A space for and by queer and trans people of color to develop acrobatics skills and to cultivate strength, resilience, power, creative intelligence, and connections to each other and the earth. 

[4-session series]
FREE
Intro on Saturday 4/8, 2-4PM
3 Wednesdays, 7-9PM: Weds 4/19, Weds 4/26, Weds 5/3

We will play! Have fun! Release! And explore the physical rigor and creative processes of LAVA’s bedrock within an environment that is respectful, positive, and unpretentious. Each session will include handstands to build strength and flexibility as well as other forms of physical and creative training including tumbling, partner acrobatics, improvisation, and movement composition. The sessions will build upon each other; we encourage you to come to all 4 if you can! 

Email sabina@lavabrooklyn.org to register. We will cap each session at 20 participants. 

Facilitators:

Mieke D (LAVA company member): Mieke is a queer mixed race femme of Asian and European descent, who seeks to investigate how a diversity of styles can or cannot co-exist in a performative space, hunting for cohesive narratives and aesthetic harmony while travelling through a vast terrain of fragmentation. The goal of her solo and collaborative work is to express the unstable nature of race, gender, nationality, and authenticity. Mieke studied at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics as part of EMERGNENYC. She has performed with La Pocha Nostra, the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, Target Margin Theater Company, and Taylor Mac, among others, and she has worked on numerous community-based theater projects with Cornerstone Theater Company (in California) and The Foundry Theatre Company (in New York). She has shared original work at Dance New Amsterdam, Dixon Place, NYU, the Bushwick Arts Festival, and Under St. Marks, and hopes to keep adding to that list. Mieke continues to grow as an artist and an activist, working from a place of love for all those who have shaped her and this ever-evolving culture we live in.

Sabina Ibarrola: Sabina Ibarrola is a green witch and herbalist in the Wisewoman tradition. Drawing on her training in herbal medicine and earthspirit wisdom, this mixed-race bruja is building her teaching and clinical practice, combining a passion for plants and plant medicine with a fierce dedication to collective liberation and helping people love their beautifully diverse bodies. Sabina Ibarrola began her relationship with LAVA as a member of the work/study team and community class assistant teacher. Since 2015, Sabina has brought her experience as a cultural organizer and curator to her work as LAVA's Events Manager and coordinating community connections. sabinaibarrola.com.

Alexis Garnett (LAVA company member): Lex is a colorful performer who aspires to expand accessibility to educational resources for young artists and businesses. She utilizes movement structures as tools for conceptual learning and community building. After discovering Modern Dance at Marymount Manhattan College, her perceptions of the roles that performance art assumes to raise social awareness and to facilitate remedial politics broadened. At LAVA Brooklyn, an award-winning feminist acrobatic dance company based in New York, she continues to grow participation in community survival methodologies and cultural preservation from under and through the many pressures of bureaucratic constructions. Here she practices the necessary integration of physical intellect and personal expression within a group, to communicate whole ideas for guiding all creatures toward an Utopian future. With LAVA, she has collaborated with Taylor Mac and hundreds of other performers during judy's spectacular 24-Hour Marathon: "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music"! In cooperation with insightful artists Sabina Ibarrola & Mieke Dee, Lex is excited to continue feeding her spirit and informing her bones, by sharing love and connection while leading her first adult acrobatic workshop for queer, transgender and gender nonconforming persons of color to remember devices for both resistance and celebration.