Discordant Harmonies: Resonance as Dramaturgy in Ligia Lewis’s Black Diasporic Art

“The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.” 
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return 

The ongoing intrigue I have with Ligia’s work arises from the ways she creates, toys with, and unravels the imposed fiction Dionne Brand alludes to in the epigraph above.(1) This fiction, ecstatically projected onto the world by the progenitors of what would come to be called the Imperial West, sedimented a stratifying narrative into a totalizing structure of existence long before our time. This structure, an untrustworthy word for a fabrication; a fiction is where Black(ened) bodies are formed to ground and thereby justify the logics of subjugation that produce exponential gains for those who (re)produce(d) the fiction.(2) Yet, the same blackened (no)bodies whose “belonging” lie “lodged in a metaphor” remain unseen, beyond the transcendental light of comprehension — eluding real capture from the horrifying logics of value that attempt to categorically define them. Meditating on the state of being incomprehensible, which Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, drawing from Frantz Fanon, conceptualizes as a sensuous disorientation akin to vertigo, paradoxically (re)orients us toward the danger the (no)bodies pose to the fiction’s viability.(3) The dizzying inscrutability of the (no)bodies functions as a rebellious force that dismantles the fiction’s framework by (pre)(ex)ceeding its constraints. 

All of this is to say that when Ligia asked me to be the dramaturg for A Plot / A Scandal, I accepted — despite the hesitation of inhabiting a role I had never played in any official capacity. I accepted because I was, and remain, intrigued by how Ligia unleashes her creations, her metaphors that are brought to life by a chorus of discordant voices that both mirror and diverge from Brand’s, yet resonate with the rebellious underside of inherited fictions.

The Plotting 

Rather remarkably, by the time Ligia asked me into her creation process, the work felt nearly complete. The compositional elements had long been crafted, with a specificity of detail that you wouldn’t expect when someone asks you to provide dramaturgical support. While Ligia had plotted most of the performance, what quickly became our point of engagement, an entryway into the logics of the world she was crafting, was her description of this creation as a solo/non-solo. This dichotomous wording reverberates with Brand’s exploration of the Black Diaspora, which she equates to living within a duplicitous narrative that is both a “creation of empires” and an act of “self-creation.”  Ligia’s description also touches upon a theme we frequently revisit in our discussions and wrestle with in our public works — an individual and collective construct too often wielded as a blunt instrument of containment and flattened into the worn-out label of “identity.”

Central to A Plot /A Scandal is the perception of the performing body which places its creator, Ligia, at its center. As a Black female-presenting figure, Ligia's decision to perform this solo/non-solo came with an understanding that her particular body enters the realm of representation — a metaphoric and very real stage- already burdened with a genealogy of mutilating projections. As she once disarmingly shared: “Every time I go on stage, I have to deal with my own disfigurement.” Rooted in the anti-Black scaffolding of Western empire creation, disfigurement is a concept Saidiya Hartman poignantly dissects in “The Plot of Her Undoing,” where she describes the inciting event as the conversion of flesh into property.(4) Enabled by an imperial drive to conquer and possess, this horrifying invention displaces multiplicitous ways of being, knowing, and feeling in exchange for a single plot. Constructed by and for those seeking control over all dimensions of life, this plot operates on both material and symbolic levels to extract total value, to evoke Denise Ferreira da Silva’s formulation, from total violence.(5)  It unfolds through processes of knowledge production that must visually (re)present the Black(ened) and gendered “she” as the missing link in the hierarchically conceived distinction between animals and humans, relegating “her” to the lowest rung of the great chain of being and the least sentient form of human life, thus justifying “her” bestial enslavement.(6) This disfiguring conversion, which Ligia and I before, during, and after this creation continue to explore through conversations steeped in Black feminist thought, emerges in her choreographic choices as a visceral tension between representation and its undoing — a corporeal vocabulary that both acknowledges and strains against the extractive weight of the Black(ened) body rendered as spectacle. 

In contemplating how to counter such spectacularizing violence, Hartman proposes strategies of stealth and resistance deliberately kept from public view (from a type of seeing conditioned to disfigure Ligia's plot(s),) on the other hand, are very public; plot(s) for all to see — hinting at their scandalous nature and perhaps also alluding to the voluptuous intrigue Brand teases us with in her poem — that challenge oppressive narratives in plain sight. Yet these plots that were designed to be viewed in a theater; the theatron; the place of seeing; also raise a if not the critical question in this context: how to bring the “Black female-presenting body” onstage without reproducing the disfiguring logics the realm of representation both dictates and perpetuates? This inquiry becomes even more fraught with Ligia's desire to evoke the spiritual and quotidian practices of our Dominican great-grandmother Lolón — a shadow, a rumor, barely real and mythic to us let alone to audiences indoctrinated in a type of viewing “heretical/exotic” others. With my brother composing the score and me, her sister, assisting A Plot /A Scandal appeared destined to be relegated to that check box of “identity” modified by the possessive pronoun “her.” Weighed down by a vast lineage of dismembering projections, the piece could have (and might still be) in danger of falling into the trap of being defined as a solo about (in horrifically positive, self-congratulatory ways regarding how institutions are representing more “diversity”) a Black Dominican-American female artist by the name of Ligia. 

Ligia’s plot(s) could not/cannot simply evade or magically wish away the plot that seeks to disfigure by reducing lived experiences to rigid, individuating categories that are paradoxically meant to visually/reductively represent many. Ligia’s plot(s) could not/cannot simply escape the repercussions of the historical plot grounded in a reward system that continues to profit from the racializing transformation of flesh into property.  So how can one/does one create ulterior plots when they are fully aware that they do not reside outside the totalizing material/symbolic realities the imposed fiction/plot creates?  

Amid the undercurrents of imposed fictions, Ligia's performance unfolds as a tapestry of intricate plots, where dark humor and seething anger work together to expose the cracks in our inherited notions and practices of identity and possession. Among these plots, John Locke’s specter of liberal individualism is “dragged” into the spotlight. Locke, the architect of modern liberal thought, framed his theory of life, liberty, and property rights as universal truths grounded in the “laws of nature,” thereby legitimizing personal dominion over the world’s resources — including land, animals, raw materials, and human bodies. In Ligia’s hands, this aspect of Lockean ideology becomes a caricature of ravenous accumulation, twisted into a fever dream of ownership that implicates us all — the children of the West still driven by the belief that proprietorship is an inherent, individual “human” right. In the tension between rigid categories and fluid rebellion, Ligia’s body becomes the crucible where these forces collide and transfigure. Her hyper-visible performance — at once scathing critique and exquisite revenge — unearthing wild excesses that refuse categorization, forging new metaphors of defiance. 

In the same performance, Ligia radically reimagines the notion of possession through Lolón, a spectral yet vital force whose way of being in the world remains scandalous to a regime intent on erasing all non-Western onto-epistemological expressions. Alluding to the rituals Lolón performed in Dios Dirá, a small village in the Dominican Republic named by her family — who never owned the land but served as its stewards and that of their community — this plot conjures a rebellious force.  Although Lolón's existence remains largely unknowable, erased even from her family by imperial fictions, her spirit anchors the performance, embodying Ligia's desire to dismantle the disfiguring plot.

In one powerful sequence, Ligia doesn't simply refuse to represent Lolón; she demolishes the very notion of plot or identity as possessive concepts. Her performance shifts into a rhetorical reflection as she grapples with Lolón's fragmented legacy — a past that resists comprehension.(7) Rather than attempting to construct a false clarity, she embraces this unknowability, maintaining an unwavering, penetrating gaze that dares the audience to face the intimacy they seek to claim. Her focus then gradually shifts as her body explodes into abrupt, uncontrolled rage. Moving with punk-like rebellion, she begins to demolish her own set — upending the plots she's been building, tearing down meticulously arranged elements, and destroying the restricted space surrounding her. This isn’t a graceful dismantling, but a raw, unapologetic destruction, an act that refuses to let the performance settle into any stable reading as character or narrative. Ligia's performance becomes an embodied protest, literally “fucking up” the plot that seeks to profit from the spectacularization of racialized bodies.

Lolón's spectral presence, as imagined through Ligia's art, represents a rebellion rooted not in the assertion of control but in the surrender to what remains unacknowledged and suppressed. This surrender invites us to heed silenced voices, exposing the cruel absurdity of ownership, commodification, and limitless resource extraction. It orients us toward a spirit, a force, and a way of being in the world that defiantly rejects the logics of mastery, containment, and possession imposed by liberal notions of identity, unearthing a relational existence that nurtures and sustains by yielding to the needs that support both our environment and one another.(8) 

Where does one begin to dramaturg a work that, from the start, feels nearly complete? My entry into this role echoed Ligia’s practice of navigating within a pre-existing plot. I didn’t serve as an external observer or add anything independently to her composition, rather I immersed myself in the “poethics” [sic] of her work by viscerally attuning myself to a (non-)solo that grapples with the arresting dilemmas in Brand’s poem, and to Ligia’s artistic strategy of plotting against imposed fictions precisely by rejecting the categorical boundaries of the “solo.”(9) By blurring the line between solo and non-solo, Ligia’s A Plot /A Scandal dismantles the inherited logics of value that seek to confine Black(ened) bodies within reductive frameworks while meditating on a state of being that gestures toward an elsewhere — beyond, before, and beneath the fictions of empire. As the imposed plot shamelessly continues to yield brutalizing symbolic and material realities, plotting against it becomes a quest for a most resonant metaphor as the rhythms of rebellion reverberate long after the performance fades to black.