Eli Lewis (they/them) makes performance work that playfully straddles dance and live art. Currently associate artist at The Place, Eli is a queer, neurodivergent performance artist, who has been creating award-winning performance since 2017. They are based in the southwest of England and London, collaborating with rural communities in the southwest to make and share dance.
Eli is interested in how people hold & process risk, occupying precarious spaces, and re-finding agency and playfulness within states of ‘not knowing’. Their practice examines where precarity intersects with queerness, ecology and collapse. Through their work they create dynamic performance landscapes that play host to suspenseful balancing acts.
Eli is driven by a desire to support people to reclaim risky spaces, and carve out space to slow down, re-find agency and play. Their practice is care-centred, working to provide positive, queer-led spaces that connect isolated, rural queer communities in creative exchange and queer and trans joy.
Eli received DanceXchange’s Choreography Award (2020) and Artsadmin’s BANNER Award (2017). Other supporters of their work include South East Dance, FABRIC, PDSW, Arts Council England, Carne to Cove, Villages in Action, Aerowaves Twenty19 and Goldsmiths College.
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What are you most excited about joining the new group of Work Place artists?
After this surreal year of disconnect, I can’t wait to be part of a close-knit dancing community again! I’m excited to connect, share and play with the other Work Place artists. I’ve had a pretty insular year and like everyone, I’m itching for new artistic encounters and the kind of creative spontaneity that arises from the cross-pollination of ideas. I’m particularly excited to open up long-term creative dialogues with the other Work Place artists that will challenge me creatively and push me to further define my practice. I’m excited to see how these dialogues mature and deepen over five years and whether new collaborations bloom from them.
Where do you seek or find inspiration for your work?
I’m curious about people’s attitudes towards risk- What people feel when they see a glass balanced on a table’s edge. I’m interested in why we feel tense or thrilled and I’m interested in what happens when we deliberately suppress our instinct to push the glass back onto the table and sit with these feelings. I see this risky space where the glass is half-on-half-off the table as a charged, highly creative space. I make work that tries to recreate this glass-table-edge moment on a larger, performative scale. I want to shift people’s attitude towards risk and display what happens if we stand back to appreciate precariousness in all its glory without rushing into ‘correct’ it.
What does it mean for you to be an artist in this day and age?
Coming out of the pandemic I feel the majority of people will be recovering from prolonged experiences of precariousness. People will be processing loss, recovering lost intimacy, and relearning how to unleash in joyous splurges. I feel artists such as myself who have an intimate, lived understanding of precariousness and vulnerability, have a lot of bodily wisdom and sensitivity to share with others, that will help them navigate this ground.
Art can be a radical form of self-care. It can work as social alchemy. It can be used to question, uproot, and unravel oppressive structures. Art shifts how we perceive the world and in this time of recovery and radical restructure, artists must guide the way forward.