What the world needs now is love. Sweet love.
That’s at least part of the motivation behind a collaboration between Barrio Dance and Theater LILA called “A Love Letter,” opening next weekend at Art House 360 in Verona.
“With everything that’s happening in the world, we just want to tell different stories about love,” Barrio Dance founder and director AJ Juarez said in an interview this week.
The performance will include nearly 20 stories about love of various kinds through theater vignettes as well as dance.
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“Love has so many ways, so that’s what we’re telling. Different stories,” Juarez said. “There’s going to be different love letters: love to our family, to ourselves, to partners, to people that we don’t see anymore … There’s a letter that I wrote about my grandpa. He’s not here anymore, but things that I never told him. That’s in the show, and someone is dancing to this.”
The ensemble consists of 12 local actors and dancers, performing theater pieces written by Theater LILA founder and director Jessica Lanius and dance pieces choreographed by Juarez. There will be considerable variety among the dance pieces as well, which will include hip-hop as well as contemporary lyrical dance. Music will include “fun songs that people recognize” as well as original songs composed by local musician Isaiah Wagabaza Doyle.
Juarez said the multidisciplinary nature of the performance will explore different ways of telling stories.
“Sometimes your body can talk and sometimes your voice can talk,” he said.
The piece will be performed in the central atrium at Art House 360 with an audience of about 60 surrounding the performance floor on both sides.
“We saw that it was going to be a great opportunity here to create something inventive in this space,” Juarez said. “We can always go rent a theater and do that more conventional, but we want to utilize this space and be a little bit more intimate.”
Juarez said he hopes to inspire a range of emotions in the audience.
“We want people to laugh, we want them to feel, we want them to cry, we want to take them all over the emotions,” he said. “With everything that is happening right now in the world, with all the tension that we are living in, we want to show, ‘Hey, there’s this way too.’ I know people know about love, but sometimes we get, you know, sometimes we get distracted by other things, yeah, so maybe bring that back and then encourage people to be more kind, more loving.”
“A Love Letter” opens February 5 with a “pay what you wish” performance, and will be performed nine more times over two weekends with tickets priced at $40. Tickets are available here.
