Ligia Lewis Messes with the Plot

Ligia Lewis, Mame Diarra Speis, Miguel Angel Guzmán and Corey Scott-Gilbert are frozen in angular positions on the ground. As I walk in, they are breaking out of their paralysis in slow, jerky movements that variously evoke shock, exhaustion and resurrection.

study now steady (2023) – the eponymous ‘rehearsal made durational’, as the press release defines it, of Lewis’s exhibition at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) – is thick with the pauses, slips and dizzy landings that populate the artist’s earlier performances for stage and camera. There is the leg-slapping, foot-stomping stepping and wobbly piling-together of minor matter (2016) that insists on urgent collectivity. There is the clamour of ‘falling flesh’ – a term Lewis used recently in conversation – of Still Not Still (2021), where bodies come crashing down against one another and onto the floor, losing their fixity, their signification. Guzmán echoes the beginning of Water Will (in Melody) (2018) as he mimes a melodramatic smile flipping into a frown. Lewis’s shifting eyes flicker with conspiracy and then quickly withdraw into a deadpan blankness – a powerful mechanism of withholding in deader than dead (2020), screening in CARA’s first floor gallery.

You could say that all of Lewis’s work tends towards choreographing repetition or, more accurately, towards trying to make space within a history of racialized violence that we compulsively repeat. Time loops and discombobulates in accretive scores like study now steady, which almost feels like Lewis choreographing her own retrospective – if only the term didn’t defeat the nonlinearity of her entire body of work. Lewis, rather, is undoing ‘the plot’ as narrative structure (there is no beginning, middle or end here, no promise of resolution), by ‘plotting’, or scheming, towards the possibility of rest and liberation outside of the deathly loop of history. The sound bleed from the video in the next gallery feels felicitous, even intentional.

In A Plot A Scandal (2023), a newly commissioned film adaptation of the artist’s 2022 stage work, Lewis reminds us that the word ‘plot’ has three registers of meaning – narrative, scheme and land – all of which are informed by desires and fantasies, at times shrouded, at others explicit. With humour straddling tragedy, the film’s voice-over unravels Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), which posited (white) man’s ‘natural rights’ to life, liberty and property, and its deeply violent implication that Black people were something to own along with land. Interwoven with this is an account of Cuban revolutionary José Aponte’s plotting of a slave rebellion in 1812 as Lewis and Scott-Gilbert perform a ‘dance of the flesh’ in colonial wigs and various stages of undress. With their sensuous and violent gestures giving visibility to the seduction, fantasy and abjection that coexists with this history of terror, the question emerges: what does it mean to let yourself be ravished by desire? What kind of trouble needs to be plotted to undo the political fictions we have naturalized as ‘truths’ through repetition?

The story’s third subplot is the hardest to tell: Lewis invokes her great grandmother Lolón Zapata, who committed herself to scandal by using her plot of land in the village of Dios Dirá in Dominican Republic as a resource for traditional medicine and as a space to practice sacred palo dancing. Here, Lewis moves the wounds of history into the embodied, psychic space of intuition and memory. In a final ‘solo’, which is not a solo at all, she dances with the various spirits of history that can be felt even if not named. The desire, I think, is for us to lose the plot altogether.

Ligia Lewis’s ‘study now steady’ is on view at Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York, until 4 February. 

^{Main image: Ligia Lewis, A Plot A Scandal, 2023, film still. Courtesy: the artist and CARA, New York}