Some Thing Folk by Ligia Lewis and the Cullberg Company celebrated its premiere on 28 August 2025 at HAU 1 during Tanz im August.
How does a society develop? How is a sense of belonging created when the notion of nationality is deliberately excluded? Answer option 1: sluggishly. The first dancer slowly drags herself across the stage. Heavy legs that are distinctly audible as they strike the stage. She seems scared and uneasy, as if she’s on the run. She keeps repeating: “They are coming. They are stealing from us.” At the same time, her feet hit the ground. She starts describing her movement. Toes, foot, toes, foot. A distinguishable rhythm of feet and voice emerges. The dancer moves sideways offstage to this beat. We’ll later learn that this scene was a foreshadowing. A cinematic stylistic device that serves as a harbinger for a storyline to come.
The curtain opens and the stage is blue. Blue floor, blue tree, and blue branches. On it are dancers seemingly testing out their bodies. Limbs swing, bodies roll and fall. Babbling and screaming. And all the while, they continuously slap and tug at their own bodies, as if they were failing to comply. People discovering their bodies, their own strengths and movement abilities. That makes sense. Why these bodies are not behaving and need to be slapped remains a mystery. The whole process seems cumbersome and repetitive without moving in any clear direction. It is tedious and unfortunately also tiresome. Half an hour later, it is over.
And thereafter the sluggishness is left behind. The dancers happily flow from group dance to line dance, from line dance to partner dance, and from partner dance to solos. Here it is, the community and the dance. Whether or not it was worth the half hour wait is something we all have to decide for ourselves.
The mood and the lighting change once again. The bluish-purple light is interrupted by a threatening orange. And they are coming. They are coming to steal. And now we’re back to the opening scene and the heaviness. Bodies being beaten and incomprehension about what is actually happening. “They”, we can assume, are colonial powers who are suppressing indigenous people and taking their land. Tradition and movement are devalued in much the same way. And this topic is heavy, everything but light. Because concepts like tradition are now more about entertainment than knowledge and the visibility of a people and their history, especially since hegemonic discourse has increasingly drained the meaning from words like tradition over the centuries. The piece ends as words gradually become visible on the curtains: “to steal a folk / is to kill a folk / this is the end / of some thing folk“. Unfortunately, the force and clarity of this final verse were not evident in the lengthy hour-long performance.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
Some Thing Folk, by Ligia Lewis und der Cullberg Company, premiered on 28 August 2025 at Tanz im August.
