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Overview
The unique career of choreographer Liz Lerman has taken her from theater stages to shipyards, and from synagogues to science labs. In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, she reflects on her life-long exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us. Lerman has been described by the Washington Post as "the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art." Here, she combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world, this is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.
To explore Lerman's dances about science and tools for embodied learning please visit her Science Choreography website: http://sciencechoreography.wesleyan.edu/. The site is a valuable resource for teachers from middle school through the university level.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571489 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 332 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
LIZ LERMAN is founding artistic director of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a dance company featuring a multigenerational ensemble that creates, performs, teaches, and engages people in making art. Throughout its thirty-year history, Dance Exchange has participated in thousands of performances and community encounters around the globe. In 2002 Lerman was recognized with a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Questions as a Way of Life
Fueling the Imagination
I was visiting with my friend, the biologist Bonnie Bassler at Princeton, when she took me down the hall to meet her colleague Eric Wieschaus, a Nobel laureate who works with fruit flies. By that time, my dance Ferocious Beauty: Genome had already premiered, and I was eagerly fixing it. I was particularly interested in the part we called the fugue because of its complex relationship between video, text, and movement. The subject of this particular section was the myriad ways in which science and artistic research overlap. It starts with the scientist Aaron Terkowitz from the University of Chicago saying, "How do I ask myself a question?" followed by five minutes of dance and media that address just that query.
So I asked Dr. Wieschaus how he asks himself a question. And he responded, "I am fueled by my ignorance."
The precision of his answer thrilled me. "Nobel Laureate Fueled by His Ignorance" would make a great headline, I told him. Artists and scientists have a keen understanding that not knowing is fuel for the imagination rather than fuel for humiliation. There is nothing to hide.
Asking Questions as a Way of Life
Twice when I was growing up I asked questions so stupid that they brought the class to an absolute standstill. The first time I realized what I had done almost instantly. The second time I was clueless until the laughing started. You would think that after experiences like that I would never ask another question. But no. It seems that asking dumb questions paved the way for asking better ones. Or maybe at a very early age I just got over the embarrassment of not knowing.
"I wonder if this is the only way it has to be. Maybe it is changeable. In fact, Liz, you could change it." That would be my father talking passionately at dinner about almost anything political, but most especially about civil rights. Or it could be my mother, whispering about self-knowledge while she drove me to dance lessons. They both had their methods for making me think about my responsibilities and role in the world, as well as about the nature of change. But either way, to make change at all, you first have to notice what is going on around you or inside you. If you are a child or a young adult, noticing frequently takes the form of complaining. It took me a while to see the connection between that infernal crankiness and a method of inquiry.
So in the sacred space of the ballet-school dressing rooms with young dancers bemoaning the fat that will forge their fate, crying as they measure the full circumference of their waist with their own two hands, I am watching and thinking: Isn't there a better way for us to be sharing our precious time before class? Or an even more radical question: Is that skinny frame actually so beautiful? And by the way: Why are my feet bleeding just so I can stand up on my toes? Whose idea was that?
In the chaos of Hebrew school with little learning, less nurturing, and confirmation as our only goal, I am thinking: Can't the adults see that we are wasting our time here and some of us actually might like to speak this language? Do they even care what we think? Why don't they?
Or standing at an anti-war demonstration at the Vermont state capitol in the winter, freezing and wondering, Is this really helping anything?
The questions trip over each other. They never stop.
It took a while to understand that this could be a way of life, a way of making art, a way of making space for others to engage in the conversation, of naming things to encourage dialogue, of reordering ideas, or of making something useful or beautiful or both.
It can be destabilizing to think like this. The constant questioning implies a lack of knowledge. And the ambiguity of so many of the kinds of answers I could come up with didn't always serve as an antidote. I tried to make a virtue of "not knowing," which often proved difficult-in part because in our culture, in the media, and in many educational establishments, smartness is defined by the ability to have answers in a hurry, stated well and without complication.
Oddly though, this "not knowing" has become a bridge to good conversation and friendship not just with artists but with clergy and scientists too. There is kind of a shared delight, and sometimes misery, in the recognition that this source of inquiry can be an engine. And besides, I eventually learned that I can pull myself out of most disasters through methods that emerged long ago in processes of endless repetitions and trial and error. I can count on various means of discovery so that moments of not knowing are more like guideposts than endings.
Slowly I began to recognize many kinds of questions, reasons to question, and even ways to harness the act of questioning. I developed my capacity to distinguish between questions that required research as opposed to action or rehearsal or conversation, and to see how these modes overlap and lead into each other. The easygoing relationship between needing to know and then discovering answers based on reading, searching the Internet, trying an idea in rehearsal, and gaining insight through dialogue makes for a lively intersection of mind and body.
An Early Teacher
It was Rush Welter, a history teacher at Bennington College, who taught me how to be utterly absorbed by asking something and who gave me the over-arching tool of inquiry as a way to address my ignorance. His course consisted of a set of six questions and a list of primary sources. At the end of every six weeks, we had to turn in a paper answering one of the questions. The questions themselves were based on historical dilemmas from pre-revolutionary America. One was about the colonial-era civil-liberties maverick Anne Hutchinson, and another asked which colony had led the revolution and why. What was unique about the course was that the "textbook" consisted only of the list of primary sources and that the instructor didn't lecture. Instead, he would meet us twice a week to answer any of our own queries, and he let those questions determine what he actually talked about with us. Over the course of the year I learned to choose among contrasting positions of thought as expressed in the primary sources. I found my way around different versions of truth as I sought to both discover agreement with and establish my individual voice among the various directions my classmates were taking in their own quests to solve problems our teacher raised. It was exhilarating. Looking back, I think his methods were transformational and helped me to see how to choreograph, especially if I were to make the kind of dance that interested me: the open-ended, trying-to-understand-something kind.
Getting Help
Early on I learned that people like to be asked to help make a dance. Dance seems such a romantic and exotic activity that when I ask for help, especially help from a conceptual sphere, folks really step in. This became clear to me when I met Gordon Adams while we were both fellows at the Blue Mountain Center. He was director of the Defense Budget Project and author of The Iron Triangle. We actually began talking about the piece I was working on at the time, Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters, while sitting on the swimming dock. Gordon gave me lots of help during my research, and he stayed engaged throughout the making of the dance. He introduced me to others in his field and provided me with facts and information that would underpin the rigor of the piece.
This is an important dynamic to understand. When you ask people for help with some special questions in mind, they in turn take an interest in your activity. They will of course come to see the concert. More importantly, they will become a partner in shaping the work. What might be considered a solo act of making a dance emerges as something quite different because of the dialogue. It is not that the advisors come into the studio embodied, but more that they are present in my mind as I work. It's as if I have a team of shadow champions in the rehearsal hall, encouraging me to continue even when I feel tired, or scared, or just plain dumb.
Turning Discomfort into Inquiry and the Beginnings of the Critical Response Process
The recognition that inquiry allows for better communication, better feelings, and even better outcomes became clear to me with increasing force as I began teaching and using the principles of the Critical Response Process that I developed in the early nineties. I discovered that this multistep process for work-in-progress dialogue also held some practical tools for pursuing the inquiry itself and some guideposts for intuition. This began with my awareness of the lengthy apologies from artists that preceded a showing of any unfinished work. I noticed that I too often had a litany of issues disguised as nervous excuses before I showed something. And when I thought more about them, I realized that these excuses were often the problems I myself was having with what I was making. At first I didn't realize they could be posed in question form. It wasn't until I started talking with loved ones (first my husband, Jon Spelman, and then others in a small orbit of very trusted friends) that I realized that what I said in introducing a showing was often the first thing that came up in the discussion as soon as it was over. So I began to wonder whether, rather than apologize, I could ask a question-ask it with dignity and want to hear the answer, whether useful or not. The principle of "turn discomfort into inquiry" begins with the things we make.
More Questions
I know my incessant restlessness started young, but I think some critical junctures along the way helped to guide it. Thankfully I found respite in choreography, in partnering with others with similar questions, and with a group of people who were willing to help figure out what is interesting in all of this.
I think it was my mother's death that forced the questioning to become a way of making art, because I really did wonder why she had to die so young, and why she had to have that ignorant rabbi she had never met come into her hospital room and rub her in all the wrong ways, and how I had the courage to give her the daily morphine shot and walk her to the bathroom and back in the middle of those last nights, and where my own strength came from-and so the questions flowed.
I think it was the dogma of the contemporary art world that made asking questions the stance of a gentle rebel.
I think the act of putting old people onstage constituted a series of questions all on its own. Did they really even belong up there? Would the audience look at them? I remember one woman who was half blind and couldn't see or hear her cues as I watched in awe of her teetering around in what seemed a very interesting little dance. I wondered if it could be art.
I think it was the political work that forced the questioning to become a way of making art, because to tell the whole story from my perspective was just plain too simplistic, too narrow, too yesterday.
But none of these realizations started as questions. They all started as complaints, opinions, awareness of discomfort, internal monologues looping around in an obsessive brain. It took a while to figure out that by changing the tone and letting my sentence end with an upward tilt, I could actually get back to the material at hand and go to work. Inquiry became liberating.
Two Dances: The Oldest and One Not Yet Made
My nephew, who is among many other things a writer, asked me about the difference between my earlier work and my newer work. After thinking for a long minute, I said, "I am cursed to always overreach. But in the later work the gap between my ideas and what I am capable of actually producing is smaller. In the early work, the gap was sometimes a chasm." I know that most artists overreach. That big vision is magnetic, an oasis in the distance during years of insomnia, and often just as illusive. I don't think this is the provenance of artists. I just think we are foolish/happy and obsessive/persistent enough to keep trying.
Here then are stories about two dances. I consider New York City Winter, made in 1974, to be the first dance of my adult life. As a solo, perhaps its scale was such that it didn't suffer too much from my penchant for overreaching. (By my third dance, I would definitely be in over my head.) The Matter of Origins will premiere in fall 2010. Inquiry is a constant companion in both, but does not always appear as a question.
* * *
Author's Note: The Matter of Origins premiered on September 10, 2010, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland, College Park.
New York City Winter
When I moved to New York City in 1973, I had saved up enough money from a teaching job in Maryland to live and study for almost a year-live poorly, but live. I was housed in a six-floor walkup with the bathtub in the kitchen, but I had my own room, a lovely loft bed overlooking Second Avenue, and a roommate I could tolerate. I felt as though I had enough money to do what I wanted until I walked past a shop in the East Village that had in the front window a hand-embroidered peasant blouse from Eastern Europe. It cost thirty-five dollars, which in those days and my circumstances was very expensive. I used to walk past it just to visit. But I could not afford it without taking some extra work.
I was studying ballet with Peter Saul and modern with Viola Farber. I took acrobatics mostly with Broadway and television hopefuls who kept me informed about the other aspects of our biz. I also made contact with Daniel Nagrin, who had guest taught in my senior year of college. He asked me to be in his company. I went to see a performance at NYU and watched with interest for a while. The dancers were terrific. The audience, mostly friends of the performers and other dancers, seemed into it too. I, however, struggled. I wasn't finding the things I was looking for in dance performance, as much as I admired the abilities of the performers. My discomfort was about the dancers' inner focus and the nature of the relationships onstage. The dancers were having fun, but the audience was not a part of it.
A very strange thing happened. All winter I had been getting nosebleeds, and in the middle of this concert I felt a small one starting. I held my hand to my nose and continued to watch the dance. I had no tissue with me, and I was in seated in the middle of the row. There was no way for me to walk out easily. The dance continued, and the nosebleed stopped. But my hand was caked in blood. As I watched, I slowly licked the blood away. I felt I was inside a ritual of grief and sorrow, of liberation and decision making. I knew I couldn't accept being in this company. I knew that I was looking for something else-something bigger for dance, for the dancers, for the art form. Something that mattered.
Meanwhile, I wanted that embroidered blouse. I had no money. I was miserable in my dance classes, and I couldn't find anything to love in the theater. Then I learned something at my acrobatics class while standing in line waiting for my turn to try to do a backflip (with the teacher's help, always accompanied by a sarcastic remark). The girls were all doing various forms of go-go dancing to make a living. I was intrigued, as you could make thirty-five to fifty dollars a night depending on where you were and what you did. They told me where to go to find out about it.
I went to a building somewhere in midtown and found the office. I met with a woman whom I took to be the secretary, but I realized later she must have had more authority than that. She looked me up and down. I was wearing a black patent-leather raincoat with cherries on it. She made a lewd comment about the cherries. I never wore the raincoat again. But I took the information, and in a few days she called me with my first job.
Go-go dancing was a liberation for me. It was also very subversive. And, I concluded after my first night, I would learn a lot about performance. Everything that had bothered me at that dance concert at NYU was countered by the go-go experience.
For example, I was by myself. A true soloist making it alone in the complex and slightly dangerous scenes, including the bus ride to New Jersey, the bar, and the late-night return to Manhattan. Perhaps I felt it was a test of my ability to make it alone in the world, but I think the real satisfaction was in the relationship of the dancing to the audience, in the development of a movement vocabulary that worked in this context, in proving my own sexual attractiveness.
What was the relationship to the audience, and why did this interest me so much at the time? For one, and a very important one, I had to focus on the people I was performing for. I couldn't pull the modern dance stare or the inner-directed movement gaze. They demanded a relationship with the dancer. I found this intriguing, challenging, and difficult. And I felt it a worthwhile problem to solve. Over time I developed ways of talking with the guys while I was performing, a dialogue that reached its apex when I was able to get some of the men to actually choreograph my moves. I have always felt less sure of myself in relation to inventiveness. I trace this to my classical roots.
The dancer in me loves my classical training. The choreographer in me has been trying to escape it forever. When my mother was dying, I was thrilled to go back to ballet class. I loved knowing what was expected of me. I loved that my body knew what to do even when I was in such chaos. But when I step into the studio to find movement, develop physical approaches, or just let loose, I almost always have to make myself move away from the classical choices my body makes first.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hiking the Horizontal"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Liz Lerman.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments PROLOGUE QUESTIONS AS A WAY OF LIFE Fueling the Imagination Asking Questions as a Way of Life Two Dances: The Oldest and One Not Yet Made Wondering about Books The Sounds of St. Albans Was Einstein a Choreographer?
Influence, Inquiry, Action WHO GETS TO DANCE?
Manifesto The Roosevelt, Dancing The Shipyard, Dancing Speech and Silence: The Who Matters A Liberation in the Gallery Being Another: One Kind of Technique WHAT IS THE DANCING ABOUT I Met a Physicist Finding the Fish: On Meaning, Narrative, and Subject Matter Dancing Dancing on Both Sides of the Brain: An Essay in Text and Movement Justice and Genetics: Two Program Notes The Problem of Abstraction Two Ways To Be an Angel PORTFOLIO OF SITE-SPECIFIC DANCES WHERE IS THE DANCE HAPPENING?
Scene at a Bedside Choreographing Space My Favorite Night at Temple Micah The Stage and Why It Matters Three Places, Three Stories STRUCTURES AND UNDERPINNINGS A Brief Conversation with a Friend What Happens on a Residency?
Dilemmas of Practice in Art and Healing: Response to an Email Structure: the Container that Holds the Dance What Is The Toolbox?
Rehearsal, Defined and Redefined Free Fall PORTFOLIO OF STAGE DANCES TRANSDOMAIN PRACTICES Calling the Ancestors In Defense of Creative Research Onward with Petichta Fresh Readings: Reviewing Books on Tango and Nureyev Ruminations and Curiosities: A Series of Anecdotes and the Questions That Follow Partnering and People Seven Paths to Creativity POLITICS Two Assertions A Return to Inquiry Activism, Professionalism, Purity It Is Easier to be Against President Bush Than It Is to Change Small Dynamics in Our Own Field A Job Swap and Slow Banking: Two Op-Eds Pushing Back: A Rant in Three Movements Small Righteous Angers BULKY LOVE To the Attendance Monitor at Sligo Creek Middle School Motherhood: Stories and an Interview Representation Found and Lost Critical Response at Home Bulky Love EPILOGUE APPENDIX: List of Choreographed Works, 1974-2010
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Lerman is that rare artist who has pioneered new pathways into the human spirit, and who is blessed with the facility of not just creating her art but of explaining it as well. Hiking the Horizontal is a combination of explanation and inquiry, couched in a narrative that is contagious with sensitivity, grace, and wisdom."
— Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman, rabbi, Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual, Hebrew Union College
"The author tells her story in such a generous and transparent fashion that one easily grasps her profound observations and provocative inquiries. You will feel like a partner in her journey. Lerman's concise text inspires and equips the reader with a host of new perspectives from which to tackle the making of artworks. Probably best appreciated by those who have engaged in artistic explorations, Lerman's ideas are novel, deep, and challenging and, as such, require time to take in, analyze, and potentially adopt."
“Liz Lerman defies categorization, mixing ideas and practices we are taught to keep separate. She catapults herself into art and politics, science and spirituality, community-based and high art contexts. This generous book will give heart to artists who both respect tradition and seek their own path.”
"Lerman is that rare artist who has pioneered new pathways into the human spirit, and who is blessed with the facility of not just creating her art but of explaining it as well. Hiking the Horizontal is a combination of explanation and inquiry, couched in a narrative that is contagious with sensitivity, grace, and wisdom."—Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman, rabbi, Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual
"Liz Lerman defies categorization, mixing ideas and practices we are taught to keep separate. She catapults herself into art and politics, science and spirituality, community-based and high art contexts. This generous book will give heart to artists who both respect tradition and seek their own path."—Jan Cohen Cruz, director, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life
"When Liz speaks a word it is more than a word. The word becomes a world. When Liz speaks a sentence, a whole/holy history unfurls. She invites us to see, sense, feel and breathe. When Liz speaks her wordslisten."—Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director and Visioning Partner, Urban Bush Women
"Liz teaches us that artists and citizens can dance a new world into existence through questions. Creating across the horizontal is both the destination and the journey, and the essential tools of Hiking will help us make it 'there', together."—Vijay Gupta, Violinist, Founder of Street Symphony
"...a book full of inspiring and provocative wisdom from one of America's most influential choreographers. Through her journey, we tap into our own creativity by considering what it means to 'turn discomfort into inquiry', 'rattle around in other people's universes' and much more."—Pamela Tatge, Executive and Artistic Director, Jacob's Pillow
“Lerman is thoughtful, insightful and gentle in her approach, and her message carries deep value.”