Conceived, choreographed and directed by Ligia Lewis for Made in L.A. 2020, "deader than dead" was originally a performance planned for the Hammer Museum galleries that had to be postponed due to the pandemic. 

Its starting point is an investigation into both the irony and the emotional distance induced by the deadpan; a comic and impassive attitude used to illustrate emotional distance. 

Initially, Lewis developed an expressively flat (or dead) choreography for ten dancers , resisting any narrative, or representational hold tied to a climactic build or progression. Following the pandemic, the cast was reduced to 4 performers and the performance pivoted to a more traditionally theatrical presentation. In this new work, the dancers use Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness) as the beginning of a work that unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void – and each tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack. The work is full of play but is also a meditation on “playing,” or acting, as well as on tragedy’s recurring cycles and familiarity within Black and brown experience. Lewis is exploring time, as it loops; performance and touch, as an act of both care and violence. 

The work is built in the form of a musical lament, a protracted complaint on loop performed ad infinitum, steadily decomposing itself. Yet Lewis presents her grim subject—the farce of progress—with a healthy dose of humor and comedic tropes, riffing on the concept of “corpsing”—a theatrical term for unintentional laughter at a non comedic moment, “playing straight” during a humorous scene, or simply breaking character. Corpsing, in the words of the philosopher David Marriott, is associated with “moments in which an actor exceeds the limits of theater and no longer is in command of a role.” But in those slippages in character, he states: “if Black life matters, it cannot be as . . . the poetical grasp of a historical meaning, nor as the breathless emergence of a politics of ascent. For such roles are not meant for the living; they depend on the idea that Blacks can only perform and perfect the role of their deaths, and that they should do so forever.”

"deader than dead" does not so much document the interpretation of a play as the potential of a performance.

For Amarre, choreographer Ligia Lewis and Andrea Rodrigo, curator of the programme, will hold a conversation that delves into the references and intuitions that have informed "deader than dead"; attending to its modular form, its embodied physical logics, and the presence of the minor, the sensual and enigma in her work.