Water Will (in Melody) is the last of a choreographic trilogy comprising Sorrow Swag (2014) and minor matter (2016) by Ligia Lewis, a Dominican-American, Florida-grown, Berlin-based choreographer. Like its predecessors, Water Will bears witness to Lewis’s profound engagement with racialized and gendered bodies in her dance work. This particular piece takes its anchor in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Willful Child, in which God exacts grotesque retribution on a “willful” and “disobedient” child, whose punishment for continuously disregarding his mother’s authority is ultimately death. As the story goes, the young boy is lowered into a grave and covered with earth. But the child’s arm suddenly reaches through, puncturing the ground. More earth is poured onto the grave, yet the willful arm punctures through again. This continues until the child’s mother visits his grave and beats the little arm down herself, after which the child finally rests. This is where Lewis begins. Out of the darkness, dancer Dani Brown (an imposing redhead) makes her way, crab-like in front of the closed curtains, across the lip of the stage. Centered, contained by a tight, white spotlight, she begins to utter fragments of the tale. Slowly, her arm repeats a gesture: beating down the side of her body, as if swatting something away. Increasingly frantic, her hand hits down the imaginary arm of “my daughter,” she says. The spotlight switches to rapid strobes as Brown’s words begin to fail her and her body takes over: convulsing, syncopating on the very edge of the proscenium.
It is worth marking Lewis’s choice to resituate the fairy-tale as the story of a willful girl; a reading we also find at the outset of Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects (2014), in which the feminist scholar interprets the Grimms’ tale as follows: “Note that willfulness is also that which persists even after death: displaced onto an arm, from a body onto a body part. The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up…. Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience.”[1] In other words, Lewis’s central image, the willful girl’s arm pushing through the soil, foregrounds a persistent—perhaps even resistant—choreography.
Anchored by this figure, Lewis constructs an eerie, neo-gothic work that deploys an unexpected theatricality. It is precisely the materiality of the theatrical apparatus that she first shows off: the lighting rig is exposed, the floor gleams a shiny and reflective black, and a pair of black velvet curtains hang on stage—slightly too short to conceal the wings and backstage area. Lone feet appear out from under the curtain—resting—waiting their turn to dance. After Brown’s opening solo, the curtains are pulled apart, and we see a rope hanging stage right: at once exit route and haunted antiblack prop. The words “PART I” appear projected stage left.
These projections are one of many devices Lewis uses to nod to theatrical conventions—in this case Brecht’s distancing or “V-effekt.” Lewis engages the projections to caption the dancing, a technique of self-aware performance that serves primarily to disclose the contrivances of stage fiction. However, if the goal of the distancing effect is typically to push the audience into a supposedly analytical mode, Water Will does not steamroll its audience with a call for critique. Instead, both the use of projections throughout the piece and the spare set’s nods to the stuff of theatre indicate Lewis’s focus on the logics of performance, which are given through dance a specificity she calls a “logic of touch.”[2] Returning to the figure of the willful girl, it seems this logic of touch, for Lewis, might just be able to dent—or puncture, disobediently—dominant historical logics of movement, under which black bodies have often been called to perform in spite of themselves.
Sure enough, the next performer to appear, Jolie Ngemi, is painted up to look like a Pierrot-minstrel hybrid: in both white and blackface, a clown’s tear, a black bowler hat, white gloves, and a long white tunic to her knees, Ngemi’s androgynous figure begins miming downstage right. Upstage left, three other dancers, including Brown, move from one tableau vivant to the next. Lewis stakes the possibilities of her choreography on the modalities of certain performance genres, juxtaposing Ngemi’s slo-mo minstrelsy, inflected by the “fixed points” classic to clown practice, with melodrama’s defining technique: a dramaturgy of stage pictures, freezing characters in exaggerated states of passion. If classical theatre’s actors simply lined up at the lip of the stage (close to the candles!) and spoke out their text to the house, then melodrama’s tableaux vivants sought to maximize what Erin Hurley has called theatre’s “feeling-making” potential.[3] Grotesquely stretching out their faces, alternately smiling and grimacing, the dancers eventually unfreeze themselves and begin coming and going up and down the stage, increasingly syncopated in their movements. This shift in rhythm is most visible in Ngemi’s progression from clown to krumper to pop locker. Moving through the registers of tension/release (used in each of these performance styles in varying ways), Ngemi dances animatedly, so much so that her dancing begins to tamper with her bodily-control—a body sutured together by each of the genres she is pulling from and with which she is crafting, at the moment of dance, a hybrid language. It is worth noting, alongside Lewis, that tension/release models in dance are heavily dependent on an assumed prior state of “neutrality” in the body.[4] Ngemi deploys tension/release on behalf of bodies whose “neutral” has not been deemed “neutral-enough,” that is, bodies deemed already in excess of fixed aesthetic modalities. With Ngemi’s solo, Lewis seems to be articulating the notion that certain genres of performance have produced certain bodies as excessive signifiers. Alternately unraveling and re-braiding historical dance genres together—revealing them as anything but innocent—she moves us to a third solo.
Susanna Schasse is up next. Taking center stage, she growls out the fairy tale in its original German into a microphone, clad in black latex, with her black hair gelled down. Schasse is slightly terrifying but incredibly effective as she sings energetically, ultimately shouting out: “I’m leaving the frame!” and “Are you entertained now!” She exits in a joyful explosion of forms. With cabaret, a certain capacity to confront is afforded by taking up the mantle of the entertainer. The inclusion of this vignette reinforces the spectator’s impression that the persistence of movement, for Lewis, may very well be a matter of genre—may very well be a matter of convention and what said convention affords to the bodies occupying its modalities. After Schasse’s vignette, a voiceover repeats: “Will, well, wall is to way, will I well, well, well, willfulness.” The voice repeats it and exhausts it until the resounding declaration: “Whitey has to die.” The audience bears witness to the words, all projected onto the stage left wall, underlining the depth of this shell of a proscenium. Thickening the relationship between speech and the moving body, Lewis builds the choreography alongside these repeated punning linguistic declensions (“will, well, wall, etc”) as she, Ngemi, Brown, and Schasse heighten their movements to reach a breaking point, accompanied by strobe lighting and a layered sonic cacophony. Closing PART I via this intense circuitry of over-signification and hyper-referentiality to genre, the paroxysm of the piece suggests—at least in some surrogate fashion—that dance choreographs the will against the wall of the girl’s premature death.
This interstice between PART I and PART II sees the four bodies fall, splayed into the sonic reverberations of their screams and attempts to speak. Most discernible in the sonic fray is the phrase “I will generate generations of will.” The phrase performs an inversion of the character of the mother from the initial tale, asking us to hear again the implications of reproduction along the lines of partus sequitur ventrem, if will could or had been afforded futurity in black bodies. We must remember, in Brown’s initial solo, the mother figure is guilty of beating down the child’s willful hand. But partus, we must also recall, held that the legal status of a child (slave or free) followed that of her mother. Lewis’s logic of touch, it seems, is couched in genealogies of willfulness, about which she is able to speculate quite beautifully—telling, perhaps, the history of a “call to arms,” as Ahmed puts it, performed by the little arm’s persistent rising. The role of the mother—or more accurately, the role partus cast black mothers into, is recalled here too. As the bodies coalesce on the floor, we are no longer moved by tension/release. Lewis transforms the plane of movement of the scene from strictly vertical to the weighty gravity of floorwork. Shattered and slowed down, the legs eerily disarticulate ghostly citations of other forms of dance (vogue, ballet, etc.), whilst Lewis herself performs an uncanny version of Helene Wiegel’s “silent scream,” slowly pushing her hand into her own gaping mouth as she crouches downstage center. Nauseating referentiality. Nauseating motherhood. A softness comes over the catatonic, absurd scene: smoke gently rustles over the bodies, permeating the proscenium. As PART I ends, a searchlight/spotlight turns its gaze on the audience, witnesses of these quasi-shipwrecked, fleshly debris.
The referential density of PART I is strikingly offset in PART II. We begin (almost) where we were left, with one dancer curled in a fetal position. Smoke has been replaced by water vapor softly moistening the stage. Slowly, the proscenium becomes dewy, humid. The lights turn to an eerie, alien green, further bathing the willful, curled-up girl. Lewis constructs a new milieu: a retro-futuristic, nineteenth-century, swamp-like darkness across which the other dancers will join the girl. The mist opens a new register for their movements, dominating the second part of the piece with their painstaking slowness—that is, the dancers now slip, slide, and glide across the stage, gradually edging toward each other to find contact. The scene’s thick, gothic erotics frame the pile of bodies, now laying atop each other, wrapped in the dense amnion of the proscenium’s jaw. Following the jarring juxtaposition of terror and epic convention in PART I, PART II offers respite without resolution. PART II is far shorter, and relies almost entirely on the material, symbolic, and metaphoric valences of water. In PART II, Lewis knowingly echoes the oceanic imagery which permeates analyses of transatlantic histories of enslavement. Brown, our fire-headed mother from the first scene, eventually pulls at the rope and swings it around. This shifting air imperceptibly accompanies the sound of water condensing on the proscenium floor and the auditorium becomes pregnant with silence. Lewis’s final, strictly choreographic choice, then, is circularity: the rope hypnotically, perhaps menacingly, swings above and around the mess of bodies. Together the textures and bodily qualities afforded by the water on stage produce a misty slow motion, with the vapor veiling the performers whilst simultaneously seeping into the house. We are suspended in an oceanic blackout, in the interminability of slavery’s afterlives. PART II offers the spectator a suspension, a state: floating in the black wetness, the shine in the floor takes its moment to glimmer under the mess of writhing dancers.
Let us hold this stage-picture next to Lewis’s task: to expose a logic of touch capable of undoing some of the historical trappings of willfulness. PART I’s generic excess, brought to its apex, resolves into PART II’s diffuse and damp blackness. At once womb, oceanic hull, and finale, this scene of suspension reveals Lewis’s choreographic preoccupations; in addition to citing mime, minstrelsy, cabaret, hip-hop, and krump, Lewis builds, with dance, what she terms “an aesthetic feeling-scape.”[5] We have traveled the darkness of the gothic, the direct, frontal address of Epic, the mood of film noir, and the wetness of the swamp. These feeling-scapes provide the conditions for Lewis to examine histories of aborted will in relation to the production of black performance and black life. Deeply aware that any logic of touch cannot simply subvert the grasp that imperial logics have on bodies (especially black, female bodies), Lewis blends them in order, it seems, to reveal the liberating and violent possibilities of touch in the moment of dancing. We might reread this case like that of the willful girl: as a singularity offered by dance to persistently raise an arm beyond death.
[1] Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–2.
[2] Post-show Talk-back, Jan. 31st 2020, MCA.
[3] Erin Hurley and Anne Bogart, Theatre & Feeling (London: Red Globe Press. 2010), 2.
[4] Post-show Talk-back, Jan. 31st 2020, MCA.
[5] Ibid.