In “examine now regular” time loops and bends. Dance, in Lewis’s work, is an exploration of embodiment, an encounter that disrupts linear time, the place performers and spectators should attend to the physique as each a troubled archive and a polyphonic refrain. An meeting of dancers and performers in shared area assemble another temporality the place cultural and racial hierarchies are uncovered and destabilized, whereas the query “Is transformation potential?” lingers, unanswered.

Lewis’s performances animate the psychic dimensions of seeing and being seen. She embraces fugitivity within the face of entrenched and seemingly intractable methods of domination. Her choreographic explorations take into accounts the challenges of illustration contained in the deathly scripts of racialization, so normalized within the on a regular basis, in that which has been made all-too-familiar. Via this embodied battle, what stays are pressing ruminations on restore, revenge, and the chances of different types of life, past that which we all know.

Within the newly commissioned movie A Plot A Scandal, on view at CARA as a part of “examine now regular,” Lewis conjures the im/prospects of restore inside the continuing histories of continued dispossession. Restaged inside a medieval city in Rimini referred to as Santarcangelo, the movie, which departs from the stage work of the identical title, makes use of this historic backdrop to share contents of The Code Noir, Enlightenment idea, and a plot of a slave rise up in Cuba, in addition to the story of Lewis’s nice grandmother, bringing to the fore a pointed critique of the entanglement between “pure rights” and property. In a comedic and poetic style, the movie challenges the very logic of land as property.

The present’s reside fee, “examine now regular,” is a rehearsal made durational, exposing the practices which have given type to stage and movie works equivalent to minor matter (2016), Nonetheless Not Nonetheless (2021), Water Will (in Melody) (2018), and deader than lifeless (2020). As Lewis says “Dancing produces its personal theoretical framework, its personal algorithm, and its personal ethos, coherent to itself.”

Via darkish humor and within the type of a critique, Lewis mobilizes embodied activations that act as unrelenting reminders that “ghosts don’t die so simply.”

at Heart for Arts Analysis and Alliances (CARA), New York
till February 4, 2024