<\/p>\nDancers perform during a dress rehearsal for “A Love Letter.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Ilana Bar-av<\/span> Juarez has worked with Theatre LILA since 2014, when Lanius brought the company from New York City to Madison. But \u201cA Love Letter\u201d marks the first time the two companies have collaborated on every step of a show, from creation to completion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe caliber of talent that AJ has with his Barrio dancers is pretty outstanding,\u201d Lanius said. \u201cI think he\u2019s raising the bar in the dance world, particularly in his genre, and to have that alongside what we\u2019re doing with the actors is pretty special.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n <\/p>\nJessica Lanius speaks with performers during a dress rehearsal for “A Love Letter.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Ilana Bar-av<\/span> The collaboration seemed like a natural fit \u2014 with the opening of the nonprofit arts center in Verona, Theatre LILA and Barrio Dance have rehearsal studios down the hall from one another, and a performance venue that\u2019s just up the stairs.<\/p>\n
\u2018A celebration of relationships\u2019 onstage<\/strong><\/h3>\nLanius came up with the idea of a show about love after trying \u2014 and failing \u2014 to create a play that responded to the fractured political climate of the United States. Theatre LILA has long addressed social justice issues in its shows, but every time Lanius tried to sit down and write something that referenced current events, she questioned whether that\u2019s what people needed right now. She decided to pivot.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe what we need and want is just something beautiful, funny and light, right? To remind us all what connects us and to have fun with it ourselves,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Lanius wrote scenes and dialogue for \u201cA Love Letter,\u201d while Gina Cornejo, LILA\u2019s Writer\u2019s LAB Director,\u200b wrote poetry to be incorporated in the show. Juarez tackled choreography, creating unique movement that evokes the complex emotions that come alongside love.<\/p>\n
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\n <\/p>\nAt Art House 360, dancers rehearse for “A Love Letter,” produced by Theatre LILA and Barrio Dance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Ilana Bar-av<\/span> Featuring songs like Gotye\u2019s \u201cSomebody That I Used to Know,” the hour and a half long production is reminiscent of\u00a0 \u201cMoulin Rouge,\u201d mixing contemporary music and styles with more traditional theater in a series of vignettes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the vignettes don\u2019t directly connect to each other to form a single plot, they do have similar themes and common threads. One of those common threads is a sense of magical realism, which appears throughout the show in the form of a character named Eros, who\u2019s modeled after the Greek god of love.<\/p>\n
Eros takes part in several scenes, representing the feeling of magic or unpredictability that comes with falling in love.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really loose and kind of playful and fun. It really just takes you on a ride,\u201d Lanius said.<\/p>\n
While the original plan was to focus on romantic love, the idea developed to embrace all other facets of love, particularly through a series of love letters written by Cornejo.<\/p>\n
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\n <\/p>\nTheatre LILA and Barrio Dance’s “A Love Letter” opens Feb. 5 at ART House 360.<\/p>\n
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Ilana Bar-av<\/span> \u201cThe theme was romantic love, and then it also became self-love, so that\u2019s in there too. There\u2019s some letters to a daughter, there’s letters to a father, letters to abuelo (grandfather). It\u2019s a celebration of relationships, mostly romantic, but others as well,\u201d Lanius said.<\/p>\n
The final product feels like a celebration of everything that made the show possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a love letter to our community. It\u2019s a love letter to the Art House as the first place where there\u2019s going to be this explosion of all these different art forms telling these stories,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u200b\u201cGrab someone you love, whether it\u2019s a friend or a date or a family member,\u201d Lanius added, \u201cand be ready to get up close and personal in a way that maybe you haven’t been before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source captimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u200bTheatre LILA\u2019s forthcoming show, \u201cA Love Letter,\u201d features a live accordion player, inventive choreography and an electronic remix of \u201cLa vie en rose\u201d \u2014 and that\u2019s just in the first two minutes of the show. On a snowy Saturday in the basement of Art House 360, an 11-person ensemble rehearsed dialogue, lifts and dance numbers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2264522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Theatre-LILA-and-Barrio-Dance-team-up-for-\u2018A-Love.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2264523,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264521\/revisions\/2264523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2264522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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