Breathing, as the condition for the dancing body’s giving and withholding, becomes the basis for a different kind of cinematic knowledge that has to do with the ontology of gesture in relation to black movement.

–Rizvana Bradley

Breathing Room explores the gallery as a site for holding time and space. In particular, this gesture is offered by Or Gallery to performance artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis.

Lewis has continually been touring her works minor matter and Sorrow Swag throughout the past four years. While this unbroken stretch of presenting work marks Lewis’ success as an artist within international experimental dance and performance networks, it also belies the necessary but unpaid labour of research, theorizing and rehearsal that Lewis also does to support the conceptual rigour underlining her choreographic and performance practice.

By offering Breathing Room as a residency for Lewis, Or Gallery shifts between roles as a site of retreat, study and collaboration without asking that these activities result in the production or presentation of a work.

Instead, Breathing Room is a space surrounded by, but also consisting of a constellation of texts, video documentation, artists and speakers who have been invited to think through and alongside Lewis’ practice. This provides temporary relief to the isolation of the itinerant and brief engagements that are part of touring performance work while drawing attention to the body that works and creates in proximity to other bodies, connecting with Lewis’ interest in dependent and entangled subjectivity and selves.

The Breathing Room studio and reading room area frame the activities of Lewis’ research residency but are also a commons, open to visitors and invited groups for the duration of the installation and following Lewis’ departure on February 8th.

Thank you to Jordan Milner, Ellen O’Connor, Brady Cranfield, Pablo de Ocampo and the PuSH Festival

“Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion,” TDR: The Drama Review 62:1 (T237) Spring 2018.