Dancing in Community: Its Roots in Art

To write a true history of dance and community would be to go back to the essential roots of dance itself. The various strands of artistic process and functions inform the evolution of the form to its practices today, on the stage and inside the life of most communities. This article merely attempts to describe — from a contemporary art perspective — some of the influences on my own early years as a way of understanding work that, in essence, merges concert and community concerns Trying to write this pointed out to me how much we need someone to tackle the larger picture. That person would have the joy of looking into several different pockets of work emerging just prior to and post mid-20^th century, but looking at this work through the lenses of both art and community practices.

There were dance artists committed to preserving their own cultures, albeit under new circumstances. There were dance artists committed to preserving their own cultures within the constructs of the dominant culture — on the stage, in the press and within artworld boundaries. There were dance artists exploring politics on a global scale, and dance artists primarily working from the more personal political space of gender and sexuality. There were dance artists concerned with access and class issues. There were dance artists laboring within institutions far from the art world stage, including hospitals, prisons, synagogues and churches. Some of these artists actually changed professions, choosing new avenues for their most passionate beliefs. (I used to say that many of my allies had become dance therapists.) Others spent lifetimes trying to integrate their beliefs inside a stratified world..

I see my own body of work as straddling thee different periods, addressing some of the above categories:

1975-85: personal grief, personal politics = access and outreach

1985-95: personal identity = crossing cultures

1985-present: questions of meaning = large scale canvases and passing it on

I had originally planned to write about these three periods, looking for my counterparts, seeing trends, while still covering this history with the detail of autobiography. But, like all historians, I really began to wonder where to begin the story. I realized that it might be more fruitful to look at the forces that shaped me before I founded the Dance Exchange in 1976.

When I think of the influences in my work — influences that helped to form patterns of thought, constructs about art and society, a way of going about my business of breaking apart myths and making new or different connections — I am reminded of several things. These include my upbringing, some lessons learned early, two books and one art movement (and for another article, the amazing people I met along the way who influenced my thinking, cheered me on when I was blue, reminded me of why I was doing all of this….)

Upbringing

By the time we laid my father’s stone in the spring of 2000, I thought I had heard every story about him. But as people came to share in their experience of his life, I was overwhelmed with the number of people and incidents that spoke to his grand mission in life. One in particular stands out. A young woman appeared on our porch, introduced herself and began crying. She was a Latina lesbian who had sat next to my father at a human-rights luncheon/conference. He had engaged her in conversation and somehow had convinced her to go back and finish school. She couldn’t believe he had died, and wanted us to know how critical the moment had been for her. I remember thinking at the time that my father never stopped. He worked in the world right up until his death.

But the accumulation of all these stories also made me think that my work was in many ways just my father’s world and ideas reconstituted. He did it through politics and business; I was doing it through dance and culture. Viewing action in the world as a sacred mission, lovingly challenging Jewish tradition, bringing people together for reasoned dialogue, making distinctions among allies, championing the regular everyday life of regular everyday people — well, actually celebrating the brilliance of the unrecognized and questioning authority, this was my father’s world and this had become mine.

My father had apparently always loved dance. He had gone to college with Anna Halprin and used to pass out flyers for her concerts. He took me to see anything that came through Milwaukee, where we had moved when I was eight. But his most important legacy to me as a choreographer was his complete lack of high-art/low-art thinking. He made me watch everything. "They are dancing on T.V.," he would yell up the stairs to me, and I was expected to drop anything I was doing, including homework, to come and watch. And he made me read. Like the man himself, his preferences were big and broad. And so, in my youth, I read about Katherine Dunham, about ballet, about Jewish theater artists, about native American ritual — anything that moved, I was expected to respect and appreciate.

But it wasn’t just my radical father who forged my concerns for thinking large about the world. My mother, too, had impact on the direction my life would take even though she died so young, in March of 1975. My mother was an elitist, the great opposing force to my father’s populism. She didn’t like people that much. She preferred her garden and music. She wasn’t compassionate about the shortcomings of human beings. She preferred and expected honesty, integrity, intelligence. If you couldn’t be direct and to the point with her, she would just as soon be alone. And she was alone a lot.

She believed in Art. She also believed in the myth of an artistic life. She told me daily how tough it would be. How I would have to learn to stand up for my own ideas. How being part of a crowd wasn’t worth it. To her, exclusiveness, like everything else, meant having integrity. Seeing one’s own vision was much more valuable than being accepted. That was how she was an elitist. It was about ideas and vision, not status and wealth.

And she saw no reason not to have the best — not in terms of material things, which she didn’t care about, but in terms of teachers. So, when we moved to Milwaukee, she searched out the best dance teacher she could find for me. Of course, she eschewed the popular one that everyone told her about. And instead she found me Florence West, a woman whose impact on my early life would parallel that of my family and my religion, my brothers.

Florence had studied with Ruth Page and Martha Graham. She was trying to develop her own style of dance, which would somehow combine the best of modern and ballet. At that time, in most parts of the dance world, it was impossible to study them together. You were expected to make your choice and stick to it, and never let the two cross. But Florence had other ideas, which she called "the Dance of Dimension." I took as many technique classes a week as I could. These consisted of barre work and then floor work similar to what a Graham class would look like. Then the last 45 minutes would be spent doing a dance phrase that Florence would have choreographed that mixed it all up. We studied the same phrases for a year and then performed them at the recital. Every other Saturday was choreographers’ workshop day. Then for two hours we would draw and paint and dance and sculpt and dance and improvise and draw some more. Anything was possible, except playing with scarves. I think Florence was afraid we might suffer the same fate as Isadora. I loved her.

But Florence was also impossible. She yelled (as did my mother, which, as I like to say, is why I hardly ever do). I never knew if my behavior was the cause of what she was hollering about, or whether she just needed to let off steam. But she was a brilliant teacher. I tried to arrive early to class because then I got invited into her one-room apartment/office/library/ that was off the main studio. She would show me books and pictures and make me touch different rocks and fabrics. She would tell me about yogis and Isadora; they all somehow blended in my mind. But, in her own way, she was the intersection of my parents. Demanding and rigorous in detail like my mother. Broad-minded and a grand mess of ideas like my father. She left Milwaukee for New York City when I was 14, which coincided with the beginning of my time of troubles.

In the summer of my 14^th year, I danced for President Kennedy at the White House as part of a group from the National Music Camp in Interlochen Michigan. After that, I would describe my life pretty much like this: quitting dance, going to Bennington and meeting Martha Wittman, transferring to Brandeis and jumping into the anti-war movement and guerrilla theater, quitting dance, trying to find my way with Ethel Butler in Washington, D.C. during a failed early marriage, quitting dance (my first husband wanted me to and I tried, I really tried, to quit, that is), teaching at a Quaker boarding school where I first tested my ideas about dance and community (more in another article), and life moved on …

But by then I had learned a few lessons that would inform the beginnings of the Dance Exchange.

1. The Problem of Institutions: While at Bennington I suffered because my Midwestern lyrical passion, which was the way I described my movement vocabulary, didn’t fit into the cool construct of the Cunningham era. If this was dance, then I wasn’t it. So, I transferred to Brandeis to study history. While there, I suffered because my generalist’s mind and inclination didn’t fit in with that particular moment in historiography, one of detail and specificity (I only learned about the power of this much later). So, there I was, railing against the system again, and that is when I realized the problem was the system. In other words, it wasn’t really dancing , or for that matter my love of history that was the problem, but rather the way these particular institutions — in the context of these particular trends with these human beings in charge — dictated the practices of the "field". What a relief. It made me remember my father’s dictum about Judaism, right at the time he was thrown out of both the synagogue and the Anti Defamation League because of his radical support of civil-rights causes. He simply told us not to confuse the beauty and truth of Jewish life and thought with the institutions that had been constructed to support it.

It is these experiences that underlie my total commitment to building a humane institution, which I define as one in which everyone gets to grow, not just the person in charge. And one in which the practices that are, well, institutionalized, are practices that support the inherent values of the goal itself, in my case, dance and art making. It turns out to be very difficult to do this, and my failures rival my failures as mom, as friend, as teacher, as choreographer, as wife.

2. Taking Work Off the Stage and Out of the Studio Is a Good Idea. I learned a lot while teaching at the Sandy Spring Friends School (1970-72). I was, at the time, only a few years older than my students. I had a lot of growing up to do myself. In the first year, I figured out I might teach the boys after practice on the soccer and lacrosse fields. No technique for them, just straight-away performance pieces, which they only brought indoors for the final dress rehearsal. They were a smash hit and after that it was easy to set up a boys’ class.

I realized my students were nervous about performing, and so I made the first concert be under the light of the second full moon of the semester. Called Moon Dances, the student dances were a series of solos and duets and trios performed on the soft hillside in suburban Maryland, while scores of their classmates and teachers tried to see them. It was gloriously beautiful and dim enough to hide all errors. And for me, site-specific work began. Later, we would perform in the creek, and the trees, in the offices and the parking lot outside the grocery store at the local Plaza del Mercado, and later still, in my Dance Exchange years, in factories, shipyards, bowling alleys, prisons, houses of worship, anywhere, really, except for shopping malls.

3. It Matters Who Is Performing. I was very taken with the ideas that I thought underscored the Medieval Passion Plays. I imagined that whole communities taking part in these productions gave serious thought to who played Jesus or Mary. I guessed that the personal attributes of the performer, or and the character they played, would blend into each other. In fact, I think the Disney folks do this, too, with some of their casting for their animated features, drawing on an Eddie Murphy, or a Robin Williams to infuse the cartoons with readymade personality and feeling, and to arouse our own empathy to a higher pitch. I thought the same could be true in our theaters as well. I thought I could make the casting affect the community, and vice versa. I could do this best by putting people on the stage who were known in their own communities, in real life. This was contrary to some of the standards being set in my field at that time, which suggested that a great dance ought to be viable and should live separately from its cast, like a beautiful vase that can exist without the function of holding liquid. But I had come to think otherwise. If revelation was one of my highest standards, then revealing something new about a human being who people thought they knew in one way was, in fact, a real outcome of the performance. And it worked in reverse, too. The dances took on an added dimension because of the very real presence of friends, colleagues, neighbors on stage.

4. New York City Isn’t Everything: I decided to test myself in N.Y.C. after my three years at the Quaker school. I came to study postmodern dance and continue my ballet training, which, at that time, I thought I needed, from a technical perspective. And I wanted to learn acrobatics. I found an amazing class filled with the oddest assortment of people trying to do back flips, including Sesame Street characters, go-go dancers and aspiring actors. It seemed significant to others that I studied all of this at on the same time (the idea was still pretty strong in New York that you picked your form or style and stuck to it). It seemed more significant to me that although I went to see lots of work, I was so untouched by most of it. And it seemed significant to me that most of the people I knew who called themselves artists were basically taking two or three technique classes a day. Period. There was no conversation about application, usefulness, pushing the world in a different way. I was shocked by their contentment with the institutions set up to make, see, account for art. I laughed at myself as I noticed I was taking more interest in my Hells Angels neighbors than I did in the art scene around me. I came to see that I couldn’t answer my questions in New York. In fact, I could barely ask them. One morning, in my ninth month of living at 2^nd Avenue and Third Street, it came to me that I didn’t have to stay there. I could go seek my answers elsewhere. I left.

The Two Books

I am not sure how I discovered "The Quest for Community" by Robert Nisbet. It was written in 1953, but reissued in 1969, and that is the copy that I own. I haven’t read it for a long time, but recently decided to look at it again. I enjoyed coming across my own notes, the sections I had underlined, the ideas that spoke to me in the years predating the Dance Exchange.

Here, on the second page of the forward to the new edition, was the clarion call I needed: "It is not the revival of old communities that the book in a sense pleads for; it is the establishment of new forms: forms which are relevant to contemporary life and thought." That was precisely what I was imagining somehow for dance — that we could use our extensive skills and tools to build, or rediscover, or create a community, a sense of community, an awareness of a collective existence.

Alienation was a big issue then, and I didn’t expect to find in his discussion of it such a passionate point of view about something that would become so important to me. Since working between generations was to become a primary tool for me, I found in this book some thinking on the subject that was unexpected. He gets into a discussion of how the past and future play out in the present, and he makes this claim: "In genuinely creative societies … there is a telescoping of the generations that is not hidden by all the more manifest facts of individual revolt. Past and present have a creative relationship not because of categories in men’s minds, but because of certain social bonds which themselves reach from past to future."

And finally, he gets into a wonderful description of the difference between power and authority, which for me has had a profound impact on the way I lead. First, he explains that power is external and based upon force. Authority is rooted "in the statuses, functions, and allegiances which are the components of any association." But what really excited me was his discussion of multiple authorities. He wrote, "There must be many authorities in society, and that authority must be closely united to objectives and functions which command the response and talents of members. Freedom is to be found in the interstices of authority: it is nourished by competition among authorities."

Without knowing it, I was discovering some principles for how I might come to run my dance company. Persuasion and authority have, for me, become hallmarks of how to lead in a more collective endeavor. Since collaboration has become such an important choreographic tool for me and so many others, understanding how to lead without being merely authoritative was very important. At the time I read this, I was only just imagining a dance company. But as I write this now, at the completion of our first 25 years, I see how this writing helped prepare me. This book gave me a theoretical base on which to hang the early explorations of the Dance Exchange.

Also at this time I read and reread a book called "ARTCULTURE" by Douglas Davis. The subtitle "Essays on the Post-Modern" both attracted and repelled me. Although now I talk about postmodernism frequently, at the time I stayed away from too much art theory. But this book was the only place I could find a synthesis of two distinct threads in my own life: serious art training, and a political point of view about the world.

The opening chapter is called "Artpolitics: Thoughts Against the Prevailing Fantasies." Here he gives a history lesson that underscores one of my own primary thoughts and frustrations about who artists are and how we are supposed to behave.

The Hollywood view of the artist as childlike naïf — a view cherished by too many curators, critics and collectors — is a particularly pernicious form of paternalism, which robs the artist, in this case Courbet, of his humanity, of his natural right to be a citizen. In his 1855 manifest he wrote: "To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation: to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art — this is my goal." These words have been printed in a thousand textbooks, yet are rarely understood. Any artist now who acts on that advice is automatically considered less than serious (about his product and his image perfecting).

I remember so clearly my sense that my work in the nursing homes and senior centers in the mid-’70s was weakening my position as a rising avant-garde artist. I kept telling people that it felt like I could be an artist if I waited tables, but if I wanted to spend time working with old people, then I was relegated to a lower caste, that of a therapist. Later still, when I compared notes with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women and a committed community artist, we laughed because she said she had been made a social worker. We guessed that white people could be therapists, black people social workers and that there was probably a hierarchy in that as well.

Here is another quote from Davis that states in one sentence a complaint that I heard again at a recent National Performance Network meeting: "What is wrong with acting collectively? Only the belief that in doing so the artist relinquishes the psychic individuality that is his prime value, as product, in the art market." We are still having to explain over and over that sparks of genius lie everywhere, and are often dormant until odd ideas and people move together. They come alive in combination with each other. I find much inspiration, pleasure and challenge in my collaboration with company members, other artists and members of community, just as I enjoy the moments of individual creative leaps. It would be good if we could find a language that supported the idea of artistic vision crossing back and forth between collaborative genius and individual brilliance.

But for me, a dancer coming up in a time of imposed abstraction, Davis’ chapter called "What is Content?" perhaps helped me the most — so much so that in rereading it for this writing, I realized I borrowed a line for my Docudance in 1980. Fortunately, at that time, I was giving my audiences bibliographies, so he was given some credit. Here it is: "The point is that we have no skills for dealing with content, after decades of avoiding it." I was eager to make dances about something, and, at the same time, keep moving forward with the very important idea that Cunningham and others had spent their lives making. He had convinced the world that dance in itself was enough. That there were worlds of information in each step. Since Cunningham had fought so hard to make that notion acceptable as content, I felt it important to find another way to describe dances about something in addition to the movement. So, I began to talk about subject-matter dancing. In my early years, I even went so far as to call some of them nonfiction dancing.

This is still quite an important subject that deserves more writing and more clarification. I say this because I continue to meet many young dance artists traumatized by their professors, the critics and who knows what else. They are terrified to be "literal," by which they mean tell a story that is understandable. These very rich ideas about content, subject matter, meaning were, in turn, to bring me to the needs of text and storytelling. And this makes yet another connection with a contemporary movement of that time: interdisciplinary work, which has grown so extensively since then as to be almost taken for granted.

And lastly, Mr. Davis, in one brief sentence, sets up for me the single biggest leap of my theoretical work; the poverty of either-or thinking. "The error of Guerrilla Art is directly opposed to the error of elitist art; it sacrifices form for content." Recently reading about Leonard Bernstein, I came across a quote in which he almost screams against the "dread dichotomy." Here is one of these false dichotomies laid out before me so many years ago. How many times have we in the community arts world been accused of giving up form for content? And how many times have I tried to get people to see that the form is everywhere, on the stage, in the unique designs of each residency, in the problem-solving of bringing people on stage who are not professionals. On the other hand, how many late nights at Alternate Roots could I be found talking passionately about how we "community artists" had to get better at our craft. And how many dance concerts have I left wishing the choreographers could have given me more to think about than just the beautiful bodies in space doing sometimes beautiful and interesting things. In my world, form and content, process and product, nurture and rigor, individual vision and collection creation, these all form delightful spectrums that I get to dance along. Sometimes I may spend a lot of time at one end of the spectrum, but I always check out the other to be sure I haven’t left something out. And the older I get, the more interesting it is to stretch the spectrum and to live at its edges.

I cannot do justice to these two books here. I suspect that a careful reread on my part would reveal some ways in which my own ideas and work have veered away from these texts. But at the time I read them, they were all I had to propel me forward. Since then there has been some wonderful scholarship in our fields. We have been fed by many more writers. But Douglas Davis and Robert Nisbet helped me in moments of extreme isolation and questioning.

An Art Movement: Or how Dada kept me fresh and enthused

I really thought that I was part of what some of us jokingly called the New Avant-Garde. I felt that those of us embarking on political/access/identity/community art making were, in effect, taking the best of contemporary art forms and, by turning them to usefulness, were inventing a new movement. I, for one, however, relied on some history to help me discover this. The bulk of that history was not in the dance world but in the world of theater and the visual arts. And mostly it had taken place during and just after World War I.

I was totally inspired by the Dadaists and a companion movement of that time, the Russian Avant-Garde. I found their ideas about art quite compelling. Looking back, I would say that there were four areas in which their thinking and actions affected mine: anti-art, pageants, readymades and collage. Briefly here is a glimpse of their impact on my thinking.

The Dadaist stance of anti-artworld-establishment suited me fine. I was among a group of artists who were interested in reframing most of the artworld’s mechanics and way of doing business. I was quite conscious early-on of how much of my methodology grew out of rebellion and the need to make a dance world different from the one I had grown up in. For me, though, it went beyond artworld politics. I was interested in creating a different mythic base for our own behavior, and addressing some of the romantic perceptions of what an artist’s life was supposed to be. The Dadaists did this with humor, attack, political thought and camaraderie, all tools that I admired.

Somewhere in my history books, there’s a paragraph about an incredible reenactment of a major battle that had occurred earlier, during the Russian Revolution. Apparently, theater artists were the directors of a grand show that included some 5,000 participants and a gunboat in the harbor. This tantalized me. I cannot find any reference to the event since then, but it has left an indelible mark on my imagination. I think some of what has evolved in my own process about community engagement hearkens back to this notion: that people use their bodies to learn their history. The Russians did this in the ’20s on a huge scale, or at least I think they did.

One form of integrating my personal and professional life was the freedom of movement that objects made between my house and the studio. Material goods traveled mysteriously from home to rehearsal to stage and back again. My mothers glasses, and the last nightgown she wore before her death made their way into my piece about her dying. I put them on right at the end and then jumped yelling "NOW." I loved this moment for myself, of thinking of her and becoming her. I found all kinds of inspiration my small daily activities and tried to see it as Duchamp and others had, a world of readymade art all around us.

I took a theoretical base for this from my understanding of Kurt Schwitters, who turned his whole house into a tower of art. His use of collage was an extension for me of the readymades, and in some ways more useful for choreographic structure. In the early years of my work with older adults, I often thought of them as a piece of collage, that their presence was like an old button, or piece of fabric, which an audience member could use to connect to their own memory quickly and deeply.

Postscript

For many of us working in the community arts world, our sense of history connects with the WPA, with political organizing, with a strong sense of civic responsibility. But I feel as strongly connected to my ancestors who labored in the art world alone, or in its various subgroups of radicals and revolutionaries. (A good example is the life of Robert Schumann, whose music is totally accepted now by even the most conservative of critics. But there is a very sobering story of what the artist went through to attain not stardom but understanding. )

Every community artist should write a story like this. I am convinced that the more we recognize the multiple artistic and social forces that led each of us to our time in history, the more it will help make our artistic ideas and projects carry the weight they deserve. I mentioned above a quote from Leonard Bernstein, who railed against the "dreaded dichotomies" of his many worlds. I would simply add that I, and so many others, stand firmly upon the bodies of work of pioneering artists who claimed art as essential all by itself, and who claimed art as critical to the well-being of our communities. And as we continue to struggle to gain acceptance, support and comprehension of the worth of our work, we might continue to call upon all of our ancestors and their accomplishments. That, in turn, will help us improve the standards we keep, and the awareness of what we are trying to become.

Liz Lerman is an internationally know choreographer and founder of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, based in the Washington, D.C. Metro area. For more information about the Dance Exchange, visit their Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002