Hang on to your seat and let your imagination go. The amazing LAVA is a movement-based, all-female performance troupe based in Brooklyn, NY. They are muscular, agile and gorgeous. They jump, swing and fly through space shattering any limited ideas we might have about women’s bodies. LAVA joined me for Trailer Talk at the NACL Catskill Festival of New Theatre in Highland Lake, NY.

I have the creator and director of LAVA, Sarah East Johnson, joining me at the kitchen table of the Beeline travel trailer post show. Sarah, could you talk about what you’re exploring with the body, and what kinds of questions you’re asking of it?
I’m not that interested in the body, strangely, because that’s my tool. But, I feel like we use our physical training as a way to focus ourselves, and that the physical rigor of what we do brings us into a psychological and emotional state that I find really potent and really honest.

So, if it’s not the body, what is it that you are exploring?
For me, I’m really interested in relationships, and in our relationships to each other. And also one’s own relationship to confidence and fear and focus and discipline. I think the body is just a way to get to the psychology and the emotions.

I just find that if I can work my body to a certain state of exhaustion or readiness, then I can perform something that is real. I can perform our relationships to each other, and I can perform my relationship to the audience. If I have my body so busy and so focused on what I’m doing, it’s almost like it disappears. Although I’m fully aware that the audience is seeing our physical reality, I get more interested in what kinds of relationships are developed out of that.

You describe yourselves as feminists, and you’re exploring everything from physics to volcanoes. What is it in your work and what you’re choreographing and creating, where you’re using the strength of your bodies to do this?
I started training as a dancer; and in dance, as a women, you’re not supposed to be very big, and you’re not supposed to have too many muscles, and I found that really oppressive. So when I started learning acrobatics and being supported and encouraged to build muscle, it occurred to me that, I think, muscles are actually a feminist issue. But it was really just following my passion for acrobatics that made me do it. It was my consciousness as a feminist that didn’t hold me back from doing it, and didn’t think, “Oh, women shouldn’t be big,” which is this idea that’s so pervasive, we can’t even imagine.

In dance, the audience is asked to objectify the bodies on stage, and I think our bodies are beautiful and everything, but the point is not to see them as objects. The muscles aren’t a point... we’re not building muscle to look good; we’re doing it so that we can achieve these skills. And I think it’s important for people to be able to look at women’s bodies in a different way, where you can see the beauty and the sexiness, but it’s not objectifying.

What is the reason that you decided to have all women in your company?
I just really love women, and women inspire me. I like working with women.

So, if you’re near Brooklyn this week and want to be engulfed by LAVA, check out their new piece or participate in LAVA’s Handstand-a-Thon later in the month.

THE PARADISE PROJECT (working title)
In a collaboration with singer-songwriter Toshi Reagon
at BRICstudio
Brooklyn, New York
Thursday and Saturday
May 1 and 3, 8:00 pm

and

LAVA's 5th Annual
Handstand-a-Thon
Saturday, May 17th, at 5:00 p.m.
A fundraiser for the LAVA Studio's Student Scholarship Fund and Community Programs.