AFTER MOUNTAINS, MORE MOUNTAINS: THE HAITI STORIES
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Donna Blue Lachman’s current show at the Blue Rider looks at voodoo from a different angle–that of a true believer. After Mountains, More Mountains is Lachman’s autobiographical account of her first visit to Haiti, in 1978, and her initiation into the mysteries of voodoo, told for the most part in the first person (with a little help from Tim Fiori and Salvatore Iacopelli, who play respectively Ghede and Ogoun, two gods from voodoo’s pantheon). After Mountains, More Mountains follows Lachman’s spiritual journey from her first glimmers of interest in voodoo as a teacher of experimental theater in Santa Cruz (where she taught “metaphysical dancing and flying”) and her spontaneous decision to go to Haiti to her eventual meeting with a mambo (voodoo priestess) willing to let her participate in voodoo ceremonies.
Along the way Lachman meets up with a number of spiritual guides, including Gerald, a Haitian lawyer and jazz musician, who shows her around Haiti and serves as her “guardian angel,” and Ghede, the loa (voodoo god) of death and crossroads (change), who warns her in a vision, “Keep your mind open–but don’t let your brains fall out.” Eventually, her brains do fall out, in a manner of speaking. She is, after all, an American in a foreign land, and it’s virtually a national trait that we Americans must break some important taboo while abroad.
But most of all, we would have missed the intricate vevers Lachman created on the stage as she told her story. For the uninitiated, a vever, usually done in sand or cornmeal, is a complicated design created by a mambo or houngan (voodoo priest) to evoke the loa. In Lachman’s show, she creates three interconnected vevers, one for each of the three loas who helped her on her journey–Ghede, Ogoun, and Erzulie. Although the story could have been told without the vevers, having Lachman create the three designs before our eyes underscores her personal connection to voodoo.
