The Dominican-American Liga Lewis, who decamped for Berlin almost two decades ago, deploys many popular tropes of European performance art: an anarchic stage picture; orgy-like scrimmages; street dance as both signal and noise; a playhouse set, which reminds us of the proscenium before us. The difference is how much is at stake in the messiness and self-reflexivity. As Lewis recently told Amit Noy of The Brooklyn Rail: “They’re all very imagistic, [my] pieces. They’re saturated with the act of construction, of image-making, and also the terror of being an image. This thing of, ‘Oh god, now I’m two-dimensional.’ It’s the process of reduction that falls upon racialized bodies: you lose your interiority; you become just a surface.” Miraculously Lewis manages to insert some daylight between performance’s essential surface-making and the particular danger the skin-deep holds for people of color. Indeed, she builds her considerable drama—she’s a master of pacing—out of this distinction between compliance and resistance. Her latest, Still not Still, has its French premiere at the Festival d’automne in Paris this month. —Apollinaire Scherr