Dance Camp for Grown-ups

This essay originally appeared in the Winter/Spring 1999/2000 issue of Contact Quarterly.

Dance Exchange company member Maggie Kast, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Senior Institute, 1999, Takoma Park, Md. Photo by Nicole Bauman

You can go on dancing forever at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, but you have to find a new way to do it. Age is no obstacle, but habit can get in the way. The aging dancer has usually spent years moving in a mold dictated by style, training, experience and inborn physical characteristics. He or she prefers one leg for balance, the other for extension; perhaps turns only right, or only left; studied ballet or a modern or ethnic technique. Each of these factors combines with a dancer's whole life experience to determine how the dancer moves.

Movement is like speech in this regard. A child can learn a new language quickly and speak without an accent; older people's sounds are shaped by use and hard to change. The aging dancer has long since poured the malleable body of childhood into a rigid mold that dictates which vertebrae move, how the weight is carried, which actions are chosen. Liz calls these patterns of movement "parameters."

"You tend to move in circles, on the floor and in place. You move in a rhythm of quick-quick-sustained. Your focus is always up or down, rather than straight out. You carve or sweep; your torso is contracted, closed; you initiate with your arms; your whole body moves all the time." These were my parameters, or habits of movement in improvisation, as observed and noted by a group of fellow dancers. The instruction for the parameters exercise was to describe a person's movement in physical, rather than imagistic, terms. A dancer's movement might be "slow, continuous, connected," but not "snakelike." Then the group compiled a series of opposite characteristics for each dancer (for me: segmented movement, direct focus, open chest), and we tried to move in this new way, on the spot, and for the rest of the week.

I came to the Dance Exchange to attend the weeklong Senior Institute, a dance intensive for senior adults in June 1999. I was 61, at the end of a lifetime career in dance. My performing days were over, I thought, and words were replacing gestures in my life. Though I still went to class regularly, my mind and body were getting out of sync. Sometimes my mind would remember and my body would fall behind, for example, with fast ballet combinations. Sometimes my body got it right but my mind drifted off; I got to the end of a long, sweeping modern combination and couldn't remember how it started. My wrists hurt when I opened a jar, and my neck was too stiff to turn a somersault. I was lucky to have had no incapacitating injuries, perhaps because of the light performing schedule I bemoaned when I had a company. A season was usually a series of weekends, and a tour was a couple of weeks.

The Senior Institute met at the same time as Immersion I, a workshop for younger dancers, and the two workshops came together for parameters, vocal work and various group improvisations. Otherwise we warmed up and improvised in separate studios in the Dance Exchange's three-studio complex in Takoma Park, Maryland. We learned and practiced Lerman's methods for generating movement, building phrases and working with detailed gesture and text. Immersion I extended this work to include costuming and site-specific studies.

All the members of the Dance Exchange company were there to teach, coach and talk to us. Senior and younger members of the company taught in teams, helped us with our individual studies and encouraged us, always showing the greatest respect for each person and his or her own abilities and limitations. Sarah Steele, now a Dance Exchange intern, took every class from a wheelchair. She moved her flexible and expressive upper body, substituted wheelchair travel for locomotor movement, and sang with her clear voice. "I'm interested in relationships," she said on the opening evening, when we each outlined our expectations for the week. "Relationships with myself, my vehicle, with nature and with other people."

Participants in the Senior Institute included regular students and teachers, dancers with performing careers behind them, and some who had never danced before. Each warm-up was different, as each teacher contributed his or her approach to movement. This diversity of approach is typical of the Dance Exchange, which does not have a unified technique. It has an aesthetic, teaching methods and choreographic strategies. It teaches Liz's well-known and structured method of Critical Response, but even these methods are not set in stone, canned or atrophied. Some say it should be called the "dance change" because of this emphasis on continual development. The Dance Exchange itself has "parameters" which it challenges continually.

A typical day began with Martha Wittman's gentle voice inviting us to "circle up." She led us in Tai-Chi-style weight transfers and exercises derived from Skinner Releasing Technique. She proceeded to simple stretches, X-rolls and hangs done slowly, as movement explorations, rather than rhythmically, as formal exercises. Martha had come to the Dance Exchange two years prior, after a career as head of the Dance Department at Bennington College.

Thomas Dwyer, tall, very thin, angular and tough, was there every morning before we arrived, doing push-ups and grip-strengthening exercises with his hands. A shock of white hair topped his pink face, and he moved with vigor and force. He had been with the company over ten years, after a career with the U.S. government. He taught our class in the afternoon. We walked in parallel lines across the room in unison while shouting answers to the question: "What did you have for lunch?" We hit the wall and then returned in silence and slow motion, our cacophonous answers still ringing in the room. Younger company members contributed techniques from their own backgrounds, ranging from Afro-aerobics to gestural solfège, a charming hand language to accompany the familiar singing of "do-re-mi-fa-sol."

Liz introduced us to word-movement relationships, as she taught us a phrase based on these images: "Tree in the wind... Swing wide... Touch gently... Pass through... Paint the sky... Rock... Wrap... Turn away... Show softly... Show strongly."

After learning her phrase, we each made our own, using these words and then their opposites. This segued into a writing, talking, and interviewing exercise, which lasted all week. We wrote completions of the sentence fragment "I come from...," observed and adopted each other's conversational gestures, wrote personal stories with an emphasis on sensory detail, recalled movies and fairy tales, and assembled a personal archive, which contained everything from photos, letters and trips, to sayings, songs, scenery, illnesses and crimes.

I was intrigued by the category of "sayings." A lot of things were said in my family, where the bon mot was always preferred to the stumbling, uneven expression of feeling. I suddenly remembered the letters my mother wrote to my father in the months before they were married, which I discovered and read when I was 13. I loved their quotidian presence and gentle, tongue-in-cheek quality, their wry observations.

I began to feel deluged by material: family customs, story fragments, objects. My archive overflowed. The more stimuli for movement I envisioned, the less I was able to move. As a dancer, I was accustomed to relying on rhythm and phrasing, the musical qualities of movement. I come from the tradition of the beaten drum, of kick, swing, and fall. Verbal and gestural material overwhelmed me, and I began to feel immobile, suspended in a sea of disconnected images. I found myself with material for a hundred stories, but not a single story in the material! By midday Wednesday, all I could write was, "My blood is turning to sawdust from sitting and talking."

At this point, halfway through the week, Liz applied her philosophy of "small steps" to our work. "If you have a goal," she said, "you can always find smaller and smaller incremental steps which will make it possible for you to get there." She asked us to write answers to the following questions: "What would you like to see yourself doing in the showing on Friday?" I wrote three possibilities. 1. Nothing. I didn't come here to perform. 2. A dance about the above. 3. Something from "I come from..." From this point, ideas began to come together, and I wrote: 4. All. 5. Perhaps a dance about music performed in silence. Then I was off and running, and worked on movement and text for a short study in much the same way that I always have, incorporating Liz's aesthetic of detailed gesture, and continuing to try to break out of my parameters.

On Friday we showed our studies, and we all viewed each of them, trooping outside to see the site-specific work of the younger dancers. One dancer undressed as she climbed a ladder on the loading dock in back of the studio, then reached for a pack of cigarettes from the ceiling supports. An articulate, red-headed dancer in green, gossamer blouse and shorts, clambered up and down green walls in a tiny hallway, supporting herself with hands or feet on the opposite wall and glancing shyly at her crammed and layered audience. One of the older seniors, a well-known dance educator, who had seemed somewhat exhausted by the week, needing to lie down in the afternoons, feeling dizzy, overwhelmed the audience with a piece based on her experience of teaching dance in the '60s. She began by singing and swaying, evoking the Southern river where she had gone to teach. Some brief tap dancing reminded us of the children's movement. Then she began to laugh, a full belly laugh that joined humor and pathos. Her face blossomed and her body rippled, as fluid as her voice. Some audience members wept as she finished with a gospel song.

There are not too many people who believe that dance can change the world, but Liz is one of them. She says, "The Dance Exchange has decided that maybe one way we can try to mend the world is by spending time in little communities," but she also recognizes that the evil of the world persists. She hears gunshots at night and confronts the deaths of children in the city. She probes tensions among African-Americans, Hispanics and whites, Jews and Christians and says, "I'm beginning to think we should do less, deeper. Do it slower. Think about time." Dance is her medium, but she does not see it as separate from politics or religion. Rather it is one of the few things we have left in this universe that can integrate mind, body, spirit.

In the Institutes, as elsewhere in her work, Liz starts with small steps. Everything about the Institutes brought us together, old and young, and I found myself getting into long conversations on breaks and in the evening with dancers and movers of all ages and from all dance traditions and parts of the country.

My parameters shifted unexpectedly: My short study was received with laughter, a rare gift for me, and my retirement has been transformed into an opportunity to speak movement and dance words in some new ways. Creaking and shuddering, I begin to change.

Maggie Kast is a member of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2000