Fierce Festival

14 — 18 October

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SCHEDULE:
  • Wheelchair Accessible Visual

DURATION:

approx. 45 mins

VENUE:

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Ln, Deritend, Birmingham B9 4AR

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The Rant That Can't (Work-in-Progress)

Ligia Lewis

(Berlin)

The Rant That Can’t (Work-in-Progress) unfolds as a live performance where speech stutters and swirls, and where language meets its limit.

A single voice—or a shifting chorus—attempts to articulate a rant that cannot fully emerge. Words stutter, repeat, collapse, and reassemble into chants and partial songs. Fragments of speech loop and echo through the space, building a rhythm that oscillates between play and strain. What begins as an effort to communicate becomes a play on communication’s failure.

Treating the body as a technology and the voice as its appendage, The Rant That Can’t traces attempts and failures at speech when ongoing injustice renders the present as a continuous site of distortion, and a persistent sense of loss overwhelms any sense of agency.

This special work-in-progress precedes the premiere at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station on Sunday 18 October, presented by Somerset House Studios as part of 3 Evenings.

FIERCE SAYS

“Ligia’s presence at Fierce is seven years in the making and the minute you experience her work, you’ll understand why. Her work is singular: always rooted in rigorous research, always deeply felt, always urgent.”

The Rant That Can’t (Work-in-Progress) unfolds as a live performance where speech stutters and swirls, and where language meets its limit.

A single voice—or a shifting chorus—attempts to articulate a rant that cannot fully emerge. Words stutter, repeat, collapse, and reassemble into chants and partial songs. Fragments of speech loop and echo through the space, building a rhythm that oscillates between play and strain. What begins as an effort to communicate becomes a play on communication’s failure.

Treating the body as a technology and the voice as its appendage, The Rant That Can’t traces attempts and failures at speech when ongoing injustice renders the present as a continuous site of distortion, and a persistent sense of loss overwhelms any sense of agency.

This special work-in-progress precedes the premiere at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station on Sunday 18 October, presented by Somerset House Studios as part of 3 Evenings.

FIERCE SAYS

“Ligia’s presence at Fierce is seven years in the making and the minute you experience her work, you’ll understand why. Her work is singular: always rooted in rigorous research, always deeply felt, always urgent.”

artist bio

▶︎

Ligia Lewis works as a choreographer, dancer, artist, and director, working across stage, exhibition, and film. Her works are marked by physical and emotional intensity, where comedy and tragedy collide. Through her practice, performer and audience confront processes that disrupt normative conceptions of the body, as her work moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Her work is held together by the logics of interdependence, disorder, and play.

 

Lewis negotiates the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the un/known. She gives space for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work, sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant. Her work continues to engage the nuances of embodiment. For Lewis, choreography is the movement of ideas across bodies, meticulously conceived and directed.

CREDITS

▶︎

Concept, Choreography, Artistic Direction, Text/Lyrics: Ligia Lewis
Performance: La Uyi Ihasee
Light Design: Joseph Wegmann
Sound composition and Design: George Lewis Jr. & Wynne Bennett
Video Projections: Moritz Freudenberg & Ligia Lewis

VENUE INFO

The building is wheelchair accessible. There is a step at the entrance but a ramp is available. There are two gender neutral toilets available, both are gender neutral with one fully accessible toilet. Find out more here.

access

Visual only

CONTENT WARNINGS

Loud Music Theatrical smoke/haze