"Hallelujah" Diary

Dance Exchange Producing Director Jane Hirshberg with Humanities Director John Borstel. Photo by Linda Burnham.

When I first started thinking about writing this piece, I remembered a few years ago that John [Borstel, the Dance Exchange humanities director] and I had a conversation about putting together a consortium application for the NEA, along with four or five of our confirmed "Hallelujah" presenters. When it came time to write the narrative, we came up with several questions that we thought would be good ones to base this presenter/artist adventure/collaboration upon. Here are those original questions:

• How can presenters acknowledge the talents of resident artists while still benefiting from the insight, excitement and fresh perspective of visiting artists?
• How can local and national artists alike assure that the impact of community-based projects is sustained beyond the timeframe of a residency?
• Given the evolutionary process and broad participation in community-based work, how can creative and producing partners assure that the audience sees a superior artistic product?
• How do presenters and artists sort out roles to achieve effective marketing for national projects?
• How can we all work smarter when we’re all working so hard?

For me, these questions still prevail. We’re still working hard – maybe harder than ever. I think we’re all a little smarter, having gone through the process of participating in an incredibly ambitious community-based artmaking endeavor that has resulted in some of the most amazing work that the Dance Exchange has ever been involved in. In praise of courageous communities! In praise of amazing artists! In praise of presenters with patience!

The first two questions above have been particularly relevant in "Hallelujah." As a rule, we seek out artists in each community where we are doing our work, hoping to find ways to assist them in their own pursuits, while enlisting them as adjunct artistic support during our projects. We encourage artists to sustain their own work after our project culminates, with the hope that working side-by-side with the Dance Exchange artists, they will gain new insight, strength and an infusion of new thinking to their own creative process. Sometimes we have strong local artist support and interest. Other times we are not accepted into the local artistic community – which is always disappointing and very often creates challenges to doing our own work successfully. The nature of the work that we do lends itself to being sustainable, but only with very strong interest from the local artistic community in continuing the artmaking process through inquiry-based exploration, and a dedication to the rigor of creating work of the highest artistic quality.

Questions about quality have abounded during this project. I felt myself go through a transition that I am only just now able to name. I came aboard the project with a somewhat didactic perspective about the Dance Exchange and its work. I wanted a great show – I loved everything we did – but I was deeply concerned about how we could insure that the quality of each community-engagement process was as rich and powerful as the product we were putting on the stage. As my own focus became more about the stage work, making sure that we had every possible advantage, in terms of music, lighting, costumes, sets and the like, I found myself becoming much more concerned with what was being mounted on stage than what was happening in each community. That evolution was not necessarily a joyous one for me.

My orientation to the Dance Exchange and the power of its work came from my own experience with a long-term project. My work on that project was very intense, and very passionate. One thing I have learned through "Hallelujah" is that the intensity and passion with which a project is led cannot be determined by anyone other than the person who is leading the project. The model we worked within during "Hallelujah" created a structure whereby the project leader generally was a staff person from a presenting organization. We had artistic project leaders in the Dance Exchange. We could not dictate – nor would it have been appropriate to – the level of commitment to the project’s success that was felt by each project leader in each community. Once I realized that I could not impart my own passion upon my colleagues in the presenter world to the process we employ, I became more focused on things that I could influence, things I could directly support, things I could do effectively that would help the artist team. For the most part, the support, skill, talent, vision and direction that came from our presenter collaborators was astounding. When the collaboration was not strong, it seemed as though we all remained committed, even if in varying degrees, to seeing the project through to its successful end. That was true for each and every "Hallelujah."

It seemed that for many of our presenters, they wanted to know very early in our projects what the final event was going to look like. Sometimes they needed to know much more than we could tell them. Everything from marketing, to developing itineraries, to landing on a theme, to negotiating time in the theater was laced with a sense that we were embarking on something that was quite scary, quite difficult for the staff to get a handle on, quite difficult to understand, or even to like. And as each project commenced, I became more and more committed to the integrity of the Dance Exchange process, and more adamant about the need for our presenters to have faith and patience, and to keep giving us the support we needed. Some staff members of our presenting organizations had a much more difficult time than others with this open-ended way of working. Most of the time, our biggest challenges were in the marketing and publicity wings of organizations: "How can I write about this thing when we don’t even know what it is?" We are finding that this is true even now as we embark upon the grand culminating adventure. Even with all of the work already made, videotaped and edited, we’re still hearing many of the same kinds of questions. Is there a way to make our work more easily understandable to people who have not experienced it? This is a huge question for me. This question, in fact, made, and continues to make, the promotion of this project as a national phenomenon very challenging.

As we started each project, I had hopes that each new "Hallelujah" would be a source of extreme pride for the organization. I wanted each one to achieve widespread critical acclaim. I wanted each one to provide a profound experience for all participants and all audience members. My hopes for each new work were not always realized. Sometimes we had enough time in a community to make work that was extraordinary, and to create an impact by the power of our interaction with the participants that was easily sustained. Other times we were caught short in our process, still discovering things that needed to be included in the work, but not able to incorporate the painstaking task of curatorial editing until so late in the production process that the staged piece looked unformed, not quite settled, or not clear. But even these "Hallelujahs" provided great insight for me into ways we could build upon our knowledge, expand our thinking, try new ways of working, and check our processes.

Now I find myself deeply interested in balancing my own perspective about what we can do, how we can do it, and what I need to put into place with the artist team, and with our presenters, in order for the quality of the production to equal the quality of the community engagement. It’s an exciting research adventure for me, which is a direct result of the 15 different projects that we have been living and breathing and dancing through during the past four years. The inquiry-based exploration continues, and it feels even more exciting now than it did before.

Jane Hirshberg, Producing Director
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
May 25, 2002

Original CAN/API publication: January 2003