Isabel Lewis (1981, Berlin) is an artist of Dominican and American origin who grew up on a suburban island off the coast of southwest Florida. She lived in New York City where she danced for many choreographers and where she has shown commissioned works from 2004 onward at The Kitchen, New Museum, and Movement Research at Judson Church among others. Lewis is based in Berlin since 2009. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy her current work takes the form of hosted occasions which are celebratory meetings of things, people, music, smells and dances and have been presented internationally and most recently at Tate Modern.
Lewis' interests circle dance (as a cultural storage system, as a technology of the self) and aesthetics in the space of social encounter. In the format she calls hosted occasions, particular conditions are created for a celebratory meeting of things, that conjure perhaps the ancient Greek symposium, where philosophizing, drinking and the sensual were inseparable. The entire human sensorium is engaged including the sense of smell with scents composed in collaboration with Norwegian chemist and smell researcher Sissel Tolaas.
In the last years Lewis has been working and crafting a specific way of performing which combines the skills of the dancer, the DJ, and the orator. In this way of performing a dancer becomes a host crafting the atmosphere, and attending to her guests offering stimulus and sociality in a space that is imagined as a kind of indoor garden and meeting place. It is a space for the exercise of the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the political.
Different from theatrical dance performances that create a space of distanced observation and intellectual contemplation and work with the excitement and anticipation of the "event," this format works towards creating the conditions for a bodily experience of relaxation and well-being. In this new format sound, smell, and touch play as important a role as sight. As the host Lewis unfolds a dramaturgy specific to each occasion, its guests and their energies, that includes dances, smells, music, and spoken address in a way that allows for conversation, contemplation, dancing, listening, or just simply being. Her regular collaborators are Sissel Tolaas and Juan Chacón of architecture collective Zuloark.
Ph: Isabel Lewis by Joanna Seitz
