in a romantic sense, but how resistance appears through the body as traces of history. And what I mean when I say that is that, of course, I could not know about Lolón without prying—without sticking my nose into the darker corners of our family history and History more generally. Her story is made obscure to me, not only because of the more personal-familial ghosting of her life, but also because this region is rendered obscure still to a grander narrative of “civil”-ized progress. Dios Dirá is a village with histories of marronage [the process of extricating oneself from slavery] that are present in the landscape, the speech, the air, and the movement of the people who reside there. My approximation to Lolón was only possible by way of my spending time there, a few months a year over the past few years. And as you stated aptly, it could only be as a kind of orientation towards her, which does not lend the work to an actual depiction or direct translation of her life. In returning to Europe, I recognized that I had to do the work of expressing why the NO to TRANSLATION and the refusal of such terms of depiction. Instead, I wanted to point towards what renders her life obscure in late racial extractivist capitalism and how, inside my work that was mostly presented in Europe, she had to remain a ghost. I orient myself towards her opacity but with a willful claim, or demand, for another order of things. Hence my call to “Fuck up the plot!”—an invocation for all who are present in the ritual of the live performative event to do the same.

SLC

I think your refusal to translate–a term that must be disentangled from an assimilationist understanding–is so important because it gets at the heart of a Black feminist occupation with what representations perform in the cultural imaginary; in other words, what they do in meaning making. To translate the unknowable story of, or to try to depict, Lolón would inevitably lead to an expected/preferred reduction, so for me the methodology you apply that attends to the “traces of history felt in the body” gets at this notion of orientation that I’m so interested in. Such an approach inevitably begins with an act of resistance, a refusal to tread upon well-worn paths and to actively attend to those who threaten a dominant order and are, therefore, made to disappear, i.e., are ghosted.

LL

Yes. And rather than propose a transparent factual account, which is neither made available to me nor offers what I am after, in conjuring Lolón, I stick to the mess of not knowing her and not being able to in ways that are privileged. As diasporic people, we are permanently in a condition of feeling loss. There is nothing for us to return to or recuperate. We can only meditate on a becoming that holds space for those whose loss is not meant to matter.

SLC

That meditation reminds me of Édouard Glissant’s proposal in Poetics of Relations—it’s not about grasping, trying to get at, or trying to possess the irretrievable. The idea of possession now leads me to your portrayal of John Locke.

In this piece, you play with the concept of revenge with dark humor as you “drag” the character of Locke by depicting him as the embodiment of supreme, insatiable individualism––a neoliberal fever dream. Locke’s theory of property rights, grounded in what he considered the “laws of nature” and presented as a universal authority, essentially argues that these laws enable individuals to claim, utilize, and have dominion over things in the world, such as land and other material assets.

LL

As much as I wanted to orient myself towards Lolón, I also admittedly expose myself as a product of a world that is overdetermined by Enlightenment theories, Lockean concepts in particular. So, yes, in this pseudo-biographical work, I am Locke, I am Lolón, I am who I have yet to know, and more.

SLC

Yes, you negate the impulse to reduce, so the piece unfolds through multiple plots. And throughout those plot(s) you relay how this idea of property, especially when property became synonymous with enslaved flesh, was deemed proper in contradistinction with Lolón’s plot. Lolón’s plot, as you divulge, was “not yet property.” Which is to say that it was not determined by the logics of possession, the logics of privatization, the extractive and exploitative logics that undergirded the plantation economy that informs the regime of racial capitalism we inhabit today.

LL

And how crazy is it for us to go to Dios Dirá now, just miles away from one of the oldest sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and feel this imposition of property? It feels so unnatural. It feels so cruel.

SLC

Exactly, because again in contradistinction to Lolón’s plot, her practice of taking care of the land to nourish and sustain the environment and, by that action, one another, is, as you bitingly illuminate, the plot that, under the logics of individual “human” rights, is framed as deviant. And so I read your act of revenge, your dragging of Locke, as exposing the violent absurdity of the logics of property and possession.

LL

Precisely, by “dragging” John Locke into a vampire and particularly his plot that conceives of life and liberty as inevitably entangled with property, highlights the continued dispossession of folks whose ancestral pasts are on the losing side of that argument. The ones who were made into “property,” are now in late racial capitalism the ones rendered the most precarious within it.

To invoke Mama Tingo [the Black Dominican agricultural worker and activist murdered by the Balaguer government in the ’70s], an equitable relationship to land would consider those who work the land to be the inevitable beneficiaries of the land. In a utopia, this land would not become property at all, delineating a possessive right outside the surrounding community. But once again, this work is an orientation towards other modes of seeing and being, which require imagination, as the pasts that might help us set another course have undergone violent forms of erasure. Now, the transformation of the soil to property is so embedded that one has to be constantly questioning what and how one possesses, including one’s own sense of being. So to echo what you’ve already beautifully unpacked, we’re in hell.

It is very difficult to not be possessed by the idea of possession itself, particularly when marked by it. So is this fever dream, this hellish landscape, we find ourselves in.

SLC

I think you enact possession, not only by dragging neoliberal logics, but also and quite strikingly by surrendering to the ungraspable spirit of Lolón. Lolón’s approach to being human–still considered deviant by a persisting reigning order–was kept as a dark secret and never shared with the surviving members of our family, an all-too-common story shared by too many. Yet we know that Lolón’s ways of being/feeling/knowing, though irretrievably lost, were crucial to liberation struggles. While we cannot retrieve the irretrievable, as we cannot know nor tell the story of Lolón, you, through your performance, approximate yourself through play. In other words, through the creation of your performance, you rehearse revolt against the liberal logics of possession that have normalized reprehensible acts of subjugation inherited by the children of the so-called West. The onto-epistemologies that guided Lolón’s human practice not only precede and surpass her, but also extend far beyond, as they have sparked innumerable acts of resistance and revolt, both in daily life and revolutionary contexts. These influences have also inspirited acts of creation that appear indecipherable to the prevailing order. Yet, as you allude to in A Plot/A Scandal, they serve as a call to action, urging us to spend time with the ghosts that help us deviate from dominant paradigms.

LL

The difficulty of knowing otherwise is that it is hard to see beyond what we already know. Play and deviance are the tools that contaminate my spirit and allow for me to pry in the folds of space—geographic or imaginary—where some secrets appear as stories. These are stories worth telling, even if the means to do so have yet to be plotted.▪︎

Experience Ligia Lewis: A Plot/A Scandal for yourself Jan 11–13, 2024 at the Walker Art Center. Learn more and get tickets here.

Explore Lewis’ her first dance made for the camera as well as other artists who make performance and dance central to their work in video, film, painting, sculpture, and drawing in the exhibition Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance on view at the Walker Feb 29–Aug 25, 2024