Everybody Say Hallelujah: the Michigan residency

Hallelujah: In Praise of Paradise Lost and Found
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Power Center for the Performing Arts, Ann Arbor, Michigan
October 6, 2001

The "Hallelujah" for southern Michigan, "In Praise of Paradise Lost and Found," was a theater production on the big stage at the Power Center for the Performing Arts, Ann Arbor, under the auspices of the University Musical Society (UMS) at the University of Michigan (see program).

With two years of planning and engagement, this "Hallelujah" was the result of a collaboration with gospel composer and arranger Rudy Hawkins, and featured performances by members of the Hawkins choir, plus more than 80 additional residents of Ann Arbor and Detroit. The theme was originally inspired by the history of Detroit's Paradise Valley neighborhood, a thriving African-American cultural and commercial center that was decimated in the 1960s by the construction of Interstate 75.

To cut to the chase, the piece was an enormous success. I heard audience members declaring "I needed that" as they left the theater. The glorious singing of the Hawkins choir infused the whole piece with an intensity, humor and vibrant life that only great music and passionate musicians can bring to an artwork. Singers danced and dancers sang, a lovely surprise. The set, with its backlit open doorway shrouded in fog and its hanging curtain of shoes, was a strong character in itself. The choreography was a perfect blend of professional and newcomer strategies, including aerial work by Elizabeth Johnson and the innovative implementation of a very long piece of stretchy material called a theraband that was used to indicate many things, particularly the offending highway. Storytelling took a big role in this work, as did live music from Rudy Hawkins and his band.

There was an element that set this "Hallelujah" apart, a joyous, vigorous sensuality. Having sat through some collaborative meetings and rehearsals, I am surprised to find myself saying this element was engendered by a gospel choir and a liturgical dance team. Stand close to a gospel choir in rehearsal and you might see what I mean. They threw themselves into the fray with such unchecked enthusiasm it literally knocked my ears back. The liturgical dancers simply smoked the stage with their ebullient style. The emotion and power and pride in their performances infused everything with a whole new, almost anarchic energy.

Having watched the Lerman company closely all year, I saw this new energy make a difference in them from the start, and by dress rehearsal the intensity was radiating powerfully from the stage. Of the Rudy Hawkins Singers, Lerman noted in the program, "The sound they make is now living in our bones, and that is a good thing." The dancers seemed inspired and emboldened as individuals, and their solo work was a stunning surprise; I felt I hadn't really met them yet. And their duets, trios and company work were deeper, more colorful, more intimate, more penetrating. This may be the first dance work I have ever really enjoyed at the center of my being.

But there was another element that upped the ante for this piece: It was probably the first live art many audience members had seen since September 11.

The issues surrounding the Detroit "Hallelujah" were tangled in politics, religion and aesthetics. The overriding question was: How to cleave to an established script in light of the intervening events of September 11? There is no doubt everybody in America was deeply affected by the attacks on Washington and New York. It saturated our lives during the weeks and months that followed.

The company solved the problem by continuing to follow the outline they had already sketched out for the performance, while staying open to the feelings, thoughts and beliefs of their collaborators. Finally, they were able to develop the piece almost as planned, but they focused parts of it upon the disaster by using a framing device. Framing changes the whole context of a piece, skewing, fracturing and re-linking the existing imagery, text, sound and movement. Framing is one of the strongest tools being used by artists working in communities — especially those in the performing arts. Material contributed by first-time artists — no matter how simple — gains a complexity when surrounded with layers of other substance. Liz Lerman is a past master at this, and it is a keystone of her community technique. More about this artwork's frame in a minute.

After September 11, there was another issue for me. I left organized religion in my 20s because I could not reconcile the concept of a loving God with the existence of evil in the world. If there is a God, He has a lot to answer for, in my view. I have had to swallow hard when digesting what Lerman calls the "faith-based" ingredients of "Hallelujah." The title alone attracts religious elements, and Lerman is comfortable working with certain faith leaders, partly because they provide her with a readymade community-organizing team. Especially in light of the religious wars that have already torn this century (and world history), it is reassuring to see Americans of different faiths coming together onstage across boundaries to praise something they hold in common.

But September 11 deepened my conflict. After the attacks, I was confounded by how many people thanked God. It reminded me of the Swiss Family Robinson falling to their knees in thanksgiving after their shipwreck. It seems to imply that disaster is the work of God, or at least preventable by Him, and He chooses whom to save. As September wore on, I became more and more unnerved by the praised heaped upon God. From some of the "Hallelujah" participants, I heard the suggestion that "we need to pray more," as if in our godlessness we deserved the disaster. If those thousands of slaughtered civilians had been more god-fearing, would they have been spared? Tell that to a surviving family member. I could understand people turning to God for comfort, but they didn't seem to notice the blood on His hands.

As Michigan's "Hallelujah" continued developing its religious vein, it felt offensive to me. In light of 9/11, and the fundamentalist religious bent of its apparent perpetrators, religion seemed less and less like a refuge and more and more like the central problem of our time.

This was my fourth "Hallelujah." I had seen the performances in Los Angeles and Burlington and interviewed the participants, but that didn't afford me enough first-hand information about their processes. For Minneapolis, I witnessed the final ten days of the residency, but saw mostly rehearsals. Hoping to arrive earlier in the process, I planned to join the Michigan "Hallelujah" at what appeared to be the beginning of the residency, a month before the performance. I was not surprised to learn that the Dance Exchange would be working with a wide range of dancers, singers, scholars and others in the region. From Ann Arbor came University of Michigan dance majors and other students, as well as people from the university's Arts of Citizenship Program and an "All Come" group of Ann Arbor residents. From Detroit came members of the Hawkins Singers and the community-based Matrix Theater Company, plus students from the Winans Academy of Performing Arts public charter elementary school. Also from Detroit came the Detroit Liturgical Dance Collective, the All-City Men's Dance Company, the Paradise Valley Dancers and senior participants from the Hannan House Program.

My fondest hope was to be present from the very beginning of the relationship between the Dance Exchange and the "Hallelujah" participants, but to achieve that I would have had to attach myself to Liz Lerman's coat tails for years. When I arrived in Michigan on Monday, September 10, she was already well known to many in the area and had produced an evening of performance in Detroit the previous fall, putting many local community folks on the stage. She had been collaborating with musical director Rudy Hawkins for a year. Meeting in Detroit and at the Dance Exchange's home in Maryland, they had explored stories of Paradise Valley, the African-American sector of downtown Detroit destroyed by the erection of a highway. (Hawkins' godmother Beatrice Buck is considered the community historian of Paradise Valley.)

Lerman had been talking to people and burrowing through libraries to discover this story, and it had led her to a Paradise theme for the Michigan "Hallelujah." Adam and Eve were to be turned out of Paradise, and the rest of the piece would consist of their journey in search of a happy home, their own Paradise. The "journey" theme would resonate with the great migration of African Americans to Detroit in search of factory employment during the first part of the 20th Century. Along the way, the travelers would hear stories about Paradise Valley.

This storyline would dovetail with a Jewish folk story Lerman picked up at a Jewish Renewal National Conference about a group of rabbis who were dancing wildly on a holiday. One danced so ecstatically that he lost his shoe, and it flew into the Garden of Eden, where an angel was doing his daily cleaning rounds. The angel found the shoe and, assuming it came from someone whose life and actions were the purest, gave it to the Archangel Gabriel, who wove it into a crown for God.

These were elements of the story so far, but this project was "not formulaic," Lerman told a workshop group of UM students on September 10, as she began the final, intensive portion of the residency. "We will be making most of it brand-new with people who stand in our circles, from older women to fifth and sixth graders." Lerman described the workshop as a two-way street. "We get to know you and you get to know us to find out if this is something you want to commit to," she told the circle, primarily young women. "It's not just about being in the dance, but understanding the roles an artist can play — as a choreographer, as a partner with somebody who never danced before, as an editor."

Here it might be interesting to follow the rhythm of such a workshop, to see how the Dance Exchange works with dancers who have some experience. As a studio pianist accompanied the movement, Lerman, along with company members Martha Wittman and Margot Greenlee (project director for the Michigan work), began direction of the student group:

At this point Margot Greenlee took over to teach the dancers a small piece the Dance Exchange had brought with them, created in a previous "Hallelujah" residency. It contained a short skipping motion and became widely know as "the skip phrase." The dancers stumbled through the directions, but learned it more quickly than I expected. Then Lerman asked the students to get their shoes from the hallway and place them in a line at the end of the studio space. She told them the story of the ecstatic, dancing rabbi and his shoe that flew into the Garden of Eden. Martha Wittman put the students through an improvisation with the shoes ("shape, shape, shape, a little stillness"), with the shoes ending up on the dancers' heads, "an Etruscan moment." Lerman told me in an aside that this was "a task dance — it gets them out of their 'dance' mode."

"Simple is not the same as simplistic," Lerman told the dancers. "Sometimes walking across the stage is the hardest thing to do." She then asked them to improvise "a little cleaning story — like, who taught you how to clean," then to choose partners and "figure out what you want to tell." There was a rumble of chatter as the partners talked animatedly to each other, gesturing purposefully. "Now, go through the shoe phrase and figure out how to tell your story in it. Now perform it in threes." This improvised material was added to the skip phrase and it became something "brand new."

This group of phrases survived into the final piece, and was performed elegantly and randomly — as a group, but not in unison — by the same dancers.

At the end of this intense physical activity, Lerman had the group sit down and she told them about "Hallelujah," how it was the culmination of ten years of doing concert and community work, now bringing it all together. She quoted a story that hundreds of people have heard her tell across America through the many "Hallelujahs," about how a participant in an early meeting had said, "I am tired of holding my breath. I don't want to wait till everything gets better to celebrate." Thus arose the praise theme of the whole initiative, but one that had also produced "some very dark work."

The text and movement would proceed from their own stories, said Lerman. "It's a way to look at our ordinary lives and see how they might be extraordinary." She told them of her Paradise Valley research, and said the piece had now progressed into "What is Paradise?" It was not a religious thing, she said, but will take on some "faith-based" elements. The stage piece would be performed at the Power Center on the U.M. campus on October 6, "with all of these folks dancing, singing and storytelling," Lerman said, and the rest of the concert would be company rep.

Monday night the "All Come" group from Ann Arbor converged in a university dance studio. This group eventually comprised a dozen people of different ages and races and walks of life, from a U.M. English teacher to a painter with a class of students preparing to teach the arts in prison to a retired Chinese man who was spending all his time dancing, "to catch up all the years I missed." Most had some dance experience.

Lerman and Dance Exchange Humanities Director John Borstel briefly introduced the work. Almost immediately Greenlee had them warming up and improvising journeys across the room and back, alone and partnered, pushing and pulling each other, telling tales, manipulating suitcases. Most interesting was the open-hearted generosity between couples of strangers: a black woman and a white man, a very large person and a very small one. The energy crackled, and Lerman announced, "We're on a roll here, and we're going to keep plowing. There are moments we might want to keep, and edit later." She stood back and watched the action greedily, making notes and whispering to Greenlee. Since there are no nondancers in Lerman's world, John Borstel pitched in too, improvising with the rest.

Eventually, the puffing dancers formed a circle and talked about what they had observed: "A lot of it was funny." "People didn't want to go, but were being pushed somewhere, they had different ideas on the destination." Lerman smiled and clapped her hands, "Perfect!"

The evening ended with a writing exercise led by Borstel, in which he asked them to divide their paper in threes: Your specific idea of Paradise or the Promised Land; a story about something you wanted, but didn't get; and a room where you feel safe. The exercise closed with brief reports on what the writers had "discovered" in the process. As an example, for myself, I discovered something my mother taught me: that you can carry good things from one period of your life into the next. An image from childhood had surfaced: I always felt safe in our bathroom, where, when you sat on the toilet, you could see a small piece of wallpaper in a frame on the wall. My mother had saved that scrap of wallpaper from the bathroom in our previous house and placed it where we would see it everyday.

From this exercise, Lerman told the group what she would take away: "Maybe my Paradise is being on the path." This turned out to be a central theme in the finished piece, and the All Come group appeared significantly in various journeying scenarios.

At 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, I was pulling up in front of the Hannan House senior center on Detroit's Woodward Avenue, when NPR interrupted a radio program on jazz to say a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Like so many Americans that morning, I called home on my cell phone. My husband told me another plane had crashed. I rushed into the building and found Lerman with three of her dancers and UMS' Dichondra Johnson, gathered to lead a workshop. The center was unable to get its TV working right away, so we were huddled around a radio at the reception desk when we heard a plane had struck the Pentagon. I remember gasping, clutching my chest and stepping backward. What next? Lerman took my shoulders and whispered, "Come back, come back."

The four started calling home, since the Dance Exchange makes its home in suburban Washington. The lines were jammed. They were also concerned about two other Dance Exchangers, Thomas Dwyer and Kazu Nakamura, who were in a plane on the tarmac at Washington's National Airport, about to depart for Detroit. (The company eventually all made it by car.)

We couldn't find out much. In a display of professional resolve that held out all month, the team decided to go on with its agenda, and we went upstairs to see if anybody showed up for the workshop. Eventually a half-dozen older women arrived, mostly African Americans. To my dismay, they seemed focused on the task at hand, and were content to wait for a new update in a half-hour. While I fought the urge to race out and connect with CNN, the ladies began to talk happily about the last time they had worked with Lerman, in the fall Detroit performance.

"You made a lasting impression on me," said a woman named Barbara. "I have always known that I am beautiful. My daughter saw me on stage the last time Liz was here, and she said, 'Now everybody knows you're beautiful. Ray Charles knows you're beautiful.' I've always been a buff, but I've always been in the audience, You gave me a chance to be on the stage!" This opened a lively and relaxed exchange around the circle of seniors and dancers: introductions and re-introductions, stories about summer activities. The minutes went by and nobody brought up the chaos in New York and Washington. I felt my blood pressure dropping to normal.

Finally, Lerman got down to the work of the day — astonishing, considering her husband and only child were beyond her reach, out there somewhere in the turmoil in D.C. "What do you think Paradise is for you?" she asked. As we went around the circle, people conjured up sharply remembered images: peace of mind, a sunny window, a kiss in the morning, good work. Each story came with gestures. Lerman gathered the gestures and five minutes later we had a dance: Hands balanced each other, thumbs came up and traveled in a circle, arms rose, fingers touched cheeks. We repeated the gestures until we had them memorized. Some of these surfaced in the final performance, including mine; you can't know how touching this is until it happens to you.

An emissary from real time brought the news that the twin towers had collapsed, and there was a plane crash in Pennsylvania. I felt panic return, then recede again as Lerman plunged back into the workshop: "Is anybody from Paradise Valley?" Stories were told about the lively Black Bottom neighborhood, and the entertainment that went on there 24 hours a day. Billy Eckstine and Sara Vaughn, Hastings Street and Adams Street, the Joe Louis Chicken Shack and the 606 Barn. All of it plowed under for a freeway "to get folks from the suburbs to the city quickly," said someone. This led to talk of the Great Migration: "How did you end up in Detroit?" There were journeys from Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, New York. They or their parents fled jobs in the fields, stubborn illness, death in the family. They came to look for work in "the arsenal of democracy."

Lerman led them toward stories of being forced to move from Paradise Valley, and they offered the even tougher tales of growing up in Detroit in black neighborhoods that were last on the list when it came to social services. We heard calmly told tales of being "raised on discrimination," where "after the war we couldn't get jobs, they took the light-skinned first, and you just did the best you could," and "there were no blacks on buses in 1948-49, white men would jump on and beat blacks up." There were sweet and funny stories, too. Finally, Barbara looked directly at Lerman and said, "We wouldn't share these stories with just anybody, you know. Not unless we feel comfortable. We trust these dance people." All the people hugged and we went downstairs and out into a new world of trouble. But for a little while, Liz Lerman had us dancing in Paradise.

As the week wore on and the team conferred, there would be references to reassurance, to reinventing a space that gives you comfort, that is safe. Lerman mentioned the City of Refuge in Hawaii, a village where no one could be harmed, no one could be pursued inside the boundaries. Enemies could be together with a sense of safety. The company set about creating a zone that would offer the participants "the inspiration, mystery and beauty of theater," as Martha Wittman put it. Some topics were discarded as "too trivial right now." Process tools from the Dance Exchange Tool Box were deemed "perfect" for extracting detail from nightmares, moving from text to solo to metaphor. They looked to the workshops for new images and phrases; a tape from the Ann Arbor All Come workshop was scoured for "ten ways of falling and getting back up again."

There were company discussions of the appropriateness of the chosen imagery, and their possible new "double meanings" — the shoes, for instance. Someone reported that the streets around the World Trade Center were supposedly littered with high-heeled shoes, discarded so women could run from the scene. Stories from the disaster began to look like dances: A reporter had been picked up and flung against a wall by a firefighter, who then fell over her as a shield, and she could, "feel his heart beat though her spine." And vice versa: People in workshop who had been traveling with suitcases now looked like people running with briefcases. The cleaning angel in the story of the dancing rabbis brought to mind the rescue workers sorting through the smoking debris. During the journeying exercises, it had been suggested that the dancers step over prostrate bodies to reference a "human highway." Now that image had become so much more powerfully human.

What about material that is "too strong"? If we don't deal with the crisis, said Lerman, the audience will feel "How can you not?" What about the sensitivities of children? You can warn families in the audience about strong material, she told us, tell them it's a good chance to talk with their families about issues. "If they don't walk out," she said, "you can bring them along."

There were sessions with Rudy Hawkins to listen to the music with new ears. Somebody remembered the spiritual "I Got Shoes":

Parts of the process were astonishingly energetic, especially given the contemporary circumstances. At a workshop in Detroit at Guadalupe School on September 12, the Detroit Liturgical Dance Collective gathered with members of the Dance Exchange, the Rudy Hawkins Singers and the local, community-based Matrix Theater Company. They exchanged work and joined each other in improvisation — taking a shape, holding it, moving en masse across the room. "It's like yesterday," somebody said, referring to September 11, "people moving together, trying to get home." Lerman directed the singers to dance and dancers to sing. The exercise was therapeutic, but all the more electric because what they were creating stood a chance of ending up on stage. (Much of it did make it into the performance, including the dancers/singers motif; there were two pairs of Adams and Eves, one pair dancing and one singing.)

This workshop was an opportunity to experience something new for many: an African-American style some called "possession dancing." The collective's founder, choreographer Penny Godboldo, is artistic director of the dance ministry at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church (Dr. Charles G. Adams, pastor) and Pemajju School of Dance. The collective includes some 200 people interested in "using dance as a medium to praise God," and they hosted the first Liturgical Dance Conference, "Dancing for God" at Marygrove College, where Godboldo heads the dance department. Their style comprises techniques Godboldo gathered in her research in Haiti, Brazil, Israel, Egypt, Cuba and Benin.

Godboldo talked about the U.S. having been "kicked out of Paradise," and knowing now what so many other countries have felt for so long: bombs, soldiers, being stopped in the street and questioned. She defined "Hallelujah" as "ecstatic praise," and told the workshoppers, "I've been working on going from bowed-down to ecstasy. You have to go through the fire to get to the Promised Land." She led a dozen members of the collective in a frenzied dance she choreographed, with stomping, rapid-fire clapping and exaggerated body tremors. They were accompanied by some operatic, a cappella gospel improv by some of Rudy Hawkins' singers. The effect was more than dazzling, and it literally changed the temperature of the air.

There was exhilaration all around as we left the building — something perhaps rare in America that night. Lerman said, "Talk about excellence in dance! In order to make something great at the Power Center, I have to craft it so the audience gets what happened here tonight."

One of Lerman's long-time goals for her company and for her community work is to empower people to make their own dances. This sounds simple and obvious until you remember the hierarchy of the dance world. Dancers are moving objects, not thinking people. Even the language disempowers them: The choreographer is said to "set a piece on" a dance company. Lerman talks about turning the hierarchy on its side, where the "cutting edge is enormous." This teaching is particularly important for dance students, who are among the next generation of American artists.

During the company's time in Ann Arbor, Peter DiMuro conducted a weekly studio class at the university, intended to introduce the students to the Dance Exchange tools and philosophy.

It is a joy and a privilege to watch Peter DiMuro in action. He is a very direct teacher, constantly including everyone, even the accompanist, yet moving things along at a rapid pace sprinkled with jokes. His stories about anything always include the funny parts.

He began by telling the students about Liz Lerman's introduction to community art at a retirement home. The workshop participants, he said, were so immobile that "the only way to get them to warm up their necks was for Liz to ask them to look at her while she ran back and forth in front of them." This led her, he said, to the concept of "making art with people rather than at them. If with, then you will grow as an artist and the wall between dancers and audience can begin to dissolve. Now I'm going to ask you to talk, think, move." His exercises were along the lines of the previously described Lerman workshop with the same group, but his intent was to transform them from dancers and improvisers into choreographers by forcing them to make choices.

Once the dancers had produced a few pieces of text and gesture to work with, he had them show each other their work in pairs, trios and sextets, then make composite phrases in small groups. They had so much fun with this it was hard to get their attention ("Oh, you're still rehearsing! Cumbaya!") Then he asked them to talk about what was interesting in what they had seen and done, and they were quickly able to do it. "Oh," said DiMuro. "So there's a reason to make a dance besides that it feels good! You're kidding! See, 20 years into this, there's gotta be a reason to get up in the morning."

Next he moved them toward editing. First he told them to separate into pairs and select one phrase from the previous work that moved them and then choose only one-third of it. "If there's a reason to make the dance," he said in capital letters, "there's a reason to edit the dance." After a few minutes of this he interrupted them. "I noticed something," he said, "when I asked you to edit, you looked like this." He mugged a blank, indecisive look, then turned a student to face him: "You go. Tell me what to do! You have the choice. That's why we're here."

Then DiMuro tried an exercise that suddenly and accidentally brought the misery of 9/11 into the room. He asked them to think of a picture postcard of what Paradise is to them. He remembered his own mother, with her orange shift blowing in the wind. "All together now, we're describing the picture." Then they sat on the floor in a circle and each talked about his/her picture. One young woman named Sarah described a small white box with her family inside. Suddenly she dissolved in tears and ran from the room. No one had to explain the terror of loss of family in the current climate of fear. DiMuro turned the moment into an impetus and had them performing the white box, "for Sarah."

His directions flowed among the dancers, now choreographers: "Edit the group phrase, focus on the physical details. Let them speak to each other. Don't think of craft, think of dialogue, we've been working in dialogue. If you can't remember the phrase, think of the reason you made it and that will help you remember what it means. Make it the next dance that you want to make. Make it passionate. Show somebody. Now everybody's dancing, everybody's making."

At this point, John Borstel joined in and opened the Dance Exchange Tool Box for the class to acquaint them with some of the tools, all of which were familiar because of this workshop. Strategies for creating content include the Prompt (questions beginning with general ideas, moving to the specific), Visualization and Specificity (the more personal we get, the more observers feel they experienced that, too). Strategies for developing movement include Theme and Variation, Levels, Size, Copy, Touch. Strategies to generate work quickly and have everybody's voice heard. Strategies to mine what you know and to free you from what you know.

After several more hours of practice and talk, DiMuro closed with an answer to the question "Where do these ideas come from?" He responded, "We know canon and all the things in books, but making dance is not a formula. Liz says, 'I don't know everything. We all know more together than any of us knows separately.' We dialogue with each other and with the current time. We have to be smarter than the university and smarter than the book. It's good to interrupt our patterns of what we think are acceptable aesthetics. Once it's written down, it's a dead thing. We're alive."

A Friday workshop at Marygrove College with the Rudy Hawkins Singers evinced some personal imagery that lent further authentic flavor to the final performance. In a circle with the singers, Lerman asked them to talk about what the Garden of Eden would look like. A long stream of images poured forth: roses, lush greenery, wildness, sunshine and freshness, a perfect day, naked bodies, animals willing to be petted. She then asked them to shift to what the Promised Land looks like: streets paved with gold, milk and honey, for royalty, no division, sun, Oz, money, jewelry, houses, land, houses covered with mosaic tile like gems, color, no blemishes, meadows, bright, glorious.

That night the singers introduced us to the old gospel tune that would ring out so effectively in the Power Center and bring 9/11 so vividly alive:

I thought about the Pentagon cleft by the jetliner as I left Michigan in my rental car on September 15. The airports were still in chaos, and besides, who wanted to fly? I drove home to North Carolina on country roads, worrying about "Hallelujah" and fretting over organized religion. Every gas station I passed sported a sign declaring "God Bless America." That phrase became a kind of battle cry against whatever foreign forces had done this terrible thing, as if to prove by repetition that God was on our side.

When I arrived back in Detroit on October 5, I went straight to the theater, where the cast was doing a "cue-to-cue" rehearsal. This kind of thing is so chaotic, it's hard to get a picture of what's really going on, so my notes are full of random jokes.

Marvin complains of the lighting.
Peter: "It's 'fear' lighting."
Marvin: "I'm in a costume and my hair is all up and this is all you got?"

Five dancers strike a pose with pistols.
"We're Liz's Angels."
"You look more like Jerry's Kids."

Peter: "You're in a beautiful clump and that's great, but when you come in, don't come in clumped. You look like bunches of grapes. Come in like separate little roly grapes that fell in a sink."

In the darkened auditorium, I fell into a conversation with two university students, who told me they had been studying the ways music and dance had changed Detroit over the years. They talked about Henry Ford's interest in early American dancing, and how he created a boarding school that taught the tradition. Motown mogul Berry Gordy, they said, worked at the Ford plant, and got the idea to take talented people and make them over into stars. Detroit became a musical center for the whole country. Music was a constant in the society, they said, a cultural reality that followed the people from the South. Gordy's approach was different from musical trends in the South, where record companies stuck to music rooted in where they came from. In a successful crossover strategy, they said, Gordy found ways to "sterilize Negro culture" by sending the artists to etiquette school, stripping them of much that made them who they were. "We're still tearing down communities to build highways," said one. "Still crossing over."

I also talked with Rebecca Fried and Alyson Newman of the Arts of Citizenship program, which offers courses in various community-arts disciplines and creates collaborative projects between the university and communities. Fried and Newman explained that they had been working with John Borstel to collecting information from the "Hallelujah" participants and following up on Borstel's interviews. They were working with project director David Scobey and Joyce Meier of the English department to find ways to measure the audience reaction to the piece. More later about this work.

For the performance on October 6, the Power Center had a nearly full house. The evening opened with the company's "Hallelujah" signature repertory piece, "Gates of Praise," choreographed by Lerman. The program helpfully described it as "inspired by the idea that even in our darkest moment we might discover — or be pushed through — a gateway leading toward celebration or the light." The company also performed "Blessed," choreographed by Bebe Miller. I have seen these pieces many times, in fact watched "Gates" in development at the Dance Exchange, and this was the most powerful performance of these pieces I have seen. These two formal pieces showcased the professionalism of the Lerman company, and contexualized as dance the community collaboration that was to come.

The frame that contextualized this "Hallelujah" with 9/11 was introduced on stage by Lerman as an "invocation." She told the story of the Hannan House workshop of September 11, and how it had "informed the whole month."

"What should we do tonight?" Lerman said she and the company had asked themselves. "Would people come?" She referenced the government's call for normalcy and asked what that means in terms of coming back to theater. Lerman said she consulted faith leaders about her "Hallelujah" dilemma, asking them how they had gotten through the crisis with their constituencies. These conversations led her to her solution for this evening: She would ask the audience to dance.

"We take texts," she told us, "and we choreograph something together. When bodies and minds are connected, something else might happen for us." Peter DiMuro came forward to "warm up" the audience, promising it wouldn't be scary. "Close your eyes and decide what direction your house is from here," he said, and we did. "Now open and point." The auditorium was a sea of arms pointing in all directions. "Now keep your arm there and point to another place you'd like to live. Now, with your nose, point to your fantasy vacation." This had the audience giggling. "Rub your hands together above your heads, now below your seats. Be careful of your neighbor, you don't know them that well! They do this in California without any prompting. Now wave your hands and look around."

Now that we were warmed up, Lerman took the mike and, gesturing, said, "Put one hand up and one hand down. Now think of all your ancestors and take them in this hand. In the other hand are all the people coming after us. Bring your fingers together, right now, here."

Then she introduced "nine faith leaders" from the local communities, and they came out in the garb of their trade. One by one, they told small stories — the rabbi, the priest, the cleric, the pastor, the monk. For instance, a Catholic priest told about making books containing prayers and support with his congregation and sending them to N.Y. Mayor Giuliani. Lerman intervened every three stories and showed a gesture she had drawn from each tale, teaching them to the audience: Bring falling leaves close to your weeping face, draw captain's stripes on your jacket sleeve, write a letter to New York, call your nephew, bring faith to your heart, bow three times.

When the stories were through, the Dance Exchange faced the audience and we all rehearsed the dance we had just made, first sitting, then standing, with music. The dancers later told me the view from the stage was so breath-taking, it made them cry.

The piece itself had an unusual structure and many moving moments. It began with a snapshot, using almost a blackout technique. Two dancers appeared very briefly in the spotlight, then vanished, a tiny preview of Margot Greenlee and Kazu Nakamura as Adam and Eve. Then Elizabeth Johnson flew down from the eves in a harness. As she was slowly lowered to the stage, writhing like a snake, challenging and teasing the audience with her eyes, a solo singer appeared backlit in a portal in the rear wall, singing mournful and wordless notes. Birds twittered in the air.

The singer, Jill Hamilton of the Hawkins Singers, came downstage just as an apple was lowered from the ceiling on a wire. Johnson tempted Hamilton, then handed her the apple.

In the next scene, Greenlee and Nakamura performed a stunning love duet, and soon were joined by another pair, Hamilton as Eve, Thomas Nance as Adam, who sang a blues as the dancers became more irritable and oppositional. I was later told that Lerman and Hawkins had to negotiate this scene, as it represented a fight between the lovers, and Hawkins held that gospel music could not depict an argument. He suggested blues, but Hamilton had reservations, since she had been a blues singer, but had left all that behind.

Luckily for "Hallelujah," Lerman prevailed. The blues duet combined with movement was most powerful. Some of the lyrics: "If only you'd listened, stayed with me as I asked, obeyed the father, we'd still be happy … Did you say that I'm at fault?" The singers blamed each other for disobedience to God, and the dancing became more accusatory, the dancers more alienated.

This scene was broken suddenly by the entrance of Peter DiMuro and Hawkins singer Armond Jackson in suits, summarily ordering the singers and dancers "outta here." As Jackson took over in an intimidating monologue, he was joined by three dancers — Dance Exchangers Elizabeth Johnson, Marvin Webb and guest artist Ted Johnson — writhing around him in a very expressive trio. They exuded a compellingly crazy, agitated, silly, sexual energy.

Jackson addressed the audience, both aggressively and seductively: "You don't know me, but I know you. I know everything about you. I am your fear. I can make you sick. I can make you sweat. I can make you not say the 'I love you' thing … I won't let go."

Adam and Eve appeared bearing suitcases in a journey across the stage, now moving forward, now looking back. The "fear" trio menaced in the portal, then entered, manhandling the dancers. Other dancers migrated across the stage, passing an apple. Boogie music was supplied by the Hawkins band.

The 18-person Hawkins choir entered through the portal, dancing and singing to "Traveling Shoes," while the migrations ensued. The choir moved stage left and continued with a sad, bawling solo with backup. The dance company entered through the portal in a cloud of smoke, slowly falling to the ground as if wounded or dying. DiMuro appeared, escorting Martha Wittman, who delivered a soliloquy: "I watched the showers of glass falling and falling. It fell to the ground in piles … I wish I could roll back all the smoke. I regret that I can't restore everything to wholeness." The company continued to dance slowly, comforting each other, while speckles of light played over them like falling glass.

The choir began a devastating rendition of "When the World's on Fire," while the company performed in duets, falling slowly, helping each other up, falling again, reaching for help, climbing over each other, stretching for the sky. The song swelled in a gorgeous harmony, as the dancers finished with gentle gestures, then silently joined the chorus, standing amongst the singers like ghosts.

The other elements of the piece included much of the work I saw created during the process. There was also a boogie section about the high life in Paradise Valley, spotlighting two very fancy showgirls who danced in the clubs in those days; a full-length backdrop curtain made of shoes; plenty of company dance and mass choreography; and more gospel and storytelling. The theraband appeared as costumes in a fashion show, the boundary of a wrestling ring and a highway laid down over fallen bodies, representing the struggle over the choice between the value of the highway and the value of the human life of the community. The performance finished with the dancing-rabbi story, followed by a reprise of the falling-glass story by Martha Wittman, which ended, "Before the fires were out and the smoke cleared, the angels gathered to clean and rebuild what they had lost." Rudy Hawkins topped it off with a resounding rendition of "I Got Shoes."

Liz Lerman had said she hoped they would create a great piece of gospel dance theater, and that is what she got.

This piece was very warmly received by the audience, but not everyone was pleased. I spoke with UMS' Ben Johnson about the audience response, and he told me, "There were some people who didn't necessarily approve of the religious overtones of the invocation. We had about 20 people walk out in that part. But the majority of the people responded positively to it. There was one person who contacted [UMS Director] Ken Fischer who said he really objected to it because he just didn't want to go back and relive September 11^th; he wanted to be over it. He even had a meeting with Ken face-to-face after the performance to talk about that, how he wanted to see some dance and not that. But if Liz as an artist decides that is the medium where she wants to work and her response is as a choreographer/activist, then I can totally appreciate the artistic choices she's making."

We are fortunate to have a lot of information about the response to this "Hallelujah" because of John Borstel's documentation and the Arts of Citizenship audience survey. Some of these statements are startling — deeply spiritual questions about meaning and uncertainty. I want to present a sampling of this response because I feel this is as much a part of the artwork as anything else, and it is often overlooked. Liz Lerman feels the whole process of the residency is a dialogue, and when asked, participants and audience members contribute perceptions that enlarge the vision of the experience. One of my goals is to revolutionize the methods of writing about community art, and response information is almost always neglected by traditional critics.

John Borstel held a "reflection" meeting with 18 of the participants in October. He used a modified Dance Exchange Critical Response Process. We can catch its flavor here with just a few highlights from the questions he asked and the answers he received, in the performers' own words:

Part of the Arts of Citizenship audience survey took place as the audience was leaving the theater on October 6. Large newsprint pads and pens were available, and questions were posted. Some audience members filled out questionnaires. Other responses were received electronically.

I interviewed David Scobey, director of the Arts of Citizenship Program, which offers community-arts training courses, major cultural partnerships with community organizations, and grant support for innovative teaching and arts projects. The program has a fascinating Web site that documents its many complex campus and community projects. One example: Coming of Age in the Riot Years, for which UM students created a series of radio pieces based on personal interviews and music about the 1967 Detroit riot. Scobey is an associate professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at UM. He is a historian with special interests in the cultural history, urban culture, public art, and urban planning of 19th and 20th century America.

Scobey has known Liz Lerman for 15 years and considers her a role model. Arts of Citizenship helped hatch the Michigan "Hallelujah" out of a statewide "cultural partnerships" project engineered by the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan that included Liz Lerman as a speaker. Scobey's program helped create the "Hallelujah" collaboration with the Dance Exchange and the University Music Society.

Among the highlights of the 18-month process for Scobey was the November 2000 production of Lerman's "Still Crossing" at the Detroit Music Hall, starring participants from community workshops all over Detroit. Intended to enlist people in the project, the performance involved 80 performers on stage. Scobey also cites an early-process dance work created by Margot Greenlee and Vincent Thomas with the All City Men's Group, also known around "Hallelujah" as "Tony's Boys" for their teacher, Tony Smith. This group of more than a dozen young dancers came out of a 50-year-old citywide after-school dance program in the Detroit public schools. The young men worked with the two Dance Exchangers to create a new piece Scobey describes as a "West Side Story-ish dance about masculinity, about being a tough young man." This was one of the first times these dancers had created their own choreography, according to Scobey. Both events were important in bonding the participants to the project, which was evident in the Hannan House ladies and their continuing allegiance to the Dance Exchange

Lerman particularly credits Scobey with "organizing the Dance Exchange's relationship to the academy." Essentially, it was his job to link the project to university teaching and faculty participation. He pulled together a team of four other faculty members in dance, education, English and a living/learning community, all interested in integrating the project into their teaching.

One such effort was a community and dance course called "Dance Stories," which looked at the role dance plays in community. Students in dance did readings and participated in community workshops and a did a collaborative research project with Penny Goldboldo and her students at Marygrove College about the historical role of dance in Detroit politics.

After talking to many "Hallelujah" audience members, Scobey said reaction to the finished performance fell into two camps: There were those moved by the presentation and those "put off" by the invocation. "The invocation overshadowed people's experience," said Scobey. "Some people were really offended. They felt like they were being made to feel a certain way, and I think they were made uncomfortable by the combination of spirituality and participatory stuff. Some people thought it was nationalistic, which I didn't feel. I think they were so hypersensitive and enlisted in a congregation of grieving that they just rejected it. But it raised interesting questions about the conditions under which people will consent emotionally to participate."

Scobey agreed with me that a university audience will have particularly complex political reactions to subject matter like 9/11. "The way it was integrated at the end was incredibly beautiful," he said, "but from the point of view of aesthetics, the invocation was way too long. That meant that it felt like, 'When are we going to get started here?' It felt like it was delaying the actual event." We both noticed that Lerman telegraphed her discomfort with the length of the invocation, and that may have been picked up by the audience. In fact, he said, "very few people got to the interesting theme of Paradise and redemption and The Fall. What I was most interested in was how you turn migration and movement from an imagery of exile to one of salvation. People just saw that as this fractured thing that they didn't get. But the way they used the story of September 11 at the end of the piece — and those gestures — reminded people that we are in a fallen world. We're not walking through Paradise."

Scobey felt this "Hallelujah" produced more of a repertory piece than others, something replicable that could tour. "I've been urging Liz to pay more attention to product," he said, "and I thought the piece itself was quite interesting. I hope they'll keep working on it, tweak it and condense it. I thought it did successfully integrate Detroit in a history of fallenness. And the story of Paradise Valley is the story of expulsion and urban renewal and erasure. The fashion show turning into the wrestling ring turning into the highway is a wonderful set of images and if you know Detroit history, it makes sense. The use of the song about 'shoes walking all over God's heaven' — usually in this kind of thematic, heaven or redemption is a kind of coming to rest, beyond the condition of having to move. I love the way shoes and movement and wandering get turned into images of redemption."

We discussed discomfort around the use of organized religion — a current thread in the arts right now. Artists and companies all over the country are doing "faith-based projects" and collaborating with faith leaders and their congregations — Cornerstone Theater, for just one example. I pointed out that artists must deal with religion when they approach working with many ethnic-specific communities, and it's not easy. Attempting to engage a traditional, church-going audience in an artspace that also shows, for instance, radical gay performance art work is a major organizational challenge.

Lerman's collaboration with faith communities of all sorts is neither accidental nor haphazard. Religious issues are not just the trend-of-the-moment for her, and she is a leader in a movement "to foster artmaking as a force for change in Jewish institutions," as she puts it. For years, she's been doing movement workshops with Jewish spiritual themes, incorporating participatory movement into services and working on Jewish identity with very young and very old populations. Between 1977 and 1997, Lerman produced four significant artworks reflecting on Jewish history, culture and identity, performing them in temples and at Jewish festivals, and she has given keynote speeches at major Jewish gatherings. In 1995, she was awarded the American Jewish Congress "Golda Award." Scobey is a colleague of Lerman's in investigations of Jewish culture, and he says she is "tussling with it in a very religious way. In the Jewish community there is more space for aesthetic and political individualism to be knotted together in experimental forms."

If inclusion of religious content makes the art world uncomfortable, that's undoubtedly okay with Liz Lerman. She often talks about discomfort as an important location for learning. "I do think the question is worth engaging in discussion of this 'Hallelujah,' because it was so central to the artwork," said Scobey. "I think it's a challenge to the culture of the art world to take this seriously. September 11 intensified an issue that was already there. The spirituality in 'Hallelujah' is completely comfortable to me. I feel like I've been living with questions like 'what do you do with tradition, how do you transform it but always take it seriously and engage with it' all the time. But I come from a more religious place than most in the arts community."

Scobey found Jewish references throughout this work. "The gospel piece, 'This Is the Day the Lord Has Made' — that had resonance for me. It's all about Sabbath and making yourself a part of everything God makes. That's what the Psalm refers to. One of the interesting aesthetic things about the 'Hallelujah' piece is that what Rudy does he doesn't describe as art or dance, so the category of art does not fit neatly in his landscape. He's doing things that look like art — you know, it quacks like a duck — and he's moving and singing and performing in a secular performance venue, and yet he resists that category. To what extent is the time a part of a performance like this, like the category of the Sabbath, but not part of it? That's the aesthetic issue that's raised by something like this.

"What interests me about Liz's aesthetic," he went on, "is that she's got this interest in the way gesture languages emerge out of everyday life, the populist side of her. The spontaneous storytelling and life-living skills emerge as gesture. And then she's got this other side of her that I think of as post-structuralist or postmodernist — fracturing and recombination and taking apart. The form of the dance is often these moments of natural language and gesture, and then an explosion of gesture." But Lerman's work is not like modern dance, said Scobey, "in the sense of being abstraction into the gestural. There are always recognizable references in social gesture and social movement that are being undercut and torn apart and coming back together again. I think she uses that tension to explore themes of fallenness and the fracturing of identity and displacement in historical situations."

The Dance Exchange's "Still Crossing" is an interesting example , said Scobey. "The form of it begins with imagery of couples and families migrating, and the whole middle part is a fracturing, a very emotional rhetoric of passing and separation. At the end there's a distillation of the body of gestures into an innocent ceremony, which I think is really palatable and moving, but also open enough to retain a different meaning, depending on who's doing it. In Detroit we had a lot of African Americans, the majority of the people on stage were black, and the image of chain-breaking just means something completely different — breaking the chains of the old life and coming to liberation. So there, for me, her kind of practice really works."

Scobey recognized Lerman's central interest in the sudden changes that always interfere with her process. "One effect of having the process and the product be merged is that accident is an important element of the aesthetic," he said. "This is where the acts of God come in. The observation that life is random and accidental. And the process is the process of constantly being able to recuperate and explore the meaning of the accident. That's the post-structuralist moment. She's not envisioning ordinary people's lives as this solitary community that's expressed in its dance traditions, that kind of closed and sentimental thing, but it's people constantly living through the accidents of their lives, and taking them seriously, not just as random things that you don't need to think about."

These past few months since 9/11, as we pursue America's new war, I have been plunged into a darkness that has plagued me ever since I "fell away" from Roman Catholicism. In New York, Washington, Afghanistan, so many "senseless" deaths. Once again, as I have so often, I fear there is no meaning to human life, and the struggle with that paradox has at times brought me close to paralysis.

The struggle with that paradox is actually the business of human life as we know it, and intellectuals and artists have been telling us this for at least 60 years. Our desperate search for meaning, our search for an answer to the puzzle of existence, is the deepest human tragedy, because once we find what we think is the One Answer, the fundamental truth, it tends to lead us to intolerance of any other answer. If our answer is true, other answers must be dangerously untrue.

The absence of meaning to life, let's call it the void, is so hard for the western and middle-eastern mind to accept that it has led us to create the concept of One God. Monotheism is essentially a struggle to fill the void with meaning. Once we can believe in our God, we feel we have the One Answer, and no other answer shall go before it. Dressed in the holy robes of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, monotheism has led us to create one atrocity after another. It has led whole peoples to do things to each other that are unthinkable — and especially repugnant because they are not done to make our brief lives better, or even to prove conclusively that God is on our side. They are done simply to lend our lives meaning.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. It would be tragic if it weren't so funny.

The funniest tragedy of all is that it is this thirst for meaning, this horror of the void, that makes us so easy to manipulate. Comedian George Carlin once said: "Convince somebody there's an old man in the sky who watches everything you do and you can talk him into anything." That's how Osama bin Lauden manipulated his suicide bombers. That's how right-wing fundamentalism is attempting to take over America. We will sacrifice anything, even our freedom, to prove God is on our side. If we can be convinced to enter a desperate struggle to prove it, and we win, then we will have proven that there is a God, and we will fill the void with meaning. That is why we can't afford to lose.

It hardly helps at all to deny the existence of God. We will go right on with our brutal search for the answer. Look at communism, capitalism.

But if we accept the void, we accept the ultimate paradox, the ultimate ambiguity. How can we exist if there is no point?

The Buddhists know about the void. They spend their time expanding into it, recognizing it, accepting it, reveling in it. Everything else we humans do to try to avoid the void — fill the blankness with something to live for, with art and democracy and feminism and all these other constructs — is just a joke. They might be concepts to live by, but not absolute truths to live for, to kill for.

Postmodernism is the conceptual representation of all this, the demonstration that all our answers are simply constructs, that there is no truth, there are only versions of it. Artists are people who have teetered against the void since they became conscious. Western artists since at least Shakespeare have been trying to juggle the paradox of meaningless existence. When conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage began introducing ordinary life and accident into art, they acknowledged the paradox of the void. The interrupted narrative, the fractured construct, the disorder of everyday life — in art, that's a tip of the hat to the void, to the absence of God, the absence of hierarchy, the absence of order and truth and harmony and hegemony.

That is why Liz Lerman's inclusion of organized religion in her patently postmodernist work is so interesting. If modern art is the Answer, then postmodern art is the neverending Question. From the first moment of the first workshop to the last gesture on the stage, Lerman is shattering absolute truth. Every minute of each residency is part of the work itself. Employing kindness, sympathy, empathy for the human condition, she takes a bit of a true story here and a bit of natural gesture there and strings them together in a phrase that retains the illusion of narrative, but is actually representative of nothing but paradox. In its inclusiveness of many different ethnicities, body types, belief systems, each artwork also bears the illusion of diversity. Each of her works is a graceful bow to the void, a cacophony of real theologies, a glossolalia of actual prayers, a blizzard of true stories, a mob scene of narrative gesture that occasionally harmonizes, then dissolves into fragment. Its power resides in its illustration of the passionate human search for an answer that will never come, for a Paradise we will never find. As each person on the stage dances his or her own search, they are united in the struggle, beautiful in its tragedy.

From the first moment of the idea of the residency till the last word written about the whole body of work, the entire process is an embrace of paradox and ambiguity. As they collude in the fragmentation of their own constructs, the participants have almost no idea of what they are making, and they never grasp the whole work of art because they can't both be in it and stand back far enough to see it. In a sense, for them it does not actually exist. What then do they have to celebrate? What do they praise? Paradox itself, ambiguity itself. As Lerman discovered during this residency, her Paradise is not a destination, it is being on the path, embracing the paradox of meaningless existence. She is, as that early participant had suggested, not holding her breath, waiting for everything to get better. She is inviting everyone to the dance, right here right now, ready or not. And in the process, she is pointing to the anomaly of stones that float and leaves that sink, the incongruity of constancy in the midst of change, the simultaneity of beauty and disorder, the coexistence of Paradise lost and found.

Instead of denying the void, Liz Lerman is saying perhaps we celebrate it, dance with it. As long as we continue to be alive, we only have the existential moment, and as long as we have memory, one moment appears to follow another, one note after another, one gesture after another. Strung together like that, they construct the illusion of time. Maybe all we have is the dance to the music of the illusion of time.

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Everybody Say Hallelujah: the Michigan residency

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