Expanding her practice as a dancer and choreographer, Isabel Lewis’s (*1981, Santo Domingo) artistry dissolves lines between artwork and experience. At Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, Gropius Bau, and beyond, she has composed environments in which she positions herself as host of various assembling bodies, conceiving performance as a practice of hospitality; a way of being, thinking, and transforming together. Recently, she was appointed artistic co-director, alongside the Austrian dance and performance workshop curator Rio Rutzinger, of Tanzquartier Wien (TQW; Dance Quarter Vienna), one of Europe’s leading centers for contemporary choreography since its founding in 2001. While extending TQW’s legacy of supporting the local Viennese scene and engaging international practices, especially as a hub for experimentation, research, exchange, and presentation, Lewis also intends to reimagine its possibilities. Attuned to both the aesthetic and the social dimensions of performance, her approach opens opportunities for how TQW can shape the wider ecology of art institutions today.

Isabel Lewis, Scalable Skeletal Escalator, with Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, LABOUR, Dirk Bell, Lara Dâmaso, Yann Slattery, Rafał Pierzyński, PRICE, and The Field. Performance documentation, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2020. Photo: Annik Wetter

Alice Heyward: As an artist who has worked with many different institutions, what drew you to becoming artistic director at Tanzquartier Wien?

Isabel Lewis: It was a natural evolution of my artistic practice, which has been a long time developing in response to certain restrictions that I long felt as a racialized, gendered body on the proscenium stage, especially in front of anonymous European audiences. That began with classical ballet, before I came to understand myself as a choreographer, and spent a decade crafting pieces, not only for the stage, but critically addressing the issue of the stage itself. From my criticality towards the theatre, how it arranges power relations and imposes aesthetic, conceptual, social, and ethical limitations, I wanted to find a generative alternative. I began to create situations where I could rearrange, recompose social relations in the space differently – where I could be a host addressing my guests.

I aimed to temper the visual dominance of the theatrical space and make work that engaged the entire human sensorium. I asked, What is the spatial strategy? what does this space smell like? what does this space feel like? Even if my practice originates from my body, choreography has come to mean something far beyond the creation of a sequence of movements. It’s become about the choreography of the situation itself, and the arrangement of all the elements that comprise it, both living and non-living. Which kinds of social codes are at play, and how to intervene in them, illuminate how different elements come into relation with one another. Hosting also meant inviting collaborators into projects as part of an expanded choreography.

Then last summer, I was a danceWEB mentor for ImPulsTanz, and stayed in Vienna for the entire duration of the festival. I lived through its full intensity, alongside fifty scholarship recipients from all over the world. In recent years, I’d been more present in the contemporary art field than in dance, and being surrounded once more by the world of dance, in this profoundly moving experience of exchange, my heart opened. I was also struck by Vienna itself – its rich food culture, the café rituals, its sense of cultivated, ceremonial hospitality – and I thought maybe I should keep my eyes open for an opportunity here.

Isabel Lewis, Communal EPIC Fiction, 2010–

Workshop documentation, ImpulsTanz, Vienna, 2023

Photos: Rio Rutzinger

AH: ​​How have your large-scale hosting projects changed your sense of an institution’s potential and your role therein?

IL: As I moved around the world with my work nonstop, creating these short-lived zones of possibility, I began to ask what it would mean to root my practice. In Germany, new positions were opening up in time-based media and performance, which I thought could be a way to address the question I was sitting with.

In October 2021, I started the “Klasse für Performative Künste” [Class for Performative Arts] at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig [HGB; Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig]. The HGB was a fascinating place to explore the institution’s relationship to the artist: a 250-year-old institution that upholds a modernist idea of what art is, complete with all its bureaucratic forms. I became aware of the psychological and physical distress that this structure, rooted in Enlightenment-era worldviews, still produces not only for students, but also for staff and administrators. Could I intervene? As in the theater before, hosting now became my way of questioning how the academic format organizes bodies and relations. I proposed a protocol for a space, and allowed that space to be shaped by the interventions of colleagues, students, and administrative staff.

[Audio: Klasse für Performative Künste, HGB Leipzig, led by Isabel Lewis, Slug Protocols: Listening Pieces, 2022. Full tracklist here]

AH: You and your artistic co-director, Rio Rutzinger, who was the head of research and workshops programming at ImPulsTanz for the last thirty years, are an exceptional match for trying to evolve TQW as an open-minded production house.

IL: Rio and I first worked together seventeen years ago when I was still living in New York. He invited me to teach, and I offered an experimental workshop for collective composition, Communal E.P.I.C. Fiction. As I came back year after year with new formats, he was consistently great at producing and supporting these kinds of experimental, research-based situations, including finding some unusual places for the workshops, and it’s from that rhythm that we developed our very warm, trusting relationship. We saw each other every day during last year’s festival, and it was Rio that suggested we apply together for TQW’s artistic directorship. I think it was an off-hand joke, but then I took it rather seriously.

Klasse für Performative Künste (HGB Leipzig) & Friends, led by Isabel Lewis. Class documentation, Ringlokschuppen, Leipzig, 2023. Photo: Isabel Lewis

Klasse für Performative Künste (HGB Leipzig) & Friends, led by Isabel Lewis. Class documentation, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, 2024. Courtesy: European Cultural Centre – Palazzo Bembo

Both: Klasse für Performative Künste (HGB Leipzig) & Friends, led by Isabel Lewis, Time Smuggler

Performance documentation, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig 2023. Photos: Alexandra Ivanciu

AH: Hosting taps into the expanded choreographies of a situation, including the historical and embedded. How do you and Rio imagine shaping an institutional culture together?

IL: While a large part of what we will do at TQW will be programming performances, we’re committed to honoring our mutual love and respect for artistic research and exchange: namely, by creating more pathways for a public to access the practices and cultures of dance and performance. Rio is at the helm of workshops and training; I am heading the theory department; and we’ll share the programming of performances, in an integrated program where each of those undertakings is given just as much attention and helps drive institutional dynamism.

AH: You and Rio have an exciting opportunity to trouble the categories of “artist,” “institution”, and “practice.”

The idea of “bureaucratic capture” – the artist or work absorbed by institutional logic – is a frequent hazard. But rather than adopting anti-institutional postures of refusal, I find it more interesting to reinvent possibilities from within, by identifying spaces for permeability. Is there room to breathe?

IL: This is going to be one of my central experiments in this role. To what extent is it possible to artistically intervene? By which I mean shift my own habits of thinking, much like I once transformed my understanding of the performer-audience relationship. I hope that this can now inform a choreographic knowledge of the inner workings of this institution.

TQW is a site with its own choreographies of relations, managed through specific bureaucratic forms. When does the relational infrastructure and bureaucracy support something meaningful? When do these tools become, as is often the case across European institutions, zombified ends in themselves? And how, then, can they be interrupted or transformed?

AH: I remember a project of yours at Gropius Bau that included RECESS: Becoming Crystalline [2018], in which Michael Helland facilitated meditation practices. How did your work, with “practice” at its core, begin in exhibition formats?

IL: Two years before its Gropius Bau articulation, I initiated a project called The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices [2016–]. I was interested in exploring what it might mean to produce a body of knowledge with others and to claim that as an institution. Would it necessarily require heavy overhead, a fixed border, or a building? Could it be something else – mobile, relational, collaborative?

The original idea was to host intensive research and co-creation sessions, treating the exhibition space as a means of “publishing” their traces. At the Gropius Bau, it took the form of a three-room installation and an eight-week program of four workshops per day, variously led by artists, scientists, filmmakers, and foragers. It was an unfolding inquiry into what an embodied, collective, and situated pedagogy could look like inside a major institutional framework.

This project has continued to evolve, with contributions from Dambi Kim, Sunny Pfalzer, Thea Riefler, Phila Bergman of Shedhalle, Lissy Willberg, and my students from HGB – not to mention the many artists who participated and shared practices. The work became an ambulatory experimental academy – a kind of living institute for the exchange of body-based forms of knowledge.

Isabel Lewis, Welt ohne Aussen [World Without Outside], with Dambi Kim and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.

Workshop documentation, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2018. Photos: Mathias Voelzke

AH: What spurred you to work with hosting as a kind of research-based fieldwork relating to situated, embodied, relational practice? And how might its affective aspects become operative within an institution?

IL: In many ways, that “fictional” institute was the seed where so many of my initial questions around institution-making began to crystallize. And it affirmed for me that working on and within the institution has an aesthetic dimension that is practice-based, alive, and capable of shaping how we come together and produce knowledge.

TQW operates within a theatre, and three studios where training and workshops happen and where work can be produced and presented. The team is highly skilled and professional, and is capable of producing polished, technically demanding work. Those are fantastic assets. Simultaneously, what really excites me artistically is further opening the institution to experimentation, and especially, to research and artistic uncertainty.

AH: Pedagogy offers a useful metaphor here: There’s the “banking model” of education, where knowledge is “deposited” and education is tracked linearly; and the “problem-posing” approach, where learning occurs through questions, relational exchange, and less documentable experiences.

IL: Dance on the concert stage has historically centered on the premiere, the performance, the ticketed event. This focus is, of course, tied to how live arts are funded, how value is measured, and how the machinery of production is built. It encourages a relentless drive toward the “new,” which creates pressure on artists to produce continuously, not just works, but content that can circulate visually and that is easily “tourable.”

Part of my role here is to support artists who create ambitious, technically sophisticated works and to ensure they have the resources necessary to present them in the best possible ways. But I am interested in expanding our understanding of what production can be. Can we consider a moment of resonance, a conversation, a memory, or a shift in awareness as such? A culture of research and experimentation requires trust and can only unfold slowly – but to achieve room for not knowing, for becoming, would have a profound and lasting impact.

Isabel Lewis, An Occasion, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016. Courtesy: MCAM

Isabel Lewis, An Occasion: Poolside Pastoral, Faena Art, Buenos Aires, 2019. Photo: Loló Bonfanti

AH: The artistic practices that resonate with me don’t rely on or produce uniform experiences. Rather, they produce subjectivity and allow meaning to regenerate.

As a freelance performing artist, you know the rhythm of short-term engagements: a few months here, a premiere there, a project somewhere else, with so much speed and churn built in. How does settling into a single institution, where change can seem so slow, shift that tempo?

IL: When re-conceiving the artist and the institution as host, everything shifts. The focus no longer rests solely on the outcomes of art-making, but on its relations: Artistic agency becomes less about authorship than about responsibility and attentiveness – an ability to tune, propose, listen, respond. That agency is fundamentally limited, precisely because it operates relationally.

Hosting adjusts in time; it isn’t reproduced. You can invite, but you cannot control the response. There isn’t a clean back-and-forth synthesis between multiple voices, needs, positions, temporalities. Sometimes they harmonize; often, they don’t. The work becomes about composing within this. Hosting does not pretend to master, but gathers and choreographs attention across bodies, contexts, and desires.

I feel challenged by the scope of hosting now on an institutional scale. It’s not only hosting artists or audiences now, but also my team; not just our regular guests, but the diverse and numerous publics of Vienna. Some know TQW well; many others don’t. Some think dance isn’t for them, or haven’t yet found a way in. Rio and I are interested in expanding our invitation as an institution, creating a space for curiosity, or even a generative irritation.

At a smaller scale, the invisible labor of installers, curators, and the communications team has always been part of every hosted occasion. As a host, you feel more clearly how critical those relationships are; the work the public receives is not just the “piece,” but its constitutive conditions. How can we gradually develop a working environment that feels hospitable to twenty full-time employees, and to build the trust essential to moving together in new directions? That takes time. It’s not just a structural shift, but a cultural one. Every new artistic director brings a unique perspective and approach. You try things, you create something new, and sometimes, you fuck up. But that’s also part of it.

AH: The interconnection of hosting requires not sameness, but intimacy across difference – I think of the ancient Greek xenia, a notion of “guest-friendship” that encompasses both the host and the stranger. How might difference shape your hospitality at TQW?

IL: I’m happy you pulled out “difference,” because for me, that’s precisely what hosting allows me to work through: It isn’t something to overcome or neutralize, but what allows something alive to take shape in social and artistic situations. My task is not to deny the power dynamics embedded in institutional structures, but to begin transforming what those structures permit artistically, socially, and politically.

AH: It’s an opportunity to keep working together extensively, not just intensively. As a freelance performer, one might work with long-term artistic collaborators in an on-off rhythm. This feels different: staying with the trouble of co-building something.

IL: It’s a trip, honestly, to face the relational rigidity that contract terms, job titles, and other institutional scripts can produce. I have to approach that with humility and compassion, recognizing those habits of the institution and asking: Where does this produce necessary stability? and where does it hinder a potential artistic outcome?

I try to see the doubt I sometimes feel in my new role as a generative force. It seems deeply resonant with the state of the world – the geopolitical clusterfuck we’re in. I wonder, can an institution that so often performs dominion over its area of expertise show itself to be uncertain, or leave space for others to express the same? Can it be vulnerable?

Isabel Lewis, Untitled (indwardness, juice, natures), with Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and LABOUR, Sharjah Biennial, 2019

AH: It’s paternalistic when institutions reproduce rhetoric that is so clearly at odds with reality, whether through ambiguity, silence, or hollow gestures and wordplays of legitimacy and credibility. An institution, like each of us, is a body. For this body to be alive and responsive, it must be alert, subjective, and evolving.

IL: I want to generate a tone of voice for this speaking, holobiont body. Being in a state of doubt or vulnerability is no excuse for this body not to act, to avoid its responsibility. On the contrary, the condition of uncertainty should make us all the more accountable. That’s part of what this body is – an institutional body, funded by taxpayers, with a commitment to address the polis and to be a place where different kinds of people and ideas come into contact.

AH: Live performance has the potential for such direct and nuanced exchange, inherently connecting bodies – contingent, affective, transformative – to a present time. It’s fascinating, especially when working a lot in visual art contexts, to consider what it means to bring your body into those spaces. Often, we enter as the “minority” position of the performer. And yet, when performance becomes the atmosphere itself – when you immerse in it as a culture – it nourishes and grows without needing to draw lines between forms.

IL: Dance is my primary technology for mediating my relationship with the world. Even when situated outside of the performing arts, my work advocates for the knowledge of the body, its condition as a site of meaning-making, magic, and transformation.

It has been essential to make that claim in other spaces, often structured by distance and cold judgment: theater spaces, museums, and various institutional or cultural spaces within what we might call the Western cosmology. Dance contains multitudes – philosophical, intellectual, spiritual – and it deserves more recognition in a European context.

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“Opening Occasion”
Hosted by Isabel Lewis

3–4 Oct 2025

18h–22h

TQW, Vienna

Jeremy Nedd & Impilo Mapantsula
blue nile to the galaxy around olodumare
16–18 Oct 2025
19.30h
TQW, Vienna

Dean Moss
figures on a field
23–25 Oct 2025
19.30h
TQW, Vienna