Ligia, I am curious to learn more about the research behind and the starting point for A Plot/A Scandal. I would also like to hear how you situate this performance in relation to your other works?
That’s a good question. For a while, I thought it would be good to develop a solo or what I describe as a non-solo, with me as the lead protagonist. The work developed as a response to my experience in the village of Dios Dirá, where my matriarchal line is from. I recognized the profound precarity yet richness that this village encapsulates, which is to also bear witness to the profound beauty and tragedy of black life in the Caribbean under racial capitalism, “property” being the fundamental concern. Black people across the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic, despite having worked the land, are being pushed from their homes due to the exploits of a tourist economy that keeps building (private) resorts across the beaches and land for white (European and American) tourists. And, of course, I have to consider Haiti and how it continues to suffer at the hands of the West (France, the U.S. specifically) for its role in Black Liberation. To put it plainly, what I am attempting to do with my plot is un-plotting the grand narrative of progress developed in the time of enlightenment in Europe at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, which rendered black folks (Africans stolen from their ancestral lands) “property,” to be molded and maimed over centuries for the extractive use of Europe, as these are the traces and the how and why this continued dispossession. Despite this tragedy, I wanted to map some of the resistances across this archipelago, the greater Caribbean, to arrive at my great-grandmother’s story and honor her practice of Dominican Palo, a minor resistance within the larger frame of Black Rebellion. This work is deeply personal and political, a consistent thread in my work, even when I am not the main protagonist.
As a choreographer and dancer, you have developed a strong and recognizable handwriting in your performances. Over time, you have increasingly ventured into the realm of theater, working with theatrical elements, slapstick, and the spoken word. I am intrigued by this development. Could you share your thoughts on this transition?
My first stage work, Sorrow Swag (2014), was a nod to the theater while also trying to unmoor the more representational forms of performance within this tradition, including considering how text is performed. I thought about how this might lend performance and the theater, for that matter, to the textures of affect and embodiment. I use saturated images through a combination of movement, language, speech, historical references, light, and sound to develop something I hopefully haven’t seen before but that gets at the psychic space of how race and gender (which is to say differential forms of power and agency) touch and move bodies differently and what that means in terms of expression and ultimately a body in the world. Because I come from dance and choreography, I use my choreographic sensibility to compose bodies in space and time, with sound and light being deeply considered as part of my choreographic language. Speech emerges from the body in and through a somatic practice I develop depending on each work. My most theatrical work is Still Not Still (2021), which maps how power is unevenly distributed across bodies while simultaneously shifting power consistently across the group and the performative situation. Rather than fetishizing difference and the grand appeal for diversity, I point to some crueler and less excitable conditions that create difference.
I read A Plot/A Scandal in direct connection with a (Western) world, that has yet to address its colonial past and continues to operate under neoliberal logics, exploiting and living off the backs of others. Daily racism persists in our societies. I am curious about your perspective on revenge and resistance in relation to this performance and your work in general. Additionally, I am intrigued by a phrase from an interview with your sister, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari: “Hence my call to “Fuck up the plot!”—an invocation for all who are present in the ritual of the live performative event to do the same.” To me, this phrase seems to appeal to imagining and actively building other futures. What do you think?
Exactly. What does it mean to fuck up the plot, to put a cog in the wheel of racial capitalism, to disrupt the grand narrative that normalizes everyday racial aggressions, that normalizes the unequal distribution of life and death, and to aid and care across bodies that fall outside of normative (European) conceptions of subjecthood/personhood? My work does not operate in a vacuum. I always consider the lived experience of myself and the interpreters of my work. Aesthetics are Politics. A feigned neutrality in this regard is only a naive attempt at universalizing Europe’s perspective. I have become increasingly more explicit, though honestly, all my work has reflected similar themes through these negative affects/pessimisms (revenge being one example). At the same time, I’ve increasingly pointed to the limits of empathy precisely because neoliberalism makes only individuals accountable rather than violent structures maintained over centuries. History matters. How we build honest structures in consideration of our pasts matters. How and what we create matters. The question of repair is an urgent one, and the time is ripe for deeper reflections on how. In a global reality, where the processes of colonialism (extraction) and racialization (violence) are consistently operating in tandem and are world-making, I think the ethical demand would be to figure out what the cogs are and how to use them wisely.