LIGHT BODY
“Lia Chavez’s Stunning Light Performance.” — Artnet News
Details
Light Body, 2016
Performance
A commission by Isabella Rossellini
Presented at Mama Farm in Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Costuming by Mary Katrantzou
Credits
Artistic Director and Performer: Lia Chavez
Performers: Troy Ogilvie and Djassi daCosta Johnson
Producers: Beverly Allan and Nur El Shami
Costume Designer: Mary Katrantzou
Stylist: Richard Ives
Beauty: Virginia Linzee
Curatorial Consultant: Tali Wertheimer
Essayist: Andrea Codrington Lippke
Documentation: Ira Lippke
Presenter: Isabella Rossellini
Selected Press
Light Body (2016)
Performance, 0:45
Commissioned by Isabella Rossellini
Presented at Mama Farm, Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Presented at Isabella Rossellini’s Mama Farm as part of her curated art series, Light Body is a live optical performance by artist Lia Chavez that envisions the human journey of physical, energetic, and spiritual ascension. Imagining the body’s transformation into a crystalline, light-based form, the work explores the possibility of an exalted state of consciousness—attained, as Chavez describes, through “absolute surrender,” the passage through the eye of the needle, in which something greater within begins to steer and transfigure the human chariot.
At sunset, Chavez leads a balletic procession of three luminous figures through the farm’s forested landscape. The choreography is rooted in contemplative walking, a meditative practice Chavez encountered during her intensive studies with Himalayan masters. This technique reverses the typical heel-to-toe motion of ordinary walking by placing the toe down first, followed by the heel—an embodied inversion that symbolizes the subversion of ego to divine will.
Drawing from the intimate spiritual experience of her inner visions—ephemeral glyphs of light perceived in deep meditation—Chavez constructs the performance around the optical phenomenon of the retinal afterimage, in which a visual imprint briefly lingers in the eye after the source has vanished. As the dancers move through space, their glowing gestures accumulate on the viewer’s retina, forming fleeting, colorful, volumetric impressions that seem to hover in midair.
“For Chavez, we are the universe and the universe is us. We are shot through with order and cosmic light.” – Image Journal
“A performance art spectacle of light and color.” –The New York Times
Before the performance began, Isabella Rossellini guided the audience through a brief meditation, grounding viewers in a state of stillness and receptivity that echoed the contemplative nature of the work itself.
Light Body may be understood within the wider tradition of sacred art—work that transcends aesthetic form to serve as a vessel for transformation, invocation, and communion with the divine. Chavez’s integration of silence, sensory purification, and breath recalls ancient ritual practices in which movement and light were not merely symbolic but operative. Through her choreographic structure, Chavez reclaims performance as sacred rite, engaging the viewer not as spectator, but as participant in a shared spiritual field.
Costuming for Light Body is designed by renowned fashion designer Mary Katrantzou, whose light-spectrum-inspired creations echo the performance’s transcendental themes.
“Chavez views light as a type both of the divine substance and the lofting, penetrating faculty of the mind.” –Image Journal
The work references the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the rainbow body—a state in which accomplished meditation masters are said to dissolve their physical forms into pure, radiant energy. For Chavez, this idea becomes a visual choreography of transfiguration—a live meditation on the tension between abstraction and embodiment. “This performance meditates on the primordial state which has no form but is capable of expressing all form,” she explains.
Light Body also marked Chavez’s emergence from a 40-day vow of silence, undertaken in the spirit of John Cage’s experiments with sensory deprivation and the ancient Yogic practice of “feasting on light”—sustaining the body through breath and meditation alone. These ascetic commitments deepen the work’s inquiry into perception, presence, and the shifting boundary between matter and light.
The performance extends themes first explored in Chavez’s photographic series A Thousand Rainbows (Damiani, 2013), which visualized the interplay between light and divine consciousness in the universal corpus. That monograph included an essay by visual culture critic Andrea Codrington Lippke, who contributes new scholarship to the current exhibition catalog.
Set within the natural surroundings of Mama Farm, a project of the Peconic Land Trust dedicated to preserving Long Island’s agricultural and cultural heritage, Light Body suggests that land, body, and light form a unified sacred ecology—an enduring continuum of presence, perception, and transformation.
