Corpsing the Frame

Abstract Choreographer Ligia Lewis's first video-based piece, deader than dead (2021) was initially conceived as a performance to be staged in the Los Angeles Hammer Museum but was translated to video when the COVID-19 pandemic closed museums for in-person viewing. The piece deploys split frames that display different video channels, embracing a multiplicity of viewpoints. Lewis uses cinema's mobile frame to unfastens the fixed viewpoint of theatrical performance and explore “corpsing” (when falling out of a role exposes the limits of performance) as an indictment of the condition of black social death. Inspired by David Marriott's essay on “corpsing,” deader than dead's “falling out of character” (Lewis's dancers literally fall to the floor, find themselves revived, and then fall again) revels in and reveals the repeated performance of black life as death to be both the foundation and fate of the contemporary world. This article leans on Jordan Peele's Get Out (2016), one of Lewis's favorite horror films, and the use of dance in his later Us (2019) to illuminate how deader than dead locates and exploits the fugitivity of bad faith, particularly the bad faith of antiracist gestures that perpetuate social foundations of antiblackness. At the same time, viewing deader than dead through Sybil Newton Cooksey's concept of “revenant motion” helps clarify how Lewis deploys uncanny animation that ruptures the continuity of performances of racial equality acted out over a reality of social life predicated on antiblackness.