Everybody Say Hallelujah: the North Carolina residencies

Hallelujah North Carolina:
From the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge

Introduction

"Hallelujah" came to North Carolina at the end of the trail. The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s magnum opus that began at first light on the first day of the millennium in Eastport, Maine, came to rest in Greensboro, N.C., on June 29, 2002. All that remained to be done was the final gathering of the "Hallelujah" clan in Maryland at the end of the summer.

The North Carolina "Hallelujahs" praised animals and their people in Raleigh, spirit and stone in Asheville, peaks and valleys in Boone and whispers and songs in Greensboro – and all in three months time.

The series was distinctive in several ways. Most noticeably, the directors’ wand passed from Liz Lerman to three of her company members: Michelle Pearson (project leader/ artistic development), Marvin Webb (project assistance) and Peter DiMuro (director). While Lerman turned up for the Raleigh and Asheville performances, the projects were driven by this trio. Pearson, who lives in North Carolina, was on the job for more than two years to make sure the wheels didn’t come off, while Webb and DiMuro traveled into the state on a busy schedule. Some of the work folded around an annual summer teaching stint by Pearson and DiMuro at the American Dance Festival in Durham.

Another hallmark of the series was its economy of creation/rehearsal time and budget. These were intended as "mini-Hallelujahs," but anyone who knows Michelle Pearson would have doubted that from the beginning. Pearson, who joined the Dance Exchange in the D.C. area from 1993 to 1997, then moved to Raleigh with her family, is now a Dance Exchange Artistic Associate. Pearson is also leading the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Elder Arts Initiative artist-training program and dancing with Even Exchange in Raleigh, not to mention teaching all over the Piedmont. An intense dancer, choreographer and all-around house-afire, Pearson couldn’t help stretching the boundaries of these four "Hallelujahs," and it wasn’t long before the community pieces were just as big as those in Los Angeles and elsewhere. That ambitious agenda really put the pressure on these residencies.

Unique as well was the presenting network for the series. North Carolina, with the help of the N.C. Arts Council and Sharon Moore and her crew at N.C. State, has pioneered a community-dance network of presenters up and down the state, from the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge Mountains. They include universities, large theaters, arts councils and even a city parks-and-rec department. Presenters in the network decide on a mutual residency project to bring a company into the state for a long stint, then share tasks like fund-raising and publicity. The scheme was inaugurated in the 1990s by David Dorfman Dance, as the New York company conducted an intensive statewide residency of works involving local dancers, businesses, athletes and whole families. The network has also hosted Chuck Davis’ African-American Dance Ensemble of Durham in a similar vein. The Dance Exchange already had a large fan club in Raleigh, thanks to several successful residencies at N.C. State, so the community-dance ground was fairly well trodden by the time this series took to the trail.

Finally, the N.C. period stood out for the quality of the new repertory pieces brought forth by the Dance Exchange. In addition to the community project in each location, the company presented "Cocktail Dances," set to music by Leonard Bernstein, and a thrilling new work, "Anatomies and Epidemics," based on their experiences of the disasters of September 11, 2001.

Michelle Pearson points to that world-shaking 2001 event as a hallmark of all the N.C. residencies: "We think that the post 9/11 ‘Hallelujahs’ are different," she told me in an August 2002 interview.

The pre-September 11 ones had more of a party kind of feel. And the post September 11s have a somber, what I call a deep happiness. Maybe happiness isn’t the right word. Everyone thinks that the pursuit in life is to find happiness, but that’s not it, it’s to find peace. And it’s this quiet kind of accepting peace that will radiate, as opposed to this fiery, explosive happiness, jubilation. The peaceful kind of radiates out. I think the North Carolina "Hallelujahs" were more like that.

North Carolina is my home state these days, and it was gratifying to have so much Dance Exchange in the neighborhood. I was fascinated to open this creative window on towns I have an acquaintance with, to come to know their diversity a little better and to make new friends in the region. I have to say, though, just following it was exhausting. For the company, trying to conduct four whole residencies in a final, intensive period of only three months in cities six hours apart was monumental. Coming at the end of two years of scrambling around the country and wrestling with up to 100 people at each of 15 sites — not to mention dealing with the planning for a massive final "Hallelujah" gathering in Maryland at the end of July —I think this company of masters finally met its match. By the end of the North Carolina run, they were almost dead on their talented feet.

That is not to say it wasn’t the best of times. Many of the participants in these four residencies were so energized by the "Hallelujahs" for their own towns that they traveled to Maryland at summer’s end to spend two weeks wallowing in it. North Carolina was richly represented at "Hallelujah/USA."

What follows is an account of each of the N.C. pieces and interviews with Liz Lerman in Asheville and Michelle Pearson in Maryland, with a bonus essay on presenting by Jane Hirshberg. There’s also a peek into the process: some "performance grids" kept by Peter DiMuro that capture the projects in the midst of change. In doing this research, it was interesting to see familiar questions popping up along the way: how to engage community participants and get them to hang in there for the long haul; the question of quality in community art; process vs. product; and what is on people’s minds these days in this state, in this country.

Linda Frye Burnham is the co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2003