Ligia Lewis: study now steady

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to debut study now steady, the first solo exhibition of artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis (b. 1983, Santo Domingo; lives and works in Berlin).

Curated by Manuela Moscoso, CARA Executive Director and Chief Curator, the exhibition occupies the entirety of the nonprofit’s space in the West Village, presenting a live performance-based commission alongside newly commissioned video work that continue Lewis’s ongoing exploration of embodied memory, labor, and race. 

Throughout the show’s run, the new live commission, which lends its name to the exhibition, will transform CARA’s gallery space into a live studio for ongoing and public study through movement. In study now steady, Lewis, Mame Diarra Speis, the Director of The Urban Bush Women, and performer and longtime collaborator Corey Scott-Gilbert, will come together for a series of ongoing rehearsal/performances taking place on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays until the exhibition’s closing.

Working iteratively while co-inhabiting a public rehearsal space, Lewis and her collaborators will invite their surroundings into a dialogue, a form of experimental scholarship that extends and loops, transmuting and transforming into something new. 

“Dancing,” as Lewis says, “[produces] its own theoretical framework, its own set of rules, and its own ethos, coherent to itself.” There is wisdom stored and transmitted in the process of shared movement—learned through lineage and experimentation. Her work uses choreography to trace historical and contemporary forms of resistance against systemic violence, invoking Caribbean epistemologies of rebellion and communion.

Reflecting on these threads, Lewis calls upon the legacy of her great-grandmother Lolon Zapata, who lived in Ayiti (Haiti) around 1900 and was a dedicated practitioner of Dominican Palo, a radical Africanist traditional dance among the Cimarrónes, or formerly enslaved people who have claimed their own freedom through escape, practiced at that time in direct opposition to the oppressive regime of the Trujillo government. Zapata’s memory carries across Lewis’ choreography, drawing upon narratives of dance as a sacred form of study and mobilizing embodied activations of tradition and subversion that act as unrelenting reminders that “ghosts don’t die so easily.”

Lewis conjures and taunts some of these apparitions in her new work, A Plot A Scandal. Commissioned by CARA and filmed in the historic Teatro Amintore Galli in Rimini, Italy, this film translation of Lewis’ 2022 work a plot/ a scandal weaves together historical, political, and mythical narratives, using shock as a vehicle to “fuck the plot.” Bringing in figures such as slave-rebellion leader Maria Olofa (Wolofa), Cuban artist and revolutionary José Antonio Aponte, Lolon Zapata, and Enlightenment philosopher and slave-trade beneficiary John Locke, the work rejects linearity and the fiction of resolution. Instead rooted in an insistent curiosity, the work asks, in Lewis’ words: “Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits?” 

Contrasting her newest work with the return of her 2020 piece, deader than dead, Lewis brings the anti-spectacle to CARA, using the vernacular form of the loop to refuse narrative structure or climax. In the work, performers operate in deadpan, hurtling toward the floor, collapsing, and contorting their bodies in repetitive patterns. Punctuated by moments of stillness, alongside a soundtrack of labored breathing, Hamlet soliloquies, techno beats, and 14th century choral music, the piece is structured as a musical lament. For additional details, please visit cara-nyc.org.

CARA welcomes visitors to its bookstore and exhibition-gathering spaces during the hours below. 

Performance hours and location
Thursday: 3–7pm
Friday: 2–6pm
Saturday: 2–6pm
Sunday: 2–6pm