Ligia Lewis's 'Minor Matter' Performance in Milan

In the deconsecrated church of San Paolo Converso, now the studio of CLS Architetti, Ligia Lewis performed 'Minor Matter.' The piece opened with the line 'I want to turn you over and enter your skin.' Black dominated both the formal and semantic aspects, despite the baroque opulence of the altar and frescoes. The dance, described as ungrammatical and bestial, was a disjointed hymn to blackness as an existential condition. It played with aggregation and disintegration, where harmony gave way to effort and lightness to the 'weight' of flesh, jarring in a church that, in darkness and silence, reclaimed its ancient splendor. The soundscape, ranging from baroque to industrial to Berlin electronic, traced the shift from environment to humanity, from a golden to an iron age. Lewis closed by shouting 'Black Black!' before the lights went out. The performance took place in 2017 in Milan, Italy.