Episode 63
Episode 63: A Conversation with Liz Lerman
Liz Lerman
In chapter one of our conversation with Liz Lerman we'll talk about her early years, her career as a heretic, the critical response process, the Heisenberg Uncertainty, the power of the horizontal, and how dance can make the world a better place.
BIO
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.
Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,”[4] she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.[5] In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant;[6] in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance;[citation needed] and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.[7]
She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador;[8] the company is now called simply Dance Exchange.[9] .[10]
Under Lerman's leadership Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. in locations as various as the National Cathedral,[11] Kennedy Center Opera House,[12] and Millennium Stage,[13] Lansburgh Theatre,[14] Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center,[14][15] Harvard University,[16] and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.[17][18]
Lerman's early work was strongly associated with the inclusion of older people alongside more traditional young performers,[19] and with the use of personal narrative.[4] Her later-career work has focused on questions of
Notable Mentions
Dance Exchange: (Previously, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange) Fueled by generosity and curiosity, Dance Exchange expands who gets to dance, where dance happens, what dance is about, and why dance matters. Dance Exchange harnesses the power of creativity and inquiry through dance to connect communities, to deepen our understanding of ourselves and to foster a more embodied, resilient and just world.
Critical Response Process: Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a method for giving and getting feedback on work in progress, designed to leave the maker eager and motivated to get back to work. is Creative
Pee-Posh (Maricopa): The Maricopa people were small bands living along the lower Gila and Colorado rivers. Each of these bands migrated eastward at different times. The Xalychidom (Maricopa of Lehi), left around 1825-1830. The last of these bands is said to have left the Colorado River in the late 1830’s. Eventually these bands came together and became collectively known as the Maricopa. As they migrated eastward, they came upon the Pima tribe and established a relationship. Both tribes provided protection against the Yuman and Apache tribes.
Tohono O’odham: The Tohono O’odham Nation is comparable in size to the state of Connecticut. Its four non-contiguous segments total more than 2.8 million acres at an elevation of 2,674 feet. Within its land the Nation has established an Industrial Park that is located near Tucson. Tenants of the Industrial Park include Caterpillar, the maker of heavy equipment; the Desert Diamond Casino, an enterprise of the Nation; and, an 23 acre foreign trade zone. of Wisconsin with a sociologist named Pearlman.
Freedom Schools: The Freedom Schools of the 1960s were part of a long line of efforts to liberate people from oppression using the tool of popular education, including secret schools in the 18th and 19th centuries for enslaved Africans; labor schools during the early 20th century; and the Citizenship Schools formed by Septima Clark and others in the 1950s.
Anna Halprin: was an American choreographer and dancer. She helped redefine dance in postwar America and pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance.[4] In the 1950s, she established the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop to give artists like her a place to practice their art. Exploring the capabilities of her own body, she created a systematic way of moving using kinesthetic awareness.[5
Florence West, dance Milwaukee: Modern dance in Milwaukee begins with Florence West (1912-1994). West left Milwaukee at seventeen to dance in a Broadway road show, quit when she discovered ballet during a tour stop in Detroit, and found her way into the corps of the Chicago Civic Opera ballet. A Milwaukee opera producer asked her to come home to add choreography to a local production of Carmen. She soon became the go-to dance person for Milwaukee dance, theater, and opera companies.
Amira de la Garza: After spending a year in Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar, her experiences with the everyday talk and life around her led her to develop methods to integrate the arts, spirituality, and personal reflection into the study of culture. She works with many border-related projects, and has had students from around the world travel with her to many places to learn the methods she teaches.Professor de la Garza reports her research using creative writing, poetry, fiction, and has often shared her research through staged performances.
The California State Summer School for the Arts is a rigorous, preprofessional, month-long training program in the visual and performing arts, creative writing, animation and film for talented artists of high school age. CSSSA provides a supportive environment in which students hone acquired skills and explore new techniques and ideas for an intense and exciting learning experience.
Ethel Butler, one of Liz’s teachers: From 1933 through 1945, Ethel Butler was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. She went on to become a well-known teacher of the Graham Technique, counting among her students Paul Taylor and Dan Wagoner.
Sandy Spring Friends School: Sandy Spring Friends School is a progressive, coeducational, college preparatory Quaker school serving students from preschool through 12th grade. SSFS offers an optional 5- and 7- day boarding program in the Middle School and Upper School.
Art in Other Places, William Cleveland, Artists have established a remarkable record of innovation and success in institutional settings. Their work with hospital patients, prisoners, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and others has shown that the arts can have a significant positive impact on the lives of these people. This book recounts the histories of 22 institutional and community arts programs across the country pioneering this approach through activities such as creative writing and the performing and visual arts.Rabbi, Danny Zemel.
Wicked Bodies: Inspired by powerful and grotesque images of women’s bodies over multiple historic periods, Liz Lerman’s Wicked Bodies, is an intimate spectacle, brings together several consistent themes of my choreographic output:
– the invisible ways and means of feminine thinking and action which have been celebrated, erased, or criminalized;
– legal systems that attempt but often fail to bend our actions towards a fairer and more just world; and
– how we as a group of intergenerational artists bring our personal lives to the stage within characters that are imagining futures
Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders is a stunning insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens who are on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy.
Anat Shanker Osorio: Host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications, Anat Shenker-Osorio examines why certain messages falter where others deliver. She has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from freedom to join together in union to clean energy and from immigrant rights to reforming criminal justice. Anat's original approach through priming experiments, task-based testing and online dial surveys has led to progressive electoral and policy victories across the globe.
Malonga Casquelourd: Even as a child in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, Casquelourd could hardly keep from moving, becoming a principal dancer with the National Congolese Dance Company in his teens and performing internationally before joining Le Ballet Diaboua in Paris. In 1972, he moved to New York and co-founded the United States' first Central African dance company, Tanawa. But his greatest impact was in the Bay Area. He arrived in Oakland in the mid-'70s, teaching Congolese dance and drumming at CitiCentre Dance Theater, where he was a founding instructor, and African studies at San Francisco State University. Even dancers who didn't take his classes looked forward to hearing his booming voice in the Alice Arts Center halls every Saturday. When the center faced closure in 2002, Casquelourd led the campaign to keep it open to the public.
Cristobal Martinez: Cristóbal Martínez, PhD is from Alcalde, New Mexico and is of the Genizaro, Pueblo, Manito and Chicano people in Northern New Mexico including Española, Abiquiu, Velarde, Pó t'síí pangeh, Embudo and Dixon. He is an artist, digital designer, publishing scholar, and Professor of Expanded Arts at Arizona State University. Martínez co-founded the artist-hacker ensemble Radio Healer in 2003; joined the internationally acclaimed artist collective Postcommodity in 2009; and co-created, with post-Mexican artist-composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music ensemble Red Culebra in 2018. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art, and continues his work within these groups.
Transcript
Liz Lerman
[:Liz Lerman is a choreographer performer writer, teacher, and speaker. She spent the past four decades making her artistic research, personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers, to ballerinas resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.
That I think gives you the gist of Liz, but here are a few specifics:
Over 90 performance works commissions from Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center Arena Stage and Harvard Law School, a USA Artist Ford Fellowship In Dance, a MacArthur genius grant, three books, including the recently published Critique is Creative, and Critical Response Process trainings and workshops all around the world.
Along the way she's done a lot of making --- new dances, of course, but also new community creative collaborations, new ways of teaching, new research strategies, new creative concepts and ideas, all of which have fomented a thousand conversations, and a multitude of new questions.
In Chapter One of our conversation with Liz Lerman we'll talk about her early years, her career as a heretic, the critical response process, the Heisenberg Uncertainty, the power of the horizontal, and how dance can make the world a better place.
This is Change the Story / Change the world. My name is Bill Cleveland.
Part One. Sometimes Dance
So Liz, Lerman welcome to the show. Uh, where are you hailing from today?
[:And I like to think in some ways I'm doing the same. Whether I do it with as much honor and characters they must have done, I don't know. But I take, some courage from having moved here to the Southwest. And honestly, Bill, you can feel it. You walk on this land and you can feel it, and you look at this sky. So I'm grateful to be here.
[:So I'll begin with a question that's jumping up for me because you did a benediction for those people, all those many years ago, who were the movers, the ritual makers, the people who prepared the ritual fire. So, do you think what you have done all your life, which we call dance, this moving, is an intrinsic and essential human behavior.
[:But in all these years that have ensued, I've come to see dance as a tributary to a larger idea, which is well, motion, and that the world is in motion, and that all things are in motion, including our institutions, and well, the ground we walk on, and that our bodies are the manifestation of how we can express, hold, learn, comprehend, work, be in dialogue with, to help us understand these things.
[:So intrinsic, absolutely. dance as we sometimes imagine it. In this western culture Not always. No
[:[00:06:08] LL: Well, I have a lot of different ways of answering that depending on, what that person does. Once I start talking.
[:[00:06:15] LL: Because there's a way in which any number of things will ensue. but, I started answering that question Bill, not because I was in an airplane, but because my daughter threw her arms around my legs while I was walking out the door yet again to go do something.
And she wished I was with her. And why are you doing this? And I have often then said this question, what are you doing is really deep. And that your answer may change depending on who you're talking to, although the essential truth of it probably needs to be there no matter what. So in the airplane, I've, I don't say dance anymore, it's just too confusing and too narrowing.
[:BC: So, since we're talking about movement, I'll just give you the context in which we're having this conversation. I am sitting in my gigantic recording studio, which is a closet. And a little chair on a hot pad. Because for the last two weeks, I haven't been able to tie my shoes.
LL: Oh, I'm sorry.
BC: So the reason I'm bringing this up is that of course movement is something most of us take for granted, right? And when you're find yourself surprised that your body is not actually cooperating and the way that you expect it to, it's a very significant consciousness, raiser about this bag of bones. We carry around with us. It's it's pretty amazing.
[:[00:08:18] BC: Another amazing thing is what little I know about your origin story? So, how did you come to this work that is sometimes dance and sometimes teaching creativity
LL: One thing I love about the origin question is that you don't really know where to start because every origin begets another origin. To be honest, I mean I feel really blessed to have been born to the mother and father I was born to cuz they were so divergent, and in their own manner bequeathed me so many things that I spent my life trying to work through.
[:But you have to really understand that the grimness of those ghettos for Jewish people at that time. I mean, it was slaughter. what did it take for him to rebel and get himself out and and land in Milwaukee where he's still a pious Orthodox Jew, gives birth to my father whose mother dies in the plague, and the, the flu epidemic at when he's six months old.
[:But I was on a panel on art, and social justice a long time ago, and was talking just a little bit about my Milwaukee roots. And this guy comes up to me afterwards, and launched and do a story that I did not know. he says, “Oh, I, I just want you to know your father, was part of a group of Jewish boys who got really angry at the pious of orthodoxy. They didn't know what to do with themselves. They ended up first generation at the University of Wisconsin with a sociologist named Pearlman. Who totally changed their lives.” So, before I start complaining about higher education, wait a minute, it altered my father's life.
And I just, that's the story in and of itself. And they all got radicalized, including my father who was wonderfully radical. So that's a way, but I mean, usually the story starts with with the civil rights movement in Milwaukee and my leaving ballet, this is the thing I'm just so struck by here at the university.
I'm in what's called Music, Dance, Theater. So I'm in a music school and we know that music schools are by and large the most conservative schools in the arts. And they've got a huge classical music program. And you just see classicism. playing out over and over again, and the act of leaving a classical tradition is just, you know, I did mine at 14.
[:But I watch how seriously the tentacles are around classical notions and classical ideas, and I see it's a challenge to remove oneself. And it's not just removing the body. You're removing thought ideas, myths, traditions, all of that. But I managed to begin an exploration that, of course, is ongoing.
[:BC: And so, as you said, your parents were both understanding and supportive of your ideas and how you wanted to manifest yourself in the world, obviously first through classical study, but what happened when you broke with the cannon? How did that go?
[:Bojangles Robinson (excerpt)
And it could be tap or it could be, so they were, they had, particularly my dad had a large youth, plus he'd gone to college with, Anna Halprin.
[:[00:12:52] LL: Yeah, And so it wasn't as if, I mean, they were both modernists at heart. They just,I think, understood something about, “Oh, you're gonna be a ballerina.” Was like the career thing, not so much the whole art picture thing. I think the idea that I was gonna quit was hard for them.
I think that, there's a part of them that love that I was, involved and so serious about my dancing, but it wasn't a total quitting, it was quitting ballet. And so then we could begin to focus on, well, where else would I get my education?
BC: Yeah, but there can be an orthodoxy, even in the modern dance world that you certainly never seem to cotton to. I I've always thought of you as kind of, um, Mad scientist inventor as much as a choreographer. Where does that come from?
[:And that is a gift. So instead of being narrowed, you can only do this, and this. Actually, they were broad in their ideas. And so, I had a lot of, little well stories in the back of my head, and not the least of which is my Jewish upbringing that helped me understand how to be a well, a gentle rebel.
Or what I have come to see is maybe more of a heretic than an actual revolutionary. Amira de la Garza, a woman who teaches de-colonial thought here, just said, maybe you're more like a heretic. It's really useful to think about, cuz heretics stay in relationship to the thing they're struggling with.
[:[00:14:35] LL: You're just sticking in there with a problem. You haven't just walked entirely away. And I thought that was a way for me to see it.
[:[00:14:44] LL: Mm-hmm. ? Mm-hmm.
[:[00:15:35] LL: I'll say I was lucky because my first teacher, Ethel Butler, who, had danced with Graham, she let us improvise for about 10 minutes. Not every class, but some classes. And, she was quick to tell me that I excelled at that, which was interesting. I heard that early on. And then Florence West, in Milwaukees she had something she called choreographer's workshop, which she held every other Saturday. I went for two hours and we would paint and draw and get up and dance around and come back, so these ideas were, there.
I didn't think I was gonna be one. I didn't, I'm not even sure I knew precisely what that was, even at that age. But I liked the messing around part, so it wasn't entirely distinct. But at the period in which I'm coming up in the arts, I mean, my, my teacher was a bit of a radical. you wouldn't think to start teaching people young.
This is just a sidebar, but recently I did spend some time with, the head of one of our very big ballet companies, I called them up because they had to just commissioned a bunch of new dances and they'd commissioned only men. And I wanted to have a discussion about that.
[:So, that was the world I was coming up into. However, it became clear to me somewhere in this period of deep unrest, deep trying to understand, how to be an artist in the world because, I had all this stuff from my upbringing —- “You need to make the world a better place .” —- from being Jewish. “You need to make the world a better place,” from my father. “You need to make a world a better place.”
It was like the one who was sustaining the idea of artists was my mother. Everybody else is like, no, no, you know, manage this larger picture. And, well, you can't do that unless you have some way to manifest the forms in which you're going to do it. So, it didn't hit me when I was studying in college it hit me more as I began to try to apply what I knew, and making was the thing. And that took place first. I mean, they're little forages, but the real place where I got to experiment was the Sandy Spring Friends School.
[:[00:18:01] LL: I cannot tell you what a lucky person I am. I was looking for a job. I was just finishing up college, my third college. I went to three different colleges. I'm, it's a mess, and saw this ad for a position at a Quaker boarding school. I went out, they wanted a history teacher, but they also wanted a dance program.
And I went, somehow they let me come and interview and I walked into the headmaster's office and he didn't say a word cuz he held the meeting as if he was, well he's a Quaker, and it was a Quaker meeting. That was the job interview. So can you, I mean, it's just such a beautiful thing. And I sat there, I don't know, about 10 minutes and then thought, well, maybe I should tell him something.
I got the job. And basically he said to me, keep our students curious and interested about the work. And so off I went with, all my ideas about dance. Everything I ever wanted to try. Yes, I taught history for one semester. Then it was all dance all the time. And I taught the boys on the lacrosse field. I went into the faculty offices and taught people. I put everybody in these big productions. Everything that you would've seen later in community-based practice. I gotta do with the Sandy Spring Friends School when I was 21.
[:[00:19:44] LL: And also, at that particular school, the connection to spirit, which is so important to me. And even though again, the art world, you and I entered, that was like almost practically a dirty word. But for me, it was so beautiful to be able to find mechanisms for the expression of that, to do, as I said, do all this experimentation.
Hey, I didn't care if we talked and danced and sang and danced or, and I realized like, my students were a little nervous of performing their own pieces cuz they were all showing stuff of their own right away. So we performed under the light of the first full moon.
That became a regular thing. , Well, I just was so fantastic. But, yeah, I am ever grateful. And also at Sandy Spring Friends School, I think this is one of the ways dance is particularly good in the world, is most dancers understand a relationship to continued education, whether it's just keeping their body fit or whether they just, you know, and teaching.
And that old saw, well, if you can't do, you'll teach, you know, none of that. You know the engagement, that the circular nature of knowledge growing because of who you're in relationship with, and who you're trying to help, and how they send back to you. The signals. I mean, honestly it was pretty profound.
And it's also where I played a little bit with this intergenerational stuff, cuz we would do these big performances and I'd have the students, these were high school kids, but also faculty, families, So I got a little taste of that, which was enough to be a seed for later, and I left there when I was 23 and my mom died when I was 27. So I had four years for that to grow inside me to the point where I got serious about dancing with older people.
[:[00:21:46] LL: So, when I left the Sandy Spring Friends School I understood some deep things from experience, not from theory, not from dreaming. But What I didn't know was whether I needed to fulfill this idea of being a professional dancer. So I left and went to New York and thought I should test my wares in that city, my nine months in New York it wasn't affirming cuz I hated it. I was miserable most of the time. But it did ultimately affirm the direction my life would take.
And that is, I tried to do professional dance as it was defined in those days. And I did not like the system. I didn't like the process, I didn't like the secrecy. I didn't like the power structure. There was nothing in the construct of what you would do to become a dancer in New York City that felt in any way relational to the values that I held about dancing and what I thought art should be.
And I, again, I was lucky sequentially that that happened because I couldn't have handled all that misery. That misery, plus the misery my mom's death. I mean, I did it sequentially, but I couldn't have all at once. But I did a lot of saying goodbye in those nine months in New York. And, what's remarkable to me is that I didn't just hang up everything again, just say, “Oh, I'm giving up on it.” But my dad used to say, don't confuse Judaism with the institutions that Jews have made to sustain it. Don't confuse the two and that was very useful.
[:[00:23:17] LL: it. And I was able, it's almost, what's that song? put it over, let your light shine and I was able to nourish this little thing in there because I understood then on some level that, “Oh yeah, right. This is it's, these institutions are, I mean, they're powerful, but they're frail.”
So it was important for me to close all those doors. Then I went to Washington and I decided, okay, I'm gonna go into a master's program. I'm gonna recreate what I did at the Sandy Spring Friends School, but I'm gonna do it in a city and I'm gonna see if I can do this. And then my mother got sick. So I had turned an important corner.
[:In 1977, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer Liz returned to Milwaukee to be with her. It was during her dying process that Liz began to envision a dance that reflected stories and visions her mother had shared in their regular conversations during this time.
The following, year after her mothers passing, Liz choreographed and performed a dance piece in her memory. While the dance was meant to celebrate her mother’s life, for Lerman, it also marked the beginning of an extraordinary new life path.
The Following is an excerpt from my book Art in Other Places.
A San Francisco lady.
The woman on the stage is speaking about. Death. Her death is coming. She says, and she wants it to hurry up. The audience sits waiting. Interested, but uneasy and a little impatient because they're here to see a dance, and she's talking. And talking just isn't supposed to be a part of a dance concert.
This is unusual enough, but there's something else. In addition to the talking that is unsettling. The dancer is young, but she speaks like an old woman. “A San Francisco lady”, she says. And even when the monologue ends, and she begins to dance on the bare dimly lit stage, what she is doing doesn't feel like a performance. It's too real. It's personal and intense. And even though the audience sits hidden in the dark, resisting the woman's increasingly anxious dance, they can't. Because, they're a part of it.
[:And that if, if you really believe that you have some agency over the things, you're gonna do, and that you already have some idea that you can translate emotions into something else, or you can translate ideas into something else, and that, in my case, the body, but maybe, for other people it's poetry or painting or, but if you have a sense that this is actually a real thing, it may, you, it may be experienced ephemerally by others, but it's real. If you have that, you have a chance in this life, to. to do what I was able to do.
[:[00:26:43] LL: All I can say, at the beginning of the situation with my mother was that, I had visions while she was dying. I'm not sure, Bill, that there was anything yet in my life to tell me to pay attention to those visions. I think this is one of the first things I try to teach my students, or anybody who's listening to me, is that for every word that you hear, for every line that you read, for any time you're listening to anything, your imagination is busy painting pictures for you, and that if you pause and notice you're actually customizing the information to your own story and it's all there for you.
You just have to take a look. and most of us experienced that as unbidden, as I did while my mom was dying. I mean, I didn't, I mean, the visions were, I couldn't avoid them. It's like I couldn't suppress them. And it's only later, that I've been able to understand how to nourish, make a space for them, try to allow that to continue because it's just so important. And I got those while she was dying.
[:[00:28:37] LL: So, and some of it was this idea of, all these people. She talked a lot about people she used to know, and they were all just floating in the house. The house was full of these floating figures in my mind. And that became the power to send me down the, find some old people. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would've had the strength, but at this point everything else had failed. So that's sometimes what happens.
BC: Yeah. Yeah, well, I've recognized, many times in my life, and then of course forgotten it, that the cosmos is actually quite generous, often in the worst possible moments. Often with the the nourishment, the vitamins that you need to move from one place to another with grace. And the question is whether you abide it. Our culture isn't particularly supportive of that, but.
[:The afternoon of Yom Kippur everybody dances. There's a whole process, the congregants help make the dance and all that. It's all done seated, gesturally and all that. But typically, he'll introduce me when it's that part of the afternoon, and then I talk a little bit. But this time, what went on just before me was the story of Jonah.
And Jonah is the one who swallowed by the whale. And he, Danny goes on to talk a little bit about Jonah. He said, “Jonah's running away from God and he gets into a whale and that's when he finally, finally gets God” He said, “But you can't escape God.” my, my rabbi goes, so I get up and I said, cuz I've been working on this for the last year or so, that “I feel like my search for creativity is probably like some people's search for God.”
I mean, it feels similar. So I said that, and looking at my rabbi, I said to everybody, “”You can't escape God, but you can't escape your creativity either. You can try, you can say you have two left feet. You can say, “I can’t.” You can say, “No, I'm, I have no nothing.”” I said, “You can try, but you can’t.”" And honestly, that was like an amazing little moment for me and for my rabbi.
He jumped right. And he was, jumping up and down. He was so happy. But I mean, it's like you just said, the cos it's actually, the cosmos is generous. It's all around us. And part, I just feel a lot of my teaching is helping people like, become liberated. Just accept what's theirs.
[:Part Four. The Horizontal.
So one of my question; Is there a story that really says, “Hey, this is, this is what I'm up to. This is something I'm proud of. And that taught me as much as I gave.”
[:[00:31:56] BC: When I first heard about this, you described it as a gesture to me and 750 other people in a big auditorium. And you literally had people move their arms up and down in a vertical. And you talked about how much of what we experience in the world is organized in this way that forces us into false up, down dichotomies, defined by winning and losing and scarcity. And then, you just moved your arm from one side to the other, on the horizontal and said, “Hey, think about a continuum rather than a hierarchy, and maybe this is a more productive place to play.
[:So, it's like a consistent practice of giving people that context affects the decisions that you make. I can use words, and I can describe it, but our bodies actually can manage it way better than our rational logic can. And so having experienced a lot of that, I think in a sort of physical form, helps me to sustain it too.
[:[00:34:39] LL: I mean, even take something like the idea of collaboration. So when we were coming up, of course, individual was everything. Well, right now, there's so much pressure for collaboration. I've got a bunch of students who think that if they do something on their own, they're being selfish. This is an example of that they just flipped it now took, 10 years to flip it, but they flip. And honestly, you can't do collaboration well if you don't have a voice, and then yes, you wanna be able to be part of a group so it's consistent over and over again.
And so, I mean maybe the pull is always towards, oh, somebody has a new idea. Let's all go figure out how to collaborate. I think that's important, but we just have to sustain the breadth of the horizon. So for me it continues. I would like to not have to talk about it anymore cuz I like this new idea I'm working on, but it just keeps coming up so much.
So even I think for example, around I think, the racial reckoning is a really interesting place where we are seeing that it necessarily has to shift. The power has to entirely shift. Will it shift all the way to a different vertical? It might, until we can come back round to something that's more horizontal. I don't know because we have so much repairing to do, but it's very interesting.
[:Good intentions and strategic bullet points just don't cut it. The way I think of it is that some institutions are like polymer elastic material, you know? When you add a certain amount of heat stress they just snap back into their original form. That safe place that they know best. But if you add too much stress, too much heat, they just melt. Which in some cases, may be a good thing.
[:And I think this is really interesting cuz the, i, you really need both. You have to be able to do both. Most things can't. In fact, most dancers can’t. Most dancers are shape dancers or momentum dancers. There are very few who can do both. But institutions are shape, and they wanna change their shape. They can't, it's all interlocking shapes. So you have to dissolve the molecules, you've gotta dissolve back into where you have momentum, which can be terrifying to an institution. It doesn't know if it's gonna know its shape again. But you have to, like a curriculum, you have to let it go I don't think the ingredients actually change that much.
I mean, you, the stuff is all there, but, and then you let the new shape take its form that's going to be more, ready for the time we're in. And you want a flexibility between shape and momentum. And I think institutions have a terrible time with this. So I, that's my new advocacy and what I'm looking at is the nature of how do you help people not lose their entire self when they lose their shape.
[:[00:38:22] LL: You know, when I left the Dance Exchange. one of the things that we said to people is that everybody would have a job when I left. They just might not be in the job they had. And that's an example of an institution changing its shape, supporting the ingredients, but saying, wait a minute, this is an amazing opportunity with Liz leaving for us to re-conceive of so many things. But you have to be, we had to have some kind of guarantee in there,
[:But, it's amazing to me. When I move over into a place like a mental health facility, a senior program, or educational institutions, and see similar strategies taking place. Just with softer edges, you know, the words are different, but the whole idea of protecting status, not taking risks, all those things are still in place.
So I have a question. As long as I've known you, you've been applying your creative process to explore how and why T\things are the way they are and examine the potential for change. So, is this something that you think about. In terms of power, how to change the balance of power.
[:So I was over there in the, and I came away thinking that the biggest obstacle to change in these institutions was wealth and status. And that with wealth, people just bought their experience. They didn't wanna have experience. So the wealthier, the nursing home, the more druged they were. I mean, it was just totally evident.
But this idea of status, I mean, second grade classrooms have people with status. So status I think, is an under-recognized under-looked at, fluid motion through almost everything we're doing. And honestly, I think this is a part of Trump is his capacity to play on the relationship between power and status that he does so, so well along with cruelty and brutality and all the rest of it.
My answer to you about power is gonna be unsatisfactory. What I feel I've done, and then maybe it's the heretic speaking, is that I feel like I've evolved all kinds of systems that allow a person to live more healthily, more fully, more respectfully in a power structure in which they don't have the power.
So I, I think, and I sometimes assign this to my gender and to my field. I mean, dance, ephemeral, female, all the issues that come with that —- nomad. I never stayed anywhere super, super long while. I stayed with the Dancer Exchange a long time, but, nomadic.
[:And you get just as beat up. So why do it? I'm dropped back down into my underground world and I'm happy. I'm doing all kinds of things that I hope have value. And I think I'm affecting my students and some of my colleagues. So, I don't engage in it at a certain level.
On the other hand, I have been enough of a heretic that in my writings, and in my philosophies, and in my constant chatter at people, it's like I'm a constant hammer, but the hammer's really small. Because actually, Bill, I was thinking even when you come, comes down to aesthetics. I'm a person who was partly accepted into the higher echelons of my field, and also rejected, continually.
So, I think if you really, truly wanna embrace what I've been talking about and what I've been doing and living by, you have to change. And I don't think many people actually want to. I mean, I don't think the institutions wanna change. So, so they'll, it's there. I'm just, as I say, this is an unsatisfactory answer about power.
[:Anand Giridharadas has a new book called The Persuaders. In it, he tells the story of an activist communication guru named Anat Shanker Osorio, who's been working to change the way progressives advocate and communicate their issues. She believes strongly that if you try to fight a vertical power structure on their terms, on the vertical battlefield, you know, by shouting, “We're not baby killers. We're not communists.” You're losing the battle because they control the language, the terms of engagement and the definitions of success.
So. Here's my way of thinking about it. Yeah. I use the image of the devil a lot because it's such an evocative thing. And, if there is a devil out there in the world he lives in the vertical realm of absolutes, good and evil, I win you lose. But on the horizontal, it's a different story. If you plot this on the horizontal, you have the power of fear on the one end, and the power of desire on the other. But. The power of freedom is in the middle.
This is because freedom is not the absence of fear and desire. I mean, they're not going away. Freedom is knowing their power and putting them in their place. So, once you come to grips with the fact that these forces are always going to be a major factor in change work, then what we call the power struggle doesn't have to turn into a tug of war. It can be about redefining power and how it shows up.
And I think your work is a journey that many people are taking together to investigate and redefine the assumptions that often hold sway so much of the time. Like patriarchy, and commodified beauty, and the stigma of growing old. The powers that you bring to the party are the wisdom of collective, the imagination, and human creativity. You're actually defanging the devil and basically saying, “Hey, you know, it's a given, right. Come on. Let's deal with this, the better angels that folks have been talking about for a long, long time they're there and they're available and they're powerful.”
[:[00:46:25] BC: Which reminds me, uh, we've been talking about critical response as though everybody out there. Knows it. For those who don't. Could you describe it?
[:Put another way I like to say it is, it's it's a four step process. You practice the steps, but like dance, you practice the steps, but dancing's not about the steps. It's the same in critical response. You practice the steps, but critical response is not about the steps, it's about the values that each of the steps hold. But those values are difficult to keep during life. So, you set aside a time — some people call it a ceremony — and you take time to practice, practice, practice, um, how to do this.
[:So let's imagine that my performance of the deep sea welders boogie has just finished. And my creative partners. Are gathered. Uh, backstage to share their impressions. God, um, Already feeling nervous about it. But, with Critical Response, rather than a free for all critique, which often ensues, we're going to have those four steps that Liz referenced, which have the potential to change the dynamics here from a fearful encounter to a supportive give and take. So here's what happens.
In the first step my colleagues get to share what they thought was meaningful or interesting ,or exciting about what they just saw.
In the second, I get to ask them questions about what they experienced and what they thought about the work.
In the third, my friends can ask neutral questions about the work and the goal here with neutral is to ask questions that do not have embedded opinions such as, “Hey, why did you have that awful Cha Cha scene with the Aqualung and the camel, you know.
And then in the final stage, folks do get to offer very specific opinions that they'd like to share. But, I get to decide whether or not I want to hear them.
So, that's how it unfolds.
[:It, it turns out it's consent driven. I mean, we didn't talk about consent when critical response started out, and yet that fourth step. I have an opinion about, do you wanna hear it? Is it's consent driven? So there are things that are inherent in it that, I don't think I understood at all when I made it.
And thankfully there's a whole community of practitioners who continue to practice, practice pr, and push it into its variations, and its lots of ways that it's being used. So I'm, it's exciting to see what's happened to it.
[:It was all pretty organic. Nobody organized it that way, but it was very critical response-like. It had similar stages, but it was a drum based ritual. So the questions and the permissions had the same kind of give and take. And after everybody learned it he shared that it was actually a dispute resolution process from his ancestry.
The idea was to give people a chance to say their piece in a safe space to vent. You know, question back and forth and give people agency in the process so that all those vertical conflict producing muscle memory things are less likely to occur, you know? You don't have to push. Uh, and you don't have to be right every time. And hey, people respected him, and it was one of the only peaceful places in the joint.
[:But I think, where I see, when I see critique at work that is, the worst kind, it's usually associated with power and authority. And, whether you're talking about, faculty at universities or, bosses the thing I'm working on right now with people is people say, be brutally honest. But, actually brutally honest is not brutally honest. It's brutal power because the person can shoot from the hip and say whatever they want, whenever they want, fine. The secretary does it, she's fired. So, no, it's not honesty, it's power. and again, Critical Response is full of, of nuances of how you can address that, and remain humane,
[:[00:52:06] LL: Which is, to me really important.
[:Another gift that dear audience members you'll be receiving shortly is the second half of our conversation with Liz. In it, we're going to talk about Wicked Bodies, Liz's newest work, its Genesis and evolving story, along with the history of the criminalized feminine that it explores. And of course it's obvious relevance to what is taking place here and now in 2023. So thank you for joining us for Chapter One today. Please tune in for Chapter Two and the beginning of February.
Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art & Community, our soundscape and theme are a miraculous manifestation of the extraordinary musical imagination of Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our special effects come from Freesound.org, and our inspiration, as always, comes from the mysterious and ever present spirit of UKE 235. If you like what you hear, here, please subscribe, share, and drop us a line. Until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.
