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<\/p>\nHaunting had an opportunity to chat with Scott Shigeoka, Melinda Lauw, and Treigh Love, members of LavaSaga, a new Bay Area theater collective. Their show \u201cSecond Chance\u201d used a safe experiential evocation of death to guide guests to a greater appreciation of their own lives. Lauw is co-producer of Second Chance along with Shigeoka, who is also founder and co-producer of LavaSaga; Love is a set and scenic designer for the production.<\/p>\n
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Shigeoka breaks down their company name: lava is a fluid that creates new land when it solidifies. Stories, sagas, have a similar generative power.<\/p>\n
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Though composed of people with several years of theater experience, LavaSaga itself is a new collective (the co-founders balk at the word \u201ccompany\u201d). Lauw sees the collective as distinct from the rest of the Bay Area theater scene: \u201cA lot of what I\u2019m seeing, especially up here, is very story- and narrative-based. A lot of them are quite theatrical, whereas what we are trying to do is more about human connection. The goal here is to connect strangers together and have them interact.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The experience utilized groups of ten, though LavaSaga specifically requested guests not experience the show with a friend or loved one. Shigeoka opines, somewhat counterintuitively, that there is a \u201cpsychological safety\u201d in going through with strangers. That\u2019s because you\u2019re going through with \u201cpeople who don\u2019t necessarily have a stake or an understanding or a context around your life, so when you go through this experience you can show up hopefully in a way that isn\u2019t impacted by the people that are around you. You can fully be present.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Despite only a mild degree of physicality in Second Chance, safety was a paramount concern. Love says, \u201cwe\u2019re creating a safe container to explore a really challenging subject that a lot of people don\u2019t want to look at or talk about.\u201d She adds, \u201cit\u2019s okay to weep on the floor if you need to. My goal in creating works of art and immersive experiences is catharsis.\u201d<\/p>\n
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At the same time, \u201cpeople can tap out if they need to,\u201d according to Love. Each guest received a small light that they could silently flash if the experience became too intense. In that case the guest would be temporarily taken out of the experience and allowed to speak with a therapist on site. Lauw explicitly likens this policy to the haunt world\u2019s safe words; audiences\u2019 \u201csafety, psychological and physical, is the most important.\u201d \u201cAnd emotional and spiritual!\u201d Love chimes in.<\/p>\n
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More than just safe, however, Second Chance endeavored to be restorative. Lauw says she situates the project within her philosophy of \u201cart as care: to have the art be for the good of the audience member.\u201d The experience provided a deceptively simple challenge: \u201cit\u2019s calling you to be yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
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If theater is often grounded in personal experience, mounting a show about death poses obvious problems. Yet the team behind Second Chance could take inspiration from various quarters. Some members were able to draw on experience from observing the final days of family members. Considerable input came from end-of-life doulas, who were incorporated into the show. End-of-life doulas are aid workers who assist in people\u2019s passage out of this world through death, in a metaphysical bookend to the beginning-of-life doulas who assist with people\u2019s entry into this world through birth.<\/p>\n
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Further conceptual touchstones for the performance were interviews with people who underwent near-death experiences. Shigeoka is captivated by such life-changing moments: \u201cWhen I\u2019ve talked to these individuals who have died and come back to life\u2014what is that space that they were in? And how do they create those shifts? When they came back to life, their orientation around time is different, or their orientation around relationships, or some of them quit their jobs and did something they were more excited to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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For Lauw, watching September 11th unfold as a young girl startled her into an awareness of life\u2019s contingency: \u201cSince then it\u2019s always been a primary goal for me to come to terms with mortality. It\u2019s been a personal journey of accepting to really live life fully. It reminds me to be super-present with myself at every moment in time.\u201d No one knows how many moments remain.<\/p>\n
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To talk about death is, for many, to wonder about an afterlife. Lauw holds open the possibility that death is not the end: \u201cFor me, I feel like there\u2019s something after, but I\u2019m okay not knowing what it is. I\u2019m someone who has super-vivid dreams that feel very real, and sometimes I\u2019m okay with the thought that if I die, I slip into one of my dream-worlds. I\u2019m hoping for that.\u201d Shigeoka, though more reticent to speculate on life after death, refers to the deceased as those who \u201chave transitioned.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Second Chance may be a wake-up call for some in the fashion of a near-death experience, but it needn\u2019t be. Shigeoka says, \u201csome people are definitely living their first life best, and maybe they come to Second Chance and it\u2019s a reaffirmation that they\u2019re doing it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Second chances come in many forms, so we asked the creators to imagine they could travel ten years into the past and offer their younger selves a second chance. What would they say or do? Lauw believes everything in her life has happened for a reason, so she has no desire to rewrite her story. Love left a career to dedicate herself to theater, and she wishes she had done so earlier; this would have given her ten precious years of \u201crefining my art and doing what I really love rather than something I do for a paycheck.\u201d Shigeoka simply says, \u201cI would want to give my younger self a hug.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Second Chance was featured as part of Reimagine: End of Life<\/a>, a weeklong celebration which brought together art installations, theatrical performances, talks, and workshops, all about death. Reimagine ran in San Francisco from April 16-22 and will return in New York from October 27-November 3.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As part of the Reimagine week, LavaSaga also sponsored \u201cShadow Channel,\u201d a multimedia art exhibit featuring death-centric visual and performance art. Some of these pieces were subtly incorporated into Second Chance, which speaks to the genuinely collaborative nature of this project.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What comes after Second Chance is unclear. Lauw and Shigeoka don\u2019t have a fixed five-year plan for their collective. The flow of lava is unpredictable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can learn more about LavaSaga by visiting their website<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>. For more information on Lauw’s other work, Whisperlodge, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Haunting had an opportunity to chat with Scott Shigeoka, Melinda Lauw, and Treigh Love, members of LavaSaga, a new Bay Area theater collective. Their show \u201cSecond Chance\u201d used a safe experiential evocation of death to guide guests to a greater appreciation of their own lives. Lauw is co-producer of Second Chance along with Shigeoka, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":10313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6515,9435],"tags":[483,25,9436,9437],"yst_prominent_words":[9762,4974,9414,9760,7272,1316,5779,9763,188,6043,9423,4747,4378,1893,763,5941,7270,9761,4525,306],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.haunting.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Second-Chance-smoke-body-1.png?fit=1440%2C808&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p89hUA-2Ge","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10306"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haunting.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.haunting.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Second-Chance-Treigh-Love-ship.jpg?resize=720%2C960&ssl=1\")
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