International DANCE Festival München: study now steady by Ligia Lewis

Haus der Kunst, Munich
May 24, 2025

Following on from Ligia Lewis’ deader than dead, which opened the International DANCE Festival München, the South Gallery of the Haus der Kunst also played host to the European premiere of her performative installation, study now steady.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Lewis has lived and worked in Berlin since 2013, her choreography spanning multiple genres including film and live installation (both in evidence here) as well as regular performance. Informed by that mixed heritage, and working across theatre and museum contexts, at the core of her work is a focus on how race, gender, and history shape experience and perception, particularly through the lens of black bodies in the present.

Opening a wide window on her work, in terms of live action, study now steady sees four dancers enact what feels like semi-ritualised choreographic patterns, in which the audience, at least those sat on the benches around the gallery walls, at times very much become part of the scene. It also has close connections with deader than dead, especially in the way the performers use those walls.

The dancers engage in what feels like exploration of the space, its floor of course, but also its walls and the other people there. And in many ways, that is the most interesting part of study now steady, which seems to be intended to provoke reflection on how we see one another as much as anything else. What is fascinating is not what the dancers are doing in terms of movement per se, but the immediacy of their relationship with those close-up audience members. And how the rest of us react too.

The choreography is set to a contemporary choral arrangement that recalls early liturgical music. Combined with the gallery’s high ceilings, it creates the impression of having entered a minimalist church.

It starts slowly. The four performers in bent over positions that eventually collapse into something else. Their bodies twisted, they twitch, jerk, tap against the floor. With no obvious meaning, not even much of a clue, a few people soon started to leave. But study now steady is one of those works that needs time. It does get a lot more interesting even if it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Interaction with the audience is first noticeable when Lewis herself appears to hold out a hand to a woman. In general, Lewis’ movement did appear to have more intent behind it than that of the others, even if exactly what remained a puzzle. Here it was almost as if Lewis was pleading with the woman to help. You can see the uncertainty. ‘Should I take the hand or not?’

Elsewhere, the performers freeze against walls as if glued to the plasterwork, creating frieze like images that have a vague sense of being shaped out of fragments of memory. They contort themselves into doorways. They construct, deconstruct and reconstruct themselves in lines across the floor, forming and reforming before rolling into a heap.

Intriguing, yes. Absolutely. But while it may have got increasingly fascinating, it did remain rather enigmatic.

Alongside the live performance and in another gallery, study now steady also features two of Lewis’s video works. The shorter film version of deader than dead proved an easier watch than the live version, the experience being helped by the use of split screen allowing us to see different dancers at the same time.

A third space was home to the screening of A Plot / A Scandal, in which Lewis traces the ghosts of colonialism through the story of her great-grandmother. Here, ‘plot’ means both a piece of land and ‘to scheme.’

Beautifully shot and edited, and filmed in and around a small town in Northern Italy, A Plot / A Scandal features Lewis and Corey Scott-Gilbert in ragged period attire, a narrator recounting the absurd legal complexities of slavery. As it progresses, it weaves together historical, anecdotal, political and mythical narratives that include the theories of seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, who owned stock in slave trading companies, and that of Maria Olofa, who oral tradition has it was one of the leaders of the Christmas Day 1521 slave revolt in Santo Domingo, San Salvador, the earliest recorded slave uprising in the Americas.

Not remotely lecturing, which seems to be a feature of Lewis’ work, and which makes it all the more powerful, A Plot / A Scandal is both attractive and enticing. One of those that you simply don’t want to tear yourself away from.