LEWIS FOREVER is in residence at the New Museum for the month of June, presenting new work in progress every Thursday night, responding to your input, and making up their mind as they go along.

LEWIS FOREVER is a performance collective of four siblings: three sisters and a brother; a director, two dancers, and a musician. Living half in New York and half in Europe, half Dominican and half Jewish American, LF is both a performance collective and a bloodline. They make new performance work for theatrical and non-theatrical spaces, present other artists, throw parties, and create other social situations that provide the opportunity to embody ideas and questions surrounding collective versus individual vision, emigration, post-American identity, transient identities, “transnationalism,” belonging, longing, and dislocation. Their work proposes a new model for the family structure, reconfiguring traditional notions. Family being the first society we acclimate to and the group through which we begin to understand the organization of our communities, LF is interested in the family structure as a site for recasting the molds that shape our understandings of the world.

The content of LF’s residency will focus on the simultaneous development of a series of a solo projects and a video/live performance project. Throughout, LF will employ a variety of different strategies for investigating and expanding this material in front of a live audience. Each presentation will offer new insights and alterations to the material, which will then inform the following week’s rehearsals and presentation. The audience will be involved as observers and critics have the opportunity to participate and directly interact with LF. LF will use that feedback and respond to it for each subsequent step. LF will, on certain days, open the rehearsal process to willing participants in one of many approaches they are investigating to develop the process of working collectively. Throughout the residency, LF will explore the process of devising and shaping new material as a collective and a family, sharing the unique pleasures and challenges of such a process, while developing new material that will be presented in its finished form later this year in Berlin.

The two projects under development are:

SCREEN TEST
A small bit of text, the representation of a man in a chair, and a mysterious faceless figure in the background engaged in a game of composition with a camera operator, a sound guy, and a strain of jazz music. These are the basic elements of this performative/filmic circumstance where each element is carefully considered as a character. Four main characters emerge: the seated man, the faceless figure, the camera operator, and the sound guy. The four members of LF cycle through, performing each of these characters in a live filmmaking performance that unfolds as a meta-neo-noir murder mystery.

LEWIS FOREVER: Solo
After their experiments in collective vision in Freak the Room, LF proposes a new working model for themselves as a constellation of individuals working independently. Each member of LF will conceive and produce a solo project within an agreed time frame. The completed solo projects will be presented to one another, after which LF will collaborate as a team of curators to work towards finding a unique and specific format for the presentation of the solo works.

LEWIS FOREVER (LF), founded in 2006, is a performance collective of four artist siblings. They gather an array of artistic backgrounds in contemporary dance, performance art, rock, experimental music, and theater. LF has presented work for AUNTS in Brooklyn and for Epic, FUEL, and LaborGras in Berlin. LF recently presented its premiere evening length work LEWIS FOREVER : Freak the Room at Performance Space 122 in December of 2008 and for the COIL Festival in January of 2009. They also received support from Harlem Stage Fund for New Work for their production at Performance Space 122.

Banner image: Courtesy of the artists