Go live!

She lands with a thud barely three feet in front of me.

The impact of her feet slamming to stillness against the mat sends vibrations through the underlying wooden floor.

The motion enters through my bare feet; we’ve been asked to leave our shoes around the perimeter of the performance space used by LAVA, the OBIE Award-winning troupe of female acrobat-artists who steamed up and kicked off the 2005 Catskill Festival of New Theatre at North American Cultural Laboratory (NaCl) in Highland Lake, NY this past weekend.

The darkened interior of the former church throbs with intense music marked by pulsating and migrating rhythms. Powerful performers leap through hoops, three-high, and tumble-roll out the other side. They tussle, wrestle, collide and sometimes slam to the ground in this intimate space framed on four sides by audience.

We hear the air exit their lungs in a forceful rush. Veins bulge and faces redden with the sustained aerobic effort. Sweat arcs through beams of light as a body spins through space.

A dynamic stillness settles over the scene as one by one the women invert their bodies, standing on their hands before gracefully returning to the floor with surety. We experience the focused force and the keen tension rises with each edgy, seemingly impossible set of moves.

A trapeze dangles from the rafters and two women mount the bar, mirror one another in complex patterns of movement and response. They entwine, then become suspended, one from the other, in precarious positions that stir a heady sense of trepidation and exhilaration.

The piece is delivered in sections whose order varies with each performance. An element of chance is introduced when the troupe asks an actress who is not a member of their group to operate a timer and enter into whatever is transpiring at precisely 29 minutes into the performance. She is clanging a bell and running pell-mell as we are jolted by this unexpected insertion of the unanticipated.

The audience is called to the mat with a series of questions that place us in a circle around a cluster of children who rise and fall repeatedly in response to guidance from the performers. This is just the sort of energy I’ve come to relish from NaCl’s festival performances—unexpected, alive, unpredictable, sometimes shocking, always stirring.

If you weren’t there last weekend, you missed your chance to check out Lava’s fiery flow as it coursed through Sullivan County. ( See lavalove.org ). But the opportunity to experience the fantastic intensity of living theatre presents itself every weekend through August 27.

Now in its sixth season, the festival consistently delivers deeply satisfying theatre that satiates sensory appetites and funds, as NaCl puts it, “that part of you that seeks nourishment, agitation, affirmation, stimulation and communion.”

If your experience of theatre is limited to traditional, heavily rehearsed and repetitious performances, do yourself a favor and sample the wild energy of evolving and emerging experimental work. It’s happening right here, right now, in a quiet village along a country road where an old church glows with the light of artistic creation. Visit nacl.org to see the schedule of upcoming performances.