Family ties

Whether or not Lewis Forever sums up a way of life or a performance enterprise, this Brooklyn- and Berlin-based sibling collective has a history that goes back to the crib. Sarah Lewis, 30, recalls making dances for her sister Isabel, now 27, as soon as she was able to crawl. Twins George Jr. and Ligia Manuela, 25, were quickly pulled into the showbiz lifestyle. Half-Dominican and half-Jewish, the Lewis children grew up in Venice, Florida—a fairly dull place where they found they had little choice but to let their imaginations run wild. In their fantastical Freak the Room, Sarah, Isabel and George perform without Ligia, who recently joined Belgium’s Les Ballets C de la B. (Eric Green, a Berlin artist, stepped in as the “impostor.”) “Nothing is simple, nothing is clear, nothing is black and white, so why even pretend?” Isabel asks during a family breakfast at her Greenpoint, Brooklyn loft. “Everything is a freaky mess.”

Isabel: We’re all doing all different things—George, music; Sarah, directing theater; and Ligia and myself, dance—but we wanted to meet with live performance. We started brainstorming on what this thing could be.

George: We knew what we wanted to do, which was perform together and use a certain aesthetic. But we didn’t really know what it was, and I think this piece was almost born out of the pressure to pretend that we knew what we were doing.
Isabel: Everything we’ve ever made together was done in a living space.

Sarah: This summer when we were rehearsing in Berlin, we got studio space in the middle of the city. We found it really stifling somehow and actually the majority of the work was developed in my living room.

Isabel: We decided not to fight it, but to just let it be the site of this experience. Yes, we’re all independent artists, but we’re also siblings. We weren’t interested in making the show about that, but we wanted to deal with the insiderness of us as a unit and also the idea of bringing in this impostor who is both part of us and not part of us. It became a question of can we ever really identify with anything? Can we identify as a family unit? As Dominican-American-Jewish people? What are all these terms and identities? Maybe we’re just all alone at the end.

Sarah: We’re playing, obviously, with authenticity.

Isabel: And in a kind of irreverent way. We’re working with creating iconic versions of ourselves in order to totally tear them down.

Sarah: And also “exotifying” characters. If I think about it now, these iconic characters are really arrogant and pompous versions of ourselves.

Isabel: Which is maybe a theme of all of our works individually, and that has to do with how and where we grew up and always being these exotic people.

Sarah: We were definitely always “other.” We grew up in southwest Florida, by far the only people of color within a five-mile radius.

George: More specifically, we grew up in the island of Venice. We were literally the only kids on the block except for one really strange guy [Sarah laughs]. We lived there and it was weird. I feel like we started this trend of kids going to the library.

Isabel: There was an otherness on various levels. It’s not just the victimization, because there is a strange power that we all definitely reap the benefits of. Playing with all that’s complex about that is interesting and it’s definitely a part of the show. When we started talking about making art together, we were like, What are we seeing? What are we frustrated with? We talked a lot about the deconstruction of things in a theater space—to the point of no meaning. We felt like the tougher question to ask right now is: If everything’s dead, what do we do now? So the transfer of that thought in the show happens in creating iconic versions of ourselves in order to deconstruct them.

Sarah: To kill them.

Isabel: To find out what’s on the other side. The show begins with the death of the icons that were Lewis Forever. It’s a fiction we’ve developed around what Lewis Forever was in the world and this idea that we’re this entity. There are mini-narratives inside of that, which deal with the impostor and what happened to Ligia.

Sarah: And this all takes place within a familial space. It’s almost as if we’re confined to that room—somehow we’ve killed our iconic versions of ourselves and we land in the situation in this room. And then it’s a series of games that we play with one another. Through this sequence of games, we show different power plays between the impostor and Lewis Forever.

Isabel: We were like, What made us excited about making art in the first place? We’re allowing ourselves to say yes to fantasy and magic.

George: It’s interesting that we have all grown into being artists. Our parents were supportive, but they definitely didn’t influence us artistically. When we were children we played in the same way that we’re creating work now.

Sarah: Which wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision. It just happened.

George: Then we played in an artful way and now we’re just doing that again. In my opinion, artists are born out of really hard-core love or hatred and we were forced to love each other—a lot. More than anything, I think our parents were just like, You have to love each other, that’s all there is to it. And sometimes we fucking hated each other, but we looked out for each other. I just think that’s it. We had nothing better to do. And we really loved each other.

Lewis Forever is at P.S. 122 Sun 30–Dec 14.

Lewis Forever: The Outtakes»