Liz Lerman

(This story appeared in High Performance #60, Winter 1992.)

When dancing belonged to the community, everybody got to dance!" Liz Lerman is on a roll. "Art belongs to everyone and dancing is a birthright," insists the founding artistic director for Dancers of the Third Age, the Washington, D.C., company whose members range in age from 55 to 92. Combining the dignity of professionalism with the vitality of activists, their performances in major festivals and arts centers across the country have awakened critics and the general public to fresh perceptions of an art form traditionally reserved for the young and conventionally beautiful. Their excursions beyond the concert hall circuit have transformed prisons, schools, neighborhood centers, nursing homes and hospitals into hotbeds of creativity. Performances for special audiences are followed by exercises designed to invigorate both body and soul, the unsuspecting performers invited to share personal stories through expressive movement.

Performer/choreographer Lerman has been likened to Woody Allen and Mahatma Gandhi. She was a "dutiful little ballerina" while growing up in Milwaukee, but by the age of fourteen decided her efforts to be the perfect Lilac Fairy were absurd in the context of the turbulent world her father, a Civil Rights activist, showed her on tours to the urban ghetto's Freedom Schools. Going on to study modern technique, improvisation, mime and dance history, she landed in D.C. with a fellowship from George Washington University and quickly became established in the experimental dance scene.

Lerman's work with the elderly was inspired by stories her dying mother told about dead relatives. For the work she conceived at the time of her mother's death, she couldn't find the older dancers needed to play the ancestors she envisioned welcoming her mother into "another place." That's why she started teaching one class a week at the Roosevelt Hotel for Senior Citizens.

Since 1976 she has created and performed in an expansive but highly-portable repertoire of dance-theater pieces for Dancers of the Third Age and Liz Lerman/Exchange, the original professional company she describes as "old and young, black and white, gay and straight, Jewish, non-Jewish, married, divorced, widowed and single." These separate but interacting companies have steadily gained recognition in the modern dance world. It's Lerman's "continuing hunt for interesting movement vocabulary that satisfies performers, watchers and the subject matter" that anchors the Exchange's outreach programs to a firm artistic purpose.

"Our work as facilitators and helpers can take over our creative voice," Lerman explains. "A problem with outreach and Arts in Education work is that it's seen as dance therapy. We are not therapists." However, their work as community-builders draws upon their collective, sometimes volatile, experience as a creative unit: "Our process is very collaborative. What we've learned internally as a company is that you can't walk out. That's the knowledge we can take out into the community. Our attempts to keep weaving ourselves back together again no matter how stressful that can be, that's a form of pulling together and not labeling ourselves."

Ironically, the multiculturalism she has championed since before the term gained currency has launched "a serious period of identity-labeling" in society, which she sees as the next challenge to overcome: "What are we going to do about all these fragmented groups?" Last spring, Lerman conducted a series of "Awakenings" to commemorate the youth of Washington, D.C., lost to street violence. Most of the victims were black, but the public invited to grieve was racially mixed. She also intends to fuse the company's programs for the Roosevelt Hotel and the inner city's McKinley High School, creating collaborations between elderly people and urban teenagers. At 44, Lerman has only begun to implement her vision of a society where culture "is not a hierarchy with the Kennedy Center on the top and the nursing homes on the bottom." Over a lifetime she has gone far to dispel that notion and is fully aware of how much further she's yet to go. Fortunately for culture, Liz Lerman sees her career as "not a sprint, but a marathon!"

Chris Westberg is a freelance writer and director based in Washington, D.C.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #60, Winter 1992

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999