Choreographer Ligia Lewis (b. 1983) works at the intersection of performance, film, and installation. She explores how race, gender, and history shape our experiences and perceptions. The exhibition presents a video documentation of her choreography “deader than dead”, a performative allegory on death. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the US, Lewis has lived and worked in Berlin since 2013.

“deader than dead” is a performance that combines movement, stillness, physicality, and sound into a dense choreographic arrangement. It shows how bodies act, tilt, fall, or drift in slow motion through states of expansion and collapse. Dance, theater, music, and singing appear side by side as equal components, each element developing its own meaning within the whole.

“deader than dead” features multiple performers whose movements alternate between powerful impulses and complete exhaustion. Musical interludes punctuate the performance and passages from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” are recited.

The performance explores transience, death, and the omnipresence of mortality in everyday life. It was created in Los Angeles in 2020 during a time of social upheaval in the US and the Black Lives Matter movement. The video shown at the Kunsthalle Krems documents a performance recorded in May 2025 at the International DANCE Festival in Munich.

In cooperation with donaufestival

Artistic director: Thomas Edlinger