Carvens Lissaint
Leslie Lissant honed her craft as a UW-Madison First Wave scholar.
I knew that This is How We Heal, a one-woman show from New York City-based dancer and poet Leslie Lissaint, would include stories from Lissaint’s childhood. Lissaint and I grew up together on the gritty north side of Minneapolis. As old friends often do, we share decades worth of memories: ballet classes as 6-year-olds, birthday parties, parents’ divorce. And we both found womanhood as college students at UW-Madison.
So when Lissaint reveals a secret in the first few minutes, a strange thing happens. My memories of us suddenly shred into parts, then braid back together with a new, dark thread.
In an early scene, Lissaint stands alone on stage. She’s lit in blue, and vocalist Sojourner Brown’s haunting melody plays in the background. Lissaint is afraid. She’s a child version of herself, up past bedtime and staring down a dark hallway leading to the bathroom. Inside, her mother is crumpling aluminum and brushing away ashes. The ruins of her addiction.
This is How We Heal, which is playing for free on March 4 at Memorial Union’s Play Circle theater, is an exploration of healing from this secret. Through contemporary dance and spoken word poetry, Lissaint moves through stages of her own life. But she also inhabits the characters of her parents. First, she’s her mother: married young, pregnant young, addicted young. Lissaint lets us peer into this world. She only gives her father one line, a nod to the fact that he’s absent for much of her life. When he’s not locked up, he’s locked in his own head. In one scene, Lissaint is flung over her father’s shoulder as he’s running, then cornered by police. She’s five years old, and her eyes are down the end of a barrel.
Lissaint lets us bear witness to her unburdening. Her poems are lyrics of resolve to break the generational cycle of fatherlessness and addiction. She chants a mantra: “Can’t pass this sunshine down to my children’s children.”
We’re mesmerized, too, by her repetitive choreography. She bows her arms and digs her hands deep into invisible earth. As she spins and digs, she looks as though she’s both burying her secret and lifting weight from her strong frame.
In the end, it’s clear that Lissaint’s piece is a love letter to herself. She blooms in her first solo performance, though her craft is already well honed from years as a dancer and writer, including training as a First Wave scholar. When I see the show on Feb. 18 at the Wild Project theater in Manhattan, the audience is “mmhmming” and weeping with Lissaint. We’ve been encouraged to participate — this is an opportunity for us to heal too.
