Episode 64
Episode 64: A Conversation With Liz Lerman - Ch. 2
In Episode 63 of Change the Story / Change the World, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. In this Episode, (64) we hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches.
Special Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their support of Liz Lerman's work and the use of an excerpt from the Wicked Bodies trailer.
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, 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]
Notable Mentions
Liz Lerman: I help others when they come to me and ask. I work in this country and abroad in settings that continue to forge my thinking, make me bolder, and let me interrogate the next generations of artists. It is wide open at the moment. I am a little frightened, a lot more curious, and full of wonder and grief as I gaze around me.”
– Liz Lerman
Change the Story / Change the World EP: 63, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. She also talked about hiking, the horizontal, the critical response process, challenging the Canon, the Heisenberg Uncertainty and how dance can help make the world a better place.
Heisenberg Uncertainty: n quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities[1] asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position, x, and momentum, p, can be predicted from initial conditions.
Wicked Bodies, Liz Lerman’s latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA was founded in 1963, as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. YBCA’s work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the community it serves.
Christine Blasey Ford: is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.[4] She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects.[5] During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.[6]
In September 2018, Ford alleged that then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in Bethesda, Maryland, when they were teenagers in the summer of 1982.[7] She testified about her allegations during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination later that month.[8]
Witches & Wicked Bodies An 2013 exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art that provided a rich survey of images of European witchcraft from the ancient world to the present day. Witches, even in biblical and classical times were predominantly women and the misogynistic narratives of their wickedness and lewdness propounded by clerics in books such as the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches),1486 resulted in enduring stereotypes that were imaginatively re-invented by artists over the centuries.
Johannes Kepler: was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music.[5] He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.[6]
In 1615, 24 witnesses accused Katharina Kepler, the astronomer’s mother, of being a witch. Because of these charges and others, the elderly Katharina was chained to the floor of a prison cell, where she was watched by two guards. Kepler, then the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, took over his mother’s legal defense, not realizing the case would go on for six years. Katharina’s story is the subject of a new book, The Astronomer and the Witch (Oxford, 2015), by Cambridge professor Ulinka Rublack.
“cultural humility” : To enter my relationships with my students who come from other cultures with my neighbors, my colleagues. I wish I knew all that I could know about their histories, but I don't. And so, and I can study, but that won't make me know it.So, humility seems to me. A space where, settle back, be gentle, be curious. Assume you're not the only person in the world and that not knowing is the best way to be. -- Liz Lerman
Hiking the Horizontal: Liz Lerman’s 2021 book offers readers a gentle manifesto to 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.
Dance Exchange: “A place I think of as a think tank and action lab, a place that has been my home and home to many others since I established it in 1976.” Mission: Fueled by generosity and curiosity, Dance Exchange expands who gets to dance, where dance happens, what dance is about, and why dance matters.
senninbari: (千人針, "thousand person stitches) or one thousand stitch is a belt or strip of cloth stitched 1000 times and given as a Shinto amulet by Japanese women and imperial subjects to soldiers going away to war. Senninbari were decorated with 1000 knots or stitches, and each stitch was normally made by a different woman.[1][2]
The Atlas of Creative Tools is a work in progress developed by Liz Lerman and her colleagues at Arizona State University. This selection of creative tools helps you practice ways of working with memories, exploring identity, making new connections, and engaging with curiosity.
Legacy Unboxed, “We're just looking at the wildness of being this age and all the wild ways we wanna be in the world and what we wanna do about that and how we wanna handle.” Liz Lerman.
She Said s a 2022 American biographical drama film directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the 2019 book of the same title by reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. The film stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Twohey and Kantor, respectively, and follows their New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women.
Demon Copperhead: s a 2022 novel by
A Conversation With Liz Lerman: Chapter 2 This is not just a dance piece. There's storytelling and video and incredible music and sound with intimacy and spectacle, come join the witches. Everybody needs protecting. Every witch has a story In this episode, we'll hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches. This is Change the Story / Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland. Part Five: Which Witch are You? So, Liz, I spent a good portion of the last few days, immersed in Wicked Bodies, its conception and evolution over the last few years. And, I have to say what you have here is a powerful way to interrogate the structure of authority and the impulse to criminalize difference in things that are hard to understand. And, not just in authoritarian dictatorships. So, could you just tell the story of this journey and how you came to this idea of wicked bodies that has manifested as a work, most recently, on the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco. But another thing I like to point out is when Christine Blasey Ford, spoke, at the Kavanaugh hearings at noon, she was a hero. But by the end of the day, she was a witch. I was not prepared for the venom, the persistent attacks, and the collateral damage to my friends and my family. I was not prepared to be physically threatened, or to be forced out of our home for over three months. (Excerpted from Dr. Fords acceptance speech for the ACLU of Southern California's Roger Baldwin Courage Award in September 2019) LL: I mean, it didn't take but four hours for that to happen. And if anybody's curious about it, just watch and you'll see the speed and what Kavanaugh his people did in order to make that turn so fast is interesting. in my case, I'll just quickly say I was in Scotland, was actually teaching critical response. I had an afternoon off. I went to the museum, in Edinburgh. An exhibit was up called, Wicked Bodies: Witches and something else. (Witches & Wicked Bodies) It was 500 years of drawings. And, I like to say when I went in, I was not that interested in witches. It wasn't shamanistic, although I got into that with my research. But I went and found the woman who put it together, a woman named Deanna Petherbridge And, we had quite an interesting talk that the, her exhibit was moving on to the British Museum, where they had already told her she could not use the word misogyny. There could have been any number of people. I picked him just because in rehearsal one day I had said, how come one person caused so much havoc? And then I realized, this is a, two years into Trump. And I thought, oh, of course this is how this happened. So that's why I picked James, although there could have been many people that we could have picked, but, because of the pandemic it took us even longer. So, we moved among things over a period of five to six years trying to figure this out. And the thing that I feel I learned is that I desperately did not want to portray the witches as victims. And therefore, I had to work through so much of my own feelings about the nature of, say, being a victim as a woman. One of the questions I asked was, well, how can the witches help you come back after the pandemic? So, and I decided that people wanted intimacy and spectacle, both. BC: Fascinating. So, both intimacy and spectacle. How does that play out in the piece? But it was really fun to work on that part. It's just, I really think it changes entirely what it feels like to be in the theater. Even a big theater like YBCA and Gammage, here, (Arizona State University, Tempe) you really can change it with it. I mean, there's just such a buzz for the first 20 minutes and everybody wants to talk to the witches. Well, I think probably, like we said earlier, everybody's has a birthright of creativity. I think probably everybody has a birth. Of what is beautiful about magic, about spells and bending the world towards something that you believe in towards the idea of a coven, where you're close to people, where you, you're close to animals, you have a right relationship to the planet. I mean, there's so many wonderful things. You, you understand the stars, you know who doesn't wanna be to be in that. And you know, by the time the piece ends, I think the audience feels like they are in that world. Cuz the whole second act, each person in the piece is the witch of something; the witch of blackness, the witch of revenge, the witch of in between. And we've determined what the story is now, is that every 500 years the witches of the world get together and choose our next narrator. And 500 years ago was a white guy, (Johannes) Kepler saved his mom from being killed. She was a. And, uh, new Shakespeare, all that. But he's clearly out of step, and which is played delightfully by, by Will Bond . And, uh, which is bringing forward, not just who they are as people, but what would it be like if the narrative of our life was, it's not just trauma that travels through generations, it's also love. I mean, how would it be different if that was our national narrative, and then, well, to me there's a real sense of hope at the end, but it's really flimsy, but it's totally believable. And only the witches could do it. And maybe that's the best invention of this is to me a tangible, maybe whimsical, but flimsy form of hope. And there's no reason why we can't have that despite it all. I You know, we live in a world that says, okay, job done, close the curtain, close the oven, but it's not job done is it? You get to rest. You can reflect. You can celebrate, but the job is not done. There's always a next chapter that contains the next hard and hopeful yeasty question. I'm the kind of person that says, oh, no, job's not done. I mean, what the heck would I do with myself that weren’t the case. [00:09:51] BC: Part Six, No Singular Stories. So, I have a couple of one-liners that I want to throw at you. The first is “aesthetic equity. “ Can you say something about that? That would not be aesthetic equity. Or we could have aesthetic equity in which actually hip hop, breaking, Afro-Latin forms, modern dance, if we decide to sustain it, would be equal. This means now we're on the horizontal again. We are definitely on the horizontal, and now everything has to change: the floors, the history classes, everything has to change in order to make that a truth. So aesthetic equity is a way of upending the canon from being a vertical to being horizontal. And like I like to say about the canon, it is not just what's produced. The canon is all the decisions that get made to sustain those decisions. And what happens if you fight the canon? Well, those decision-making practices are defined as professional. This is how to be professional. Well, if you fight them. Unprofessional. No, no. Aesthetic equity changes all that. [00:11:28] LL: This is my beautiful friend, Sumana Mandela, the person who brought this to my attention. I think it is a beautiful way for, I'll speak for myself, for a white Jewish woman born in the middle of the last century. To enter my relationships with my students who come from other cultures with my neighbors, my colleagues. I wish I knew all that I could know about their histories, but I don't. And so, and I can study, but that won't make me know it. So, humility seems to me. A space where, settle back, be gentle, be curious. Assume you're not the only person in the world and that not knowing is the best way to be. Something like that. [00:12:28] LL: When they turned to Hiking the Horizontal into an audiobook, I got to go to a studio and read it. And I cry. I cried a lot. These beautiful young engineers, Latinx engineers, they also, they just kept saying, we got your back, Liz. It's okay. It's just bursting into tears. [00:12:50] LL: Hiking the Horizon. I wanted people to understand that art is powerful, that dance can make a difference. I wanted to document ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live and work in, and the encounters that we have with each other. The phrase, “hiking the horizontal” is the most recent and encompassing terminology to express the underlying philosophy of my work. Before I found the words hiking, the horizontal was a physical gesture. It took me a very long time to understand the full implications of what was so simply accomplished with my hands. But the movement came first as a way of explaining why I wanted to live in a non-hierarchical world. Imagine for a moment, a long upright line that runs from top to bottom. At the top is art. So separate from the rest, that its greatness is measured in part by its uselessness. Other characteristics arguably include: emphasis on personal expression, crafting aesthetics, and a commitment to purity of form. At the bottom is art so embedded in its culture that no one thinks to call it art. Here resides sacred rituals, healing ceremonies, objects made beautiful by their functions. People meeting and moving through the stories and needs of the calendar of festivals or your perspective might lead you to put culturally embedded art at the top and arts for its own sake at the bottom. Either way, the forms of art are ranked from top to bottom according to a system of values. This is the kind of hierarchy of ideas that I grew up with and that continues to prevail in many worlds. Now imagine turning this line sideways to lay it horizontal that way. Each of these poles exerts an equal pole and has an equal weight. Of course, the line is not completely flat, and the poles are often not equally heavy. It's more like a seesaw, and that is why dancing and art making provides sustenance for the hike. If we are lucky enough, we can actually take the long highway between the sometimes-opposing forces. LL: But partly what would happen in that book is I would read a sentence like, “Okay, at the end we had a week's residency. Then we had a gathering and people shared stories.” Okay, there's probably a million hours that into all that. What is it that makes people feel like they can gather? Why would they come together? What story would they choose to tell? Why would they sit in a circle? Is the story they always tell? Are they willing to tell a story that they did until before? Why would we share these stories? In what form is it gonna take? Oh, wait, we only have 30 minutes. We can't tell everybody's stories. We're gonna have to not tell everybody stories. Now what happens? “Oh, can I reframe your story?” Oh, actually I can't. “May I?” “No.” “Go home. Check with your family. Is this okay with them that it's all right that this story is being told” (That’s) how it's like that and much more. But that particular quote comes really from Wicked Bodies, which is, it became evident to me, that in order for us to tell this story, each of the people committed to this five year long process was going to have to figure out which, witch they were, and where were they in this story, and then, how these all went together. And it was interesting, Bill, because again, it's not singular. It may be a single story, but is not singular. No, LL: And what happens when people go home and ask. We did a project in Japan, and I was interested in these charm belts from World War II called the senninbari, where each belt had a thousand stitches, and each stitch was made by another woman. So, I arrived in Japan with this idea, and I walked, walked into an intergenerational group of people. We were gonna work together. I said that --- all hell broke loose. They got so mad at me. The young ones were furious. They hated senninbari. And the old ones were embarrassed because, well, they were embarrassed. So anyway, I said, well, okay, before we change ideas, go home and talk to your families about it. Let's find out what this means to everybody. Well, whoa, the stories that came back. Turns out that the women knew this was crazy, that they pricked themselves with blood, that they put their pubic hair in it, that they, I mean, all kinds of things that nobody knew. They were still mad at me, and there was still a section in the dance where they yelled at an American who thought that she could come over and tell 'em what to do. So that that didn't change. But the notion of what these things were that was really powerful. That's where I came up with Act One was, Protect Us as We Keep the Original Meaning of Things, and Act Two was, Protect Us as We Change the Original Meaning of Things. So, two more questions. First, what's sparking you right now? What are you really excited about? [00:20:09] BC: Now the Atlas of Creative Tools is a work in progress, right? There's a toolbox online that people can go to. You wanna take it further? It's envisioned as a digital common to hold all these things that you and I have been talking about just now in the form of action related things that people can do. But also, many lectures, and all kinds of things that people can take along with them, and also, add their own to it. And I haven't been able to convince anybody to actually fund that at some level that, you know, so we'll see where that goes. BC: What else is out there? Well, this, the thing I'm doing with a group of older choreographers, we're calling Legacy Unboxed, and we're just looking at the wildness of being this age and all the wild ways we wanna be in the world and what we wanna do about that and how we wanna handle. And that might relate to some questions of the Library of Congress and how the library holds its dance and theater stuff, which it holds in recreation. I mean, you can't find it. And it speaks to what you were just talking about. It speaks to an overly rational place that doesn't have any clue how to not only hold these things, but how to help people find them. And we may get involved in that. And if we. I feel really excited for the very reason you said, when is the world gonna like just wake up and realize we have a lot of these knowledge systems that could help. [00:21:54] LL: Well, I was inspired by the movie, She Said by the persistence. Clarity and the take down that eventually occurred. That's, it's really, it's a really good movie. I am listening to the audible book, Barbara King Solver's, Demon Copperhead. It's incredible. She holds a mirror up to some things that are just really hard to listen to and see in the pictures in your. It's really good and I continued to collaborate with my daughter on some of the things that she's making. The amazing, Anna is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She lives in Turkey with her partner who works for UNESCO, and she works for Univision, and she made a little five-minute thing for the exhibit at YBCA. That is like a dream. It actually relates to some of what we've been talking about fear, about shape, momentum, but she used all these old pieces of footage from other dances together as if you lie down on a couch and it's pretty nice. She's working on a long form film. About a young woman who was four when she came into herself and needed to transition to become Maddie and Anne has been with the families for not quite 10 years, but she's gonna stay with the family until Maddie's 18. And it's an amazing story of a North Carolina family with where, where Mother decided to become a lawyer in order to help support this girl's decision, and it's pretty amazing. So, stay tuned for that. [00:23:43] LL: It's so good to see you. Really great. BC: Absolutely. All right, OK. LL: Bye. Change the Story / Change The World is a production at the Center for the Study of Art & Community. Our theme and soundscape blossom up regularly from the brilliant musical garden tended by Judy Munson, our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our “FX” come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. Until next time, stay wel, do good, and spread the good word. And one last note: This episode has been 100 percent human! Transcript
