Home Under One’s Skin

Home Under One’s Skin

February 28, 202p
3p, 4p, and 5p
Belmar History + Art Site
Santa Monica, CA
Free, RSVP requested

homeLA presents Home Under One’s Skin, a site-responsive dance by Marcella Lewis activating public memory, care, and Black communal histories at the Belmar History + Art Site.

Created in conversation with April Banks’ public sculpture, A Resurrection in Four Stanzas at the Belmar History + Art site in Santa Monica, Home Under One’s Skin is rooted in movement, voice, and direct audience engagement, reflecting on memory, revival, and longing—centering the intergenerational loss of “porch life,” a cultural space of gathering, storytelling, and care once central to Black communal life.

Home Under One’s Skin is a performance that activates the architectural thresholds of Banks’ sculpture—porch, passageway, and exit—guiding audiences through a living, embodied narrative that mirrors the spatial logic of a narrow row house. As Lewis moves through and around the structure, shadows, words, and gestures cast across the site, bringing the sculpture into live dialogue with the body and with public memory.

Through a language of contemporary dance informed by Black feminist spiritual practice, Lewis treats the performance as a moving story and a form of invocation. Her choreography channels absence and desire, imagining the resurrection of communal spaces that have been eroded by displacement, urban change, and social fragmentation. The work invites audiences into a shared act of remembrance: one that is intimate, porous, and attentive to the ways history is held in the body.

Before each performance, audiences are welcomed to gather for a brief “porch talk” led by Lewis. These pre-performance gatherings establish the tone of care and relational exchange that grounds the work, echoing the social rituals and everyday encounters that once animated porch life.

Situated near the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Belmar History + Art site commemorates underrecognized histories embedded in the city’s landscape. Home Under One’s Skin invites audiences to encounter the site anew and reflect on Santa Monica’s cultural memory.

This project was made possible in part with AoR Microgrant support from the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts. For additional information, please visit our website and join our mailing list.

Accessibility: The site is wheelchair accessible.

About the Artists, Partners, and Location

About Marcella Lewis
Marcella Lewis hails from Los Angeles, CA, where she began her dance training at the Lula Washington Dance Theatre. She continued her studies at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts(LACHSA) and received her BFA from the Purchase Conservatory of Dance in 2016, where she was awarded the Adopt-A-Dancer Scholarship. She joined A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in fall 2016, as a dancer, soloist, and company liaison. While with A.I.M, Marcella performed works by Kyle Abraham, Trisha Brown, Doug Varone and Andrea Miller and was a rehearsal assistant for Kyle Abraham with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s “Untitled America”, New York City Ballet’s “The Runaway” and  Misty Copeland’s “Ash.”  Marcella was featured with A.I.M in “Dance Magazine” in August 2017 and was mentioned in the “New York Times” for A.I.M’s Joyce season in May 2018. In 2018 Marcella became a recipient of the 2018 Princess Grace Award in Dance. As a freelance artist, Marcella has performed works by Micaela G. Taylor, Chris Emile, Marjoni Forte, JA Collective, Jodi Melnick and Genna Moroni.  Marcella has choreographed and performed her movement solo installation called “Movement Transference” as a part of Institute of Contemporary Arts Los Angeles “Infinite Rehearsal.” Marcella has also presented her own choreographic work Spectacle of Ritual at Dance Theatre Lab (Purchase, New York), Odyssey Theatre(Los Angeles), Highways Performance Space(Santa Monica) and Stomping Ground L.A. She has also created work on Windward Middle School, Loyola Marymount University and Viva School of Dance. In addition, Marcella is a dance educator and has taught at Juilliard,  USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and  Loyola Marymount University. Furthermore, Ms. Lewis has dabbled in the commercial world as an assistant choreographer and dancer in Hailey Bailey music video “Angel and was the star in Theo Crooker’s music video, “TO BE WE” ft. Jill Scott. Marcella was a featured artist in SHOUTLA magazine’s  “Local Stories” in May of this year. Marcella is currently a performing artist with TRIBE Multidisciplinary Visual Performance Collective led by Shamel Pitts, an adjunct professor at Loyola Marymount University, and a freelance performer, choreographer, and educator in Los Angeles and New York.

About April Banks
April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social engagement and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Her recent work time travels through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning systems and future identities. She is interested in amplifying lesser known stories, challenging the gaze, and giving narrative to the erased and intentionally forgotten. In February 2021 she completed her first permanent public art sculpture “A Resurrection in Four Stanzas” in Santa Monica, CA, commemorating a former Black community erased by eminent domain. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Ethiopia. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections. April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999. www.aprilbanks.com

About A Resurrection in Four Stanzas
A Resurrection in Four Stanzas is a permanent sculpture for Belmar History + Art (BH+A) in Santa Monica, CA that commemorates the history of the African American residents and business owners of the historic Belmar and surrounding neighborhoods. Once a thriving community, this area was razed through eminent domain in the 1950s in order to make way for the Civic Auditorium and the Civic Center campus. The sculpture pays homage to the shotgun house which migrated with African Americans from the south. It is delineated it in four steel and aluminum sculptures at full architectural scale as a ghost structure: porch, door, house, window. https://www.santamonica.gov/belmar-history-art