Ligia Lewis

deader than dead begins at the end. The video opens with a whispered performance of Macbeth’s final soliloquy from Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day as the performer moves across a dance floor, practicing and repeating a series of movements stilted in their

flow. In opening with Macbeth’s reflections on mortality and the futility of life, Lewis locates the liveness of the work in direct conversation with death.

Throughout deader than dead, Lewis mobilizes repetition to flatten narrative structure and resist climax. Performers oscillate between deadpan—an affectless form of action designed to invoke emotional distance—and slapstick—a kind of plastic performativity that operates in hyperbole. Dancers twitch, writhe, and move in recurrent patterns punctuated by moments of stillness to a soundtrack composed of labored breathing, techno beats, and fourteenth-century choral music. “Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure” (One who laughs in the morning weeps in the evening), a ballad by the French poet and composer, Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377), soundtracks portions of the video. Invoking the medieval tradition of the lament, the piece itself is arranged as a never-ending complaint, performed here as an exposition of the limits of progress. The performance deteriorates as it repeats, unmastering the artifice of representation. Lewis’s danse macabre, or choreographed allegory for death’s inescapable presence, produces a resonant feeling of doom, of being trapped in the nightmare of history’s presents. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will come, and, as deader than dead suggests, attempts at progress will unwind and glitch, ending as they began—in nothingness, in absurdity, in a loop.

Background information 

Originally conceived in 2020 for the Hammer Museum, the creation of this piece began with an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion to illustrate emotional distance. Utilizing this expression as a type of stasis, Lewis developed a film that plays on loop, presented online and in exhibition spaces. The newly developed live version, which was last seen in Mexico and Luxembourg now has three performers. In this new performance the dancers use Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness) as the beginning of a work that unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample. The work is full of play but is also a meditation on ‘playing,’ or acting, as well as on tragedy’s recurring cycles and familiarity within Black experience. Also presented as a meditation on touch as an act of both care and violence. The work is built in the form of a musical lament, a protracted complaint on loop performed ad infinitum, decomposing itself along the way.

Kippen, fallen, liegen, an der Wand kleben wie tote Fliegen: Die Performer:innen in der Videoinstallation zur Performance deader than dead von Ligia Lewis zeigen den slapstickhaften Kontrollverlust und schauspielerische Darstellungsformen im ausdruckslosen „deadpan“-Modus genauso wie Momente einer zombiehaften Remobilisierung, in der sich Widerständigkeit und Repressionserfahrung die Waage halten. Das in der Kunsthalle Krems präsentierte Video erscheint letztlich als eine Allegorie auf den (auch sozialen) Tod und die Auslöschung von Stimmen und Geschichte(n) unter rassistischen Bedingungen. 

In Kooperation mit der Kunsthalle Krems.
Die Ausstellung läuft bis 1. November 2026.