Dominican choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis, living in Berlin, has chosen Barcelona and Madrid as the European cities in which to premiere his piece deader than dead, which he started to create shortly before the onset of the pandemic. It was originally a piece started as research into the idea of ‘deadpan’, meaning inexpressive and unemotional, but employing comic resources to illustrate emotional distance.

The magnetism of Ligia Lewis’s dancing is related to a well-thought-out combination of the familiar and the unknown. In his work, sound and visual metaphors crash into the body, which materialises the enigmatic, poetic and dissonant. The macabre dances presented in deader than dead, in a space evocative of an autopsy room or a limbo between life and death, with its white fluorescent tube lights, are debtors of the theatrical tradition that’s always been essential to his work and in his performative practices. Dances pierced by agitation, moving inside of him, hurting him, and that which he transmits through his movements. The fact that we are accustomed as white people to seeing images of dead black bodies, depersonalised and dehumanised, is created on stage by four artists, more alive than life itself.