elinorlewis

Eli Lewis (they/them) makes work that playfully straddles dance, live art and installation.

Currently associate artist at The Place, Eli Lewis is a queer, neurodivergent performance artist, who has been creating award-winning performance since 2017. Their practice playfully straddles dance, live art & installation. They are based in the southwest of England and London, regularly collaborating with rural communities in the southwest to make and share work.

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.

The performance Eli makes burns slowly. It’s meditative. It's still. They like to make people wait. Their work invites people to zoom in and slow down. If you’re patient, their work will unfurl for you. Eli's work will play with your expectations, before mischievously subverting them with a twinkle of awkward humour. During of Eli's performances, even if it’s not immediately apparent, everything is hanging in a delicate balance. At any moment, something might go ‘wrong’ - something sudden and unplanned might happen to cause everything to collapse. But if it does, that’s ok.

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 inclusive and care-centred. They work to provide positive, queer-led spaces that connect isolated, rural queer communities in creative exchange and facilitate queer and trans joy.

Eli is currently associate artist at The Place. They received DanceXchange’s Choreography Award (2020) and Artsadmin’s BANNER Award (2017). Other supporters of their work include South East Dance, DanceXchange, PDSW, FABRIC, Take Art, Arts Council England, Aerowaves Twenty19 and Goldsmiths College.