Home Under One’s Skin by Marcella Lewis

Home Under One’s Skin

February 28, 2026
3p, 4p, and 5p
Historic Belmar Park
Santa Monica, CA
Free
RSVP: https://bit.ly/belmar-park

homeLA presents Home Under One’s Skin, a site-responsive dance performance by Marcella Lewis activating public memory, care, and Black communal histories at Historic Belmar Park in Santa Monica.

Marcella Lewis’ Home Under One’s Skin is created in conversation with April Banks’ A Resurrection in Four Stanzas at Historic Belmar Park in Santa Monica, a public sculpture that engages histories of displacement and remembrance. Rooted in movement, voice, and direct audience engagement, Lewis’ work reflects 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.

The performance 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 in the low winter sun, shadows, words, and gestures cast across the site, bringing the sculpture into live dialogue with the body and 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.

At the start of each performance, Lewis welcomes audiences into a brief “porch talk” — an informal moment of conversation and hospitality. These gatherings establish a 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, Historic Belmar Park occupies land once home to the Belmar neighborhood: a vibrant early 20th-century African American community of homes, businesses, and cultural life that was largely razed in the 1950s through eminent domain to make way for Santa Monica’s Civic Center campus. By activating this space, Home Under One’s Skin invites both intentional and incidental audiences to encounter the site anew, fostering reflection on Santa Monica’s cultural memory while amplifying the resonance of Banks’ city-commissioned sculpture through live performance.

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 Artist 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’ A Resurrection in Four Stanzas
April Bank’s A Resurrection in Four Stanzas is a permanent sculpture for 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. April Banks, historian Dr. Alison Rose Jefferson, and members of Santa Monica’s Black community were the triumvirate of creative forces for the project. www.aprilbanks.com https://www.santamonica.gov/belmar-history-art