Sarah East Johnson, director of the all-female dance troupe LAVA, and musician Toshi Reagon met eight years ago at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. Reagon became a steadfast admirer of LAVA’s robust, gymnastic-acrobatic performances and the two women discussed, in vague terms, the idea of collaborating.
“Toshi had been saying for a while ‘I want to work with you guys,’ and I didn’t really take it that seriously—until suddenly she said, ‘I’m not going to come see any more shows unless I’ve made the music.’”
That clearly got Johnson’s attention. “We embarked on a process together, figuring where we meet as artists.”The resulting work, we become, arrives at the Brooklyn Lyceum this week, settling in for a three-week run. “She’s been a really big part of how the piece has become what it is,” Johnson emphasizes.
LAVA, which Johnson founded in the late 1990s, is an assertively all-female ensemble; it emphasizes strength and power rather than grace and elegance.The six women train in gymnastics, acrobatics, trapeze and Capoeira, and are capable of holding a handstand for an impossibly long time or supporting one another’s body weight in challenging constructions.
Previous LAVA works have drawn inspiration from imagery in nature and geology. But this project with Reagon—whose singing/composing talents are known from her work with BIGLovely as well as her collaborations with her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon—a cofounder of Sweet Honey in the Rock—has led to fruitful new directions. “For this piece, we started by looking at social phenomena. So were really representing more literal relationships as opposed to abstracted relationships, which we’ve done a lot of in the past.”
“Toshi and I are both lesbians, both work with women a lot.We’re also of different races. Trying to understand whiteness and blackness became a starting point for our collaboration. In we become we look at separatism and integration, and those two different movements that build empowerment and social evolution. So a lot of the choreography we generated revolved around ways that we can physically support each other—literally lifting each other up and holding each other, and allowing each other to do things that we couldn’t do on our own.That contrasted with ways we can hold each other back, limit each other and provide each other with challenges and obstacles. So there’s a lot more emotion, personality, individuality and direct meaning in this show.”
Reagon’s music for we become was composed specifically for the piece. “She watched rehearsals and interviewed all the performers,” Johnson says. “Toshi’s music includes a lot of lyrics that were written based on what she saw in the work.”
During LAVA’s early years, Johnson and her dancers regularly attended the San Francisco School of Circus Arts to hone their skills.These days, LAVA has its own active Brooklyn studio where aspiring professionals as well as neighborhood families take a wide variety of classes. Johnson, who is “directing” this time around, with the choreography credited to the performers, notes that for we become, they incorporated new skills and approaches including improvised structures.
Through this new approach, she explains, “We were trying to blend the precision and formalism of acrobatics with the more expressive options that many dance languages bring.” Also new was the use of hanging ropes, on which performers Molly Chanoff and Lollo perform an intriguing duet. “The assignment I gave them was to stay connected to each other and to the rope, and to do things to each other they wouldn’t be able to do without the rope.The rope is the third player, or connecting force in their relationship.The rope takes the duet off a center line and so it swings and sways and flies. It’s really exciting.”
Another major participant in the piece is visual artist Nancy Brooks Brody, a longtime LAVA collaborator. She is doing a site-specific installation at the Lyceum, whose capacious space is being transformed for the work. LAVA’s last two local outings were at Tribeca’s intimate Flea Theater.The Lyceum fulfills her desire to present LAVA in her home borough, and gives these daring, feisty dames plenty of room to fly.
> LAVA
Through Mar. 1, Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 Fourth Ave. (at President St.), Brooklyn, 718-399-3161; times vary, $20.
