Some Thing Folk

A future written in the past
A story hard to tell,
something folk for now

In a distant past, in a blue landscape, a story is being written. An imagination of a folk and people who are eager to belong.

Suppose the “human” body, beyond its fleshly matter, comprises stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. How might these porous and animate creature-like things (bodies) host an-other story inspired by their collective pasts but uprooted and set in motion by a series of imaginative departures?  A crucial story which teaches us to see each other more honestly.

Inspired by for example black feminist theorist Zakkiyyah Iman Jackson and cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, choreographer Ligia Lewis will explore complex modes of embodiment in ways that confront a racial history tethered to the skin, while simultaneously disrupting any linear or reductive explanation of this experience.

See interview with Ligia Lewis on Youtube. 

Ligia Lewis on the piece:

At this particular moment in history, a moment of concentrated attention on social /political  movements as well as the respective violent political pushback, I observe a reactionary  “nativist” return mixed with multicultural nostalgia. What I mean by that is that on the  conservative end, far right groups are returning to a sanitized national mythos, and on the  more liberal end, I witness a cultural return to some nativist fantasy of what it means to be  “othered”, expressed through shallow celebrations of difference without the bite of critique.

I wanted to work on this idea of “folk” not as fixed or exotic, but always in flux: an emergent,  evolving collective shaped by internal difference and attentive to the violence of the present.

– How do you understand the relationship between choreography, folk, and the Volk? In developing this dance work, what goes into staging the different scales of choreographing (with) the folk, from the group, to the community, to the nation etc.

I understood that choreography in its more traditional Euro-American usage is an archaic imposition on the body. I have been working on an embodied practice that puts eleven very different bodies in space through a meticulously organized manipulation of time. Hyper constructed and real time investigations are performed through a series of actions (folking/ figuring) and activities (landscaping), so that a visual and musical composition emerges.  Every body in space uses their own weight as a guide, however sculpted through an embodied practice I developed where we work on falling together – finding the skin, bone, and blood of ourselves and each other.

With this piece, I also hope to share that the ghosts and goblins, and monsters from our  fairytales are really about us – symbols for us to see ourselves, and how we are implicated in  the monstrosities of the present, made into monsters whether idly standing by, or directly  and indirectly committing harm.

As for “nation”, it’s a trap. We dance to do away with such things.