Daredevil Drama. - Review - dance review

Art in America, Feb, 2000 by Sarah Valdez

The all-female troupe Lava combines dance, acrobatics and video in performances marked by eruptions of humor and risk.

The struggle involved in discovering oneself, the strain of coupling, the precariousness of collaboration and the animate nature of the earth itself were all explored in "Lava Love Cabaret," which recently appeared at the Flea Theater in Manhattan. The show's myriad vignettes comprised dance, acrobatics, trapeze acts, wrestling and video segments in an hour-long presentation that was at once highly amusing and intellectually engaging. Sarah East Johnson, the founder of the performance troupe called Lava and the director and choreographer of the cabaret, has training in ballet, modern dance and circus skills--as well as geology. Her idiosyncratic combination of interests culminated in her selecting the volcano as the melodramatic exemplar of the principles underlying life, movement and relationships of all sorts. "I like to work in metaphor," she says with understatement.

The episodic format of Johnson's production recalls such cultural phenomena as the Cirque du Soleil's Vegas aquatic revue "O" (as in eau), or the performances of the Argentinean troupe De la Guarda, which has grown into a renowned Manhattan institution [see A.i.A., Feb. '99]. "Lava Love Cabaret" differs, however, in that its seven performers are all female, which makes the category "woman" a subject matter in itself. Showcasing the physical strength and intrepidity of its members, Lava's latest floorshow gibes at both muscle-man exhibitionism and typical displays of the female form for male consumption. And the seams show: mistakes are made, exertion is apparent and the production values, though refined, are not altogether slick. This is deliberate: in lieu of perfection, the company's charm entails having its efforts exposed.

One number involved the symbolically laden activity of jumping through hoops. Four women wearing white, silver and red superhero costumes with stars and racing stripes, capes and aviator caps dove--sometimes two at a time--back and forth, through and over stacked rings, landing in somersaults, headstands or on top of one another in organized heaps, narrowly escaping collision. Another piece, set to Hawaiianesque lounge music, featured two women in grass skirts with garter belts affixed to the outside, bras with gaudy plastic flowers on them and faux palm trees perched atop their heads. While spinning glittering pink hulahoops around their necks, wrists, waists and ankles and enacting an acrobatically demanding routine, they maintained smiles which were at times forced, coyly mocking the manner of beauty queens, and at other times genuine, as they enjoyed the hilarity and camaraderie of their endeavor.

Human pyramids were another of the cabaret's fortes, the most spectacular of which engaged two women performing handstands as anchors, the backs of their necks serving as support for the others' feet. The troupe fluently built and unbuilt statuesque structures with their bodies, demonstrating familial understanding of one another's capabilities and playing upon the linear possibilities of their varied physiques.

Several scene changes were filled with video segments projected on a screen, which were created by Johnson with the artist Nancy Brooks Brody: a Bill Viola-ish flaming heart was shown as plangent guitar music played, a volcano silently erupted, a person rolled down a dirt road, animals moved around in their characteristic fashions (snake slithered, walrus scooted, hermit crab minced, etc.). Occasionally the relationship between the video and performance was explicit--the animal footage preceded a number in which a performer resolutely hopped across the stage on a pogo stick--but, more often, we were left to make the associations for ourselves.

The cabaret concluded with three couples swing dancing. Almost imperceptibly, one pair's dancing morphed into wrestling, embraces turned into headlocks and back into eyelash-batting flirtation just in time for another couple's dancing to begin a similar cycle. The dowdy, warm-toned gingham dresses they wore in this number subverted pink as the hackneyed indicator of all things feminine; the clashing of it with orange and red bespoke heat, power and, not least of all, camp. The vignette culminated in a riotous disrobing: swarming around the stage, the performers stripped off their housewifely dresses to reveal T-shirts and bloomers adorned with fringe and sequined flames before they clambered into one final, triumphant pyramid.

The esthetic of "Lava Love Cabaret," which Johnson has described as "Evil Knievel meets Esther Williams," is refreshing after more than three decades of mostly dour if revolutionary feminist performance art. (Think of Shigeko Kubota's Vagina Painting [1965], Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll [1975], Ana Mendieta's untitled rape performances [1973-74], Eleanor Antin's El Desdichado [1983], Karen Finley's Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman [1998], which have depended on being angrily male-referent or unpleasantly shocking for their potency.) And, without taking itself too seriously, the show foregrounded the female body in a way that did not posit its passive commodification. But perhaps above all, the Cabaret's volcano metaphor is ideologically beguiling as a model for existing in constant flux, with danger as a necessary component of growth and rebirth.