A Plot / A Scandal

Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s performance A Plot / A Scandal takes up plot in its multiple meanings. Rebellious fantasies become schemes against the limits of narration. Mythical, historical, and political vignettes scandalize landed property’s legacy. Where plot is a scandal, the stage gives itself over to the pleasures of transgression. Here, Lewis explores what it might mean to be caught in the act.

In the artist’s own words, “A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted, invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage.”

Drawing together personae that range from Enlightenment thinker John Locke, 16th-century Santo Domingo slave rebellion leader Maria Olofa (Wolofa), Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, and Lewis’s great-grandmother, Lewis choreographs a “poetics of refusal at the edges of representation.” Scheming against theater’s strict economy of seeing and being seen, the artist outlines a scene “where the excitement for that which does not fit might find its place.”