Hallelujah North Carolina: From the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge - the Asheville residency

The Dance Exchange Company performing a new repertory piece, "Anatomies and Epidemics." Photo by Stan Barouh. View a slideshow from the Asheville residency.

The Hallelujah Project: In Praise of Spirit and Stone
Diana Wortham Theatre, Asheville, North Carolina
April 13-14. 2002

Asheville’s "Hallelujah" stood out not only for its lyrically spiritual character, but for the new work that was unveiled by the company, post-9/11. Both experiences left Liz Lerman with some profound conclusions and some nagging questions.

"Hallelujah" discovered Asheville, N.C., as a place where opposites live side by side and sometimes collide, its essence described as "spirit and stone." The little town (pop. 69,000) on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Great Smoky Mountains, is known across the U.S. as a haven for artists of all persuasions and as a center of traditional Appalachian culture. It also plays host to a wide range of spiritual sensibilities. Writer Mado Hesselink described it in the Mountain Times as a town where one can encounter, within the same short drive, bumper stickers ranging from "We Still Pray" to "We Still Chant" to "We Still Ride Broomsticks and Howl at the Moon".

"We continually turned to the opposites prevalent in our town," said Rae Bucher, the Wortham Theatre’s outreach coordinator, in the performance program. In addition to the area’s wide variety of spiritual beliefs and practices, she said, the "Hallelujah" participants talked about the physical opposites in the land, the mountains and the valleys, and how the landscape is both a lure and a barrier. They talked, too, about "the large gap between liberals and conservatives, the income gaps in our population."

"Hallelujah" tended to attract people interested in spirituality and religion all across the country, but in Asheville it found spirit of a particular flavor, one bound up in a wild mountain landscape dotted with bountiful home gardens, where herbal healing and handicrafts are common practice. Walking down its streets filled with art galleries and crafts stores, you see men in beards and sandals, women on bicycles with long, long hair.

One hundred of these people passed through the process for Asheville’s "Hallelujah," in four residency periods, 23 workshops and more than 50 hours of work in preparation for the performance. They included an all-come group with little or no dance experience, some professional dancers and a group from the Center for Creative Retirement. Only 30 of them appeared in the final performance, but they were an interesting 30; they included a practitioner of Sign Language, the manager of the Asheville Art Museum, the director of the National League of Junior Cotillions, a resident of both Asheville and Nepal, a health educator, a hospice nurse, a jazz singer and a marketing consultant.

I arrived in Asheville on Friday before the Saturday and Sunday performances, ventured across the town square and into the theater, where I found a stage full of people of all ages happily teaching each other their ideas, moving together, touching, reaching. I heard Peter DiMuro, the director, say, "Try to do the bottom phrase — anybody feel like they don’t want to do it?"

There were groups of people being called "The Doo-Wop Girls" and "The Whisper Women." Dancers who were a little thick in the waist wore sweaters tied around them. A chunky redhead swept the floor with her fingertips and you could see her sensuality gently drape itself over her body. One tall dancer complained of a bleeding foot and got a Band-Aid for it. A strawberry blond of indeterminate gender danced in sunglasses. An older woman came in with a long rope, stretching it all across the stage.

"One of us may ask you to drop what you’re doing and become a giant stone," announced DiMuro. "Move the Marvin chunk off and the lace chunk off. Good work, you got three things done at once. Oh, y’all’re so purty, lookit chy’all."

Gradually, the rehearsal unfolded its "chunks" of imagery: A dance about gardening, with the sowing of seeds, ploughing, plants growing, vines climbing, trees, boulders. And text to illuminate it: "It takes four years for asparagus to thrive. Flowers, herbs, vegetables, a young man is teaching me."

Memories of leaving Asheville in frustration: "I missed the cities. I wanted to be successful in everything, acting, painting, lucky in love. but I was always trying to fit into someone else’s mold." And stories of coming back again: "I’m back in the mountains now. It’s slower, I focus on who I am, not what I’ve done. Stones grow slowly around here."

Two women from two different continents complained about their broken hearts, "I know how that goes." Four duets about "the Miss Atlanta voice," had women dancers shaping each other, binding each other, lying on top of each other: "The voices on our shoulders. The voices that don’t want you to change. My friend calls her Miss Atlanta. ‘You ought to keep your legs together.’ ‘Heels would make your legs look longer and slimmer.’"

There were combinations of jazzy and static moments and a fantastically complex and uncomfortable conglomeration of bodies. Men dancers played with a long veil: three young bald men and a rangy, white-haired sexagenarian. An older woman carried a rope serenely across a stage full of leaping young people.

The same woman made motions in the air.

Q: What are you doing?

A: Making lace.

Q: Why?

A: I am passionate about lace. The Mountain Lacers meet on Saturdays once a month and make lace all day long. I learned it at the Southern Highland Craft Guild 10 years ago. Garden spiders are the best lacemakers. Every year they pick a spot and come to it all summer long and weave a web, reweaving every day. No two are alike. "Punto in aria," a point in the air, that’s what lace is, a needle capturing light and air into thread.

Q. What’s its going to be?

A: Something beautiful.

For the dancers, this story must have called up the connections and reconnections they had been making with their neighbors during the process of creating "In Spirit and Stone." For those of us who had experienced "Hallelujah" across the country in many different communities, a continental web emerged: the giant lace tablecloth of "Hallelujah," made by the Dance Exchangers criss-crossing the nation, returning to the same spots again and again like garden spiders making their webs. After having been present for so many of the individual projects, it was easy for me to spot pieces of the gardening and planting choreography from "In Praise of Fertile Fields" at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts, used here to bring alive the gardens and the wildflowers of North Carolina, with the addition of stone imagery from the local mountains. It was easy to recognize Robert Een’s gorgeous cello and harmonium work from "Fertile Fields," transplanted here to a push-pull dance piece illustrating the dynamics of opposites and calling up the dignity and history infusing this centuries-old Appalachian environment.

Between rehearsals I interviewed Mary Stair, a striking, petite woman who sings and plays piano for a living. She told me how lacemaking had emerged as a key theme for the Asheville piece. She had been in a small group set up by Michelle Pearson, the project director. Stair heard an older woman, Ellen Maynard, telling the story about how she learned to make lace, and she thought it over. Later Stair discussed it with Pearson as a possible theme, a metaphor for art making, for the weaving together of opposites, the bringing together of all these stories. She saw a beauty in that. It reminded her, she said, of a poem she had been reading, which she showed to me. It was from "I Heard God Laughing," translations from Hafiz, a 14th-century Persian poet, by Daniel Ledensky:

…I can see in your eyes
that you are exquisitely woven
with the finest silk and wool…
Wayfarer, your body is my shrine.
…see Hafiz kneeling by your side,
Humming playful tunes
and shedding joyful tears
Upon your wondrous hidden Crown.

Excited, Stair explained how serendipitous things had been: the creation of the piece while reading the words of Hafiz. The experiences had somehow chimed. She turned the pages and brought me to this one:

I am happy even before I have a reason.
I am full of light even before the sky can greet the sun or moon …
What can Hafiz do now but forever dance?

And this:

I see saints bowing in the mountains
Hundreds of miles away
To the wonder of sounds
that break into light
From your most common words.
…Hafiz could set you upon a stage
And worship you forever!

It was clear that, for her, this weekend was far more than a performance. It was playing out on a spiritual plane.

Liz Lerman, who had consigned most of the N.C. projects to her company, arrived during rehearsal, where she was told about the project’s many drop-outs, attributed to the rigor of the process. In a long interview during her Asheville stay, Lerman talked about what she had still to learn about making a work of quality with so people in a limited time and limited budget.

I have questions about the nature of how long it really takes to recruit and build the relationships you need to build, so that people who are really far removed from this will participate. I think about the Shipyard [a Dance Exchange project in New Hampshire 1994-96], I think about Burlington [Vermont’s "Hallelujah"] – we went back and forth to Burlington for four years, we went to the shipyard for two years. We did lose some people on this project here, and I think it has a little bit to do with the speed with which we had to move from workshop mode to concert mode. There’s not enough time to build those relationships up. …

And I just continue to think about the finances and how you can afford to do that work, and yet it has to be done. I’m not sure that local artists who do (or maybe don’t do) this work understand that. It just takes time. So, that’s a question….The people here [Asheville] say you’re asking for such a big commitment from people. I don’t know how easy you want to make it for people so they think making art is simple. …Working from nothing like we do in "Hallelujah" and going from nothing to something, it has to include, if it’s to be worthwhile, the bad side, not just the good side of making art. So, we have to help our presenter understand there’s going to be some trauma, they might hear from people who were unhappy.

If people were unhappy, they were not among the people who communicated with me. Idelle Packer, one of the professional dancers in the piece, offered some graceful new insights into what it’s like to participate in "Hallelujah." Packer graduated from college in 1971. "I had not taken formal dance classes in years," she told me by mail.

And, yes, I was able to do the dancing and creating on a level with my own and the Lerman dancers' expectations. It felt great to conquer the self-doubt. This feeling of accomplishment has stayed with me. I also wanted to meet the dancers in the Asheville community. The experience that has stayed with me is the strong connection I now feel to the dance community here in Asheville as a result our intense work together. And the choreography itself has stayed with me. When I recognize certain "Hallelujah Project" movement phrases come into my improvisation, I smile inside, as though seeing a photo of an old friend and knowing that part of that old friend is now a part of me.

I am struck with the risk on the part of the creators and the participants. As a former professional dancer, I felt I was taking a risk in that I did not know the company's process nor their aesthetic. For the company members, they delved into the creative process, learning our phrases to add to their movement vocabulary with the same intensity we were learning their phrases and bringing them into our vocabulary. I loved how the company members were woven into our dance. It would have been less risky (and less time-consuming) to just perform their own section. But the experience would not have been the same. The rewards of all this risk were seen in the integration of the final choreography. I couldn't have predicted its beauty and power. I was grateful I had taken the risk and the challenge to be a part of its development and performance.

The Asheville performance also included some new surprises from the Dance Exchange company. They showed excerpts from the brand-new "Dances at a Cocktail Party," commissioned by the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center for its "American Music Festival 2002: Bernstein, Broadway, the Bomb — the Age of Anxiety." This work was in a style I had not yet seen from the Lerman company. Created to a selection of Leonard Bernstein pieces, including his Broadway musicals, it was sweet, jazzy, flirty dance in cocktail dresses and evening suits, with bluesy piano, cigarettes and moves sampled from "West Side Story." "Be the dots on these little black dresses," Lerman had told the dancers when they began to work on the material, which emerged rich in specific detail. They also worked on "character sketches" based on the life of Bernstein and his wife, and from those improvisations came a solo by Margot Greenlee, a female figure conceptually trapped in a box, utterly surrounded by the strong identity of her male partner.

The selections created a period piece, calling up images from the ’50s and showcasing the dancers in a strong new dimension. The Bernstein work gave the company a chance to work on something completely outside of "Hallelujah," which for them, after two years of concentrating on facilitating others’ work, was a real treat. "They wanted us to do something about ‘The Age of the Anxiety,’" Lerman told me.

Bernstein in the ’50s. We made two sections for Tampa: One was his age of anxiety and one was our age of anxiety. ... I feel that after a series of encounters like "Hallelujah," the time we get together is like sacred time. And the time in rehearsal around our own artistic edge is so sacred. Not to say that it is more or less, it’s just that you can’t go out and do all that work in communities if you don’t get that other time. They’re both incredibly intense and the value of the time that we have with ourselves after a series of these encounters is incredible. And I think that’s what helped us make what we just made.

The second half of the evening, "Uneasy Dances" focused only on company work, and the dark political events of the previous year emerged here with force.

Liz Lerman performed a bittersweet solo she made in 1998 called "Body Map," from "Fifty Modest Reflections on Turning Fifty." It celebrated and explored two simultaneous 50th birthdays: Lerman’s and Israel’s. Lerman, who has done a large body of work about her relationship to her own Jewish identity, has, like many American Jews, a great deal of painful ambivalence about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the residents of Palestine. "Imagine my body as a map of Israel," she began, physically locating significant geographical and historical sites in her different organs and limbs: Haifa, the West Bank. Finally approaching her heart, she began thumping her chest with an ominous cadence. Quoting a friend, she shouted, "Don’t! Don’t make your heart a metaphor for Jerusalem. It’s too cut, too split. It will mean you have a broken heart." To which, in stillness, she answered, "It’s impossible to be 50 and not have a broken heart."

This blow to the heart was followed by "Anatomies and Epidemics," simply one of the most powerful pieces of theater I have ever seen; I have seen it five times now and it doesn’t get stale with repetition. A reflection on the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, the work is a jarring combination of apparent opposites: inconsolable grief and uncontrollable laughter. The piece has three movements, including a beginning and ending section steeped in lament and loss. Choreographed to the music of Andy Tierstein and the visionary, mystical East-West synthesis of composer Alan Hovahness, and lit with sensitivity and inspiration by Michael Mazzola, the work stands up to its challenge of mourning the obliteration of our country’s innocence and its entry into an increasingly complex 21st century.

The piece opens with the company in glittering black costumes, embarking upon what Lerman calls "an introduction to the idea of heartache." It centers on Martha Wittman’s story, created in the November 2001 "Hallelujah" for southern Michigan, in which she captures the enduring image of the World Trade Center falling in a shower of glass "like poured sugar." It moves into a lament meant to capture both the beauty and chaos of grief.

"You know how grief can be beautiful?" Lerman asked me. "My own experience with grief is that there’s something of relief. Something where you can be really connected to the way autumn leaves break apart, but it can be really harsh, and what I’m trying to do in that is begin the lament with this sense of beauty and build it." Finally, the company collapses into chaos, throwing each other around the stage. About this section, Lerman told me, "When I got the phone call that my father had actually died – meanwhile we had been hoping for him to die because it was so awful at the end – I just remember falling to the floor and having this feeling like if I’d known it was going to feel like this, I would have kept him alive forever. Because trying to get to that, in fact it’s not beautiful at all. The bottom drops out."

At the end of the lament, Peter DiMuro moves to the front of the stage and begins to tell a story about a laughing epidemic in Africa, which began with young girls and spread uncontrollably to whole towns. The company members begin some heavy breathing, which morphs into giggles, then guffaws, accompanied by knee-slapping, sneezing and hooting. This moves into choreography to a Spike Jones piece of "music" composed entirely of different kinds of laughter. It’s utterly infectious, and audiences wind up laughing in spite of themselves.

This piece of the work, according to Lerman, "is four-and-a-half minutes of some of the best choreography we’ve done. I shouldn’t toot my own horn, but I really like that section." The whole Spike Jones component was performed without the dancers actually laughing. "My assignment to the dancers was to do a visualization where they had to follow the line of the laughter precisely, but the movement couldn’t look like laughter," said Lerman.

And they struggled, they really struggled. They all had tapes and took them home, and Martha came back and had figured it out. And once they saw Martha’s, they knew what to do. And it’s her musicality that allowed us to do this. And it was such fun because we were so disciplined. Partly with the community work, when you’re working fast, you’ve gotta do a big wash, you can’t always get down to the details. This was so detailed and we had so much fun.

This hilarity is followed by a mystifyingly serio-comic piece of text performed by Marvin Webb, describing the biological process of a "strange behavior," that begins with Webb crawling across the stage on his stomach and ends with Webb and one of the women dancing a duet with their backs to the audience, massaging their own derrieres. Music starts up in a more serious vein as the dancers move a line of chairs in a diagonal across the stage and all sit down facing downstage, going through a series of gestures that echo some of the "laughter" choreography, but with a very nervous edge. Occasionally, a dancer falls out of a chair and flops hysterically around the stage, only to be led back to the line of chairs.

The piece then moves into a monologue by Wittman that expands on the biological description of the contorted, paralyzed body of a person so physically transported that he is unable to speak: "Your mouth was half-open, your tongue was hanging out, you were contorted, you were gasping for air." The two contexts, one comic and another apparently tragic, conflate the biological processes of paroxysmic laughter and immoblizing grief — even, possibly, death.

The impact of this shift in emotions is hard to describe, at once exhilarating and shocking, introducing almost a feeling of guilt. "I was just so sure that we were onto something," said Lerman, "with the laughter material that we got at the Grantmakers [Grantmakers in the Arts, an organization of program officers from private foundations] meeting, which was a mini mini mini ‘Hallelujah.’

They had asked us to come and be in residence for three days. It was part of the renewal part of their conference. There was the idea that you would come and study with us every day and then some of them would perform with us in the concluding performance of the conference. But this conference took place in early November [2001], so it was completely, totally colored by September 11.

Meanwhile the grantmakers were spending days trying to talk about it, so by the time they got to actually move or see their colleagues move … they were awash in feeling. … We had decided we’d start the morning with the inquiry of "How have you been human in the last six weeks?" We were testing it on a couple of our grantmaker friends, and one of them was Nick Rabkin, who was having breakfast with us, although he didn’t take the workshop. His response was, "I don’t know, but any time I have a chance to laugh, I’m so relieved."

So, I ran upstairs and got on the Internet immediately, because I just had this flash that I should find out what it’s like biologically for us to laugh. And when I did this, I encountered this story about a laughing epidemic. And then I went back downstairs and began working with the grantmakers, and at one point, we did a little "ha-ha" lying on the floor with them. So, all these grantmakers are lying on top of each others’ bellies going "ha-ha-haaa-ha." And I had the company in the back doing it without sound. That’s when I noticed that laughing and crying were identical, you couldn’t tell them apart. … It reminded me of the moments in my own life when they have been completely merged, specifically around my mother’s death and my father’s death, where you would be laughing one second and crying the next. I was so charged by that idea and feeling that the momentum we had made in Michigan had a lot of power that I felt convinced we should do this. It wasn’t like we were commissioned; there was no date for it. It was just like, "Okay, we have to make this."

The piece then moves into full grieving, with dancers comforting and carrying each other, shaking and falling. At one point, the two tallest dancers, in this case Thomas Dwyer and Ted Johnson, stood together on the stage’s apron like twin towers, then crumpled to the floor. At the work’s end, a soulful response poured forth from the audience, with many shout-outs for the company.

For me, the most evocative moment of the piece came when the dancers were all seated in a row on chairs. Not being a resident of New York or Washington, I experienced 9/11 in front of a television set, unable to tear myself away for days and days, saturated with misery and helplessness. Those feelings came back in strength as I watched the dancers glued to their seats, writhing with anxiety. It was a very strong physical response in me, transporting me back in time. But I later learned that Lerman had envisioned this as a reference to the workers in the towers at their desks. And others have said they saw it as people sitting in the highjacked airliners, unable to prevent their own deaths. Others have viewed it as a hospital scene.

Everyone I have talked to had a striking response to this piece, the most surprising and marked one coming from friends who are residents of New York City. More than once, New Yorkers have responded to my queries with vehemence, almost violence, in their rejection of this piece and all others about 9/11. One said she was "9/11-ed out," referring to the uncountable number of artworks and TV news specials that have plumbed human reaction to those events. I also detect a note of propriety, as if New Yorkers are tired of other Americans appropriating a tragedy that was so enormous and so immediate that it can be truly understood only if you live in New York. There seems to be little sympathy for the fact that the Dance Exchange comes from Washington and therefore owns a good-sized piece of that story. The emotion in these responses from usually rational friends made me re-assess the whole 9/11 event. I now believe that, no matter how many documentaries or artworks I consume, I can never know what it was like to live with the horror and lingering death for so many months, and the post-trauma stress for years.

Asheville’s "Hallelujah" ended with the usual love-fest in the lobby. Before the performers came out, they met with the producing team of Pearson, Webb and DiMuro. Pearson told them that one purpose of doing this kind of work was to give them a real tool they could use in their lives. "If you are sad, this gives you the power to claim it," she said. Then she gave each of them a chocolate, a candle to take back home ("Don’t move till it’s gone") and a promise to see them again.

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

Original CAN/API publication: January 2003