Changes: An Interview with Liz Lerman at the End of the "Hallelujah" Trail

This interview with Liz Lerman, artistic director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, took place at the University of Maryland, College Park, on August 6, 2002, during "Hallelujah/USA," the final residency in the company's nationwide community performance initiative. Participants in the previous 14 "Hallelujah" residencies converged from all over the U.S. to take part in this two-week performance finale, including youngsters who came to attend the Teen Dance Institute. Lerman talks about her history in community arts, "political" art, cultural and age diversity in performance projects, changes in the Dance Exchange company over the two-year span of "Hallelujah," and coming changes in the arts. —LB

Linda Burnham: When did you begin to think about your work with communities and its place in the art world?

Liz Lerman: Where I began to feel uncomfortable about my own articulation was probably in the early 1980s when I realized the fact that I had to talk about art and community as two separate words. I would meet people for whom those words weren't separate, primarily in the dance world coming out of the African scene. That's when I began to locate this idea that mine was an art form that was bereft, and in order to reimagine my art form in what I felt to be a truer sense, it had to go through these things I was doing. We needed new art forms in opposition to what we had growing up — the alienation, separation, that whole myth. New forms were developing. I think for example, this weekend is an entirely new form. And I'm not saying I want to practice this form all the time. I don't. But what it is is definitely different.

LB: Some people in grassroots art stopped at the Civil Rights movement and refuse to budge.

LL: I've found myself writing about myself in three different periods: the first period being personal grief and personal politics, translating to my work with old people and my docu-dances; then the middle period being about identity and cross-cultural stuff, "The Good Jew." Then you start crossing some lines after that, I wouldn't like to use the word "spiritual," because I'm not that happy with that word, but it does seem that this last decade has been much more oriented toward the political, but it doesn't look "political."

LL: I think it's also about an outcome that isn't measured by whether you change the political state. Once I made a piece about "Star Wars," the Ronald Reagan anti-missile system. The day after I premiered it, he gave his Evil Empire speech about the Russians and I felt like a total failure. I felt like I had gotten the worst review of my life. I think I thought that my art could change the political establishment. After that, I began to be less inclined to the political "fix-it." However, I have to say in total contradiction that an outcome of "Hallelujah," some of this political art mood is returning and I think it's going to see its way into some of my next pieces. But I don't know how I'm going to synthesize it. I need to hold myself to this: I don't think political art must have a political outcome.

LB: Our national politics in the 1990s became so much about race and class. "Hallelujah" included people of so many different backgrounds, yet, as far as I know, the projects didn't become bogged down in racial or class bickering. Is that because, going in, you weren't focusing on those topics per se? You were focusing on what people were in praise of, which allowed them to describe their situation in new way, and allowed you to stand beside them?

LL: Maybe everybody was able to step out of that particular box. I'm sure there are subtexts of it around in a couple of our sites.

LB: During "Hallelujah" you worked in 15 communities across the U.S. Lately I've been studying community-based performance ensembles that have been serving one community for 15-35 years. I'm curious about your work at home in Takoma Park. What's your situation with your community and what would you like to do there? And if you could avoid touring to stay alive, would you do that?

LL: It's a little complicated psychologically for a dance company because touring is how you live. We can't stay home and make new work fast enough to support a company of the same dancers over a given year in one place. That's just not possible. Now you would think that you could do a fall season and a spring season and carry out some community-based projects cycling in and out all year long with a variety of structures — some would be training projects, performance projects, education, research projects. But it's an income thing. For every project we want to do at home, we have to find the money to stay home, as opposed to getting paid to travel. Now, I think we're beginning to think that we can change that. For example, Margot (company member Margot Greenlee) took the initiative to meet with the Library of Congress to propose a series of projects that relate to the archives, to their work with young people and to their staff. And ff we could build a long-term relationship with a local presenter or a university even just the summer, we could be here in the summer.

LL: Yes, it is. Our roots are in D.C., which is the urban hub of our region, and we also get incredible support from friends in our county and state. And our local partnerships extend into northern Virginia. So, we tend to focus broadly when we think about our home community. But we'd still need to tour some. My desire to get off the road is not the same as the dancers in the company. As they build their work, they want it to be seen elsewhere. When you tour, there are some skills you learn that I'm not sure you can learn with a home audience. And I also think it's really hard to do this work at home and carry on our lives with our families. It's easier to be on the road. It's something about compartmentalizing your life. When you go out, you become so focused on the work in communities. You put in these 14-hour days. I don't know how that can flower at home.

LB: People do it. Some companies are so busy in their own communities, they never get out and seen what else is going on.

LL: — and meet people. In general I'm not in favor of national/local as a formulation, but I do feel that a lot of people are here ("Hallelujah/USA") because we're a national company. And they give themselves permission to take two weeks out of their lives to do this in a way that they could not do for themselves at home. And if that's true, let's harness that psychological thing to the best good we possibly can.

Since we came home, I've been trying to figure out how best to relate to the community here at home. I don't think it's going to take a long time to figure the non-dance part out.

LL: If you think about our 25-year history, I'd say yes, we've done all of them. In any given period, though, we've tended to focus on a few at a time. The first ten years we hardly went anywhere. There have been long, long periods in the community. All the work at the Roosevelt Hotel [a D.C. residential facility for senior adults] and all my work with aging in the area. There was a very conscious act of bringing people together in productions.

I think now, in the last five years since we moved to Takoma Park, we've offered the building as a resource to Kankouran, one of the best African companies in our area, four days a week. A lot of people use the space just for rehearsals, which I think is important. I think we've carried out a kind of vision of what it can belike, people know us for something. And to an extent, that is valuable for everybody. If you're interested in thinking about an intergenerational company, you think of the Dance Exchange right away. We have been able to build some partnerships that I think are really interesting.

For me, one vision I would have about our local community — this is a little exploitative — is that it's our laboratory, and we can see that most clearly at Temple Micah, where I've been for eight years now, evolving work that I then take out with me wherever I go. When you think that I spent ten years at the Roosevelt, there's an aspect – it isn't that at that time you would look at that institution and say the dance program had a big impact and here are the ways. Now, the only way you know that is what you see in me and how I have learned how to train people and animate institutions.

LB: So, you didn't really change the Roosevelt permanently? It went back to what it was?

LL: There was a while there when they were trying to do a rent strike and the people leading it were the dancers, which I loved. And I always wondered if it was the dance program that got them strong enough to do that, or was it just that those were the kind of people who would come out for both dance and leadership? Probably some combination of both. I think for a while we had a huge impact, but by the time we left it was degenerating. Eventually it closed its doors. They're renovating the building, which started as an exclusive hotel back in the 1920s, into a huge luxury condo.

LB: So, this is a question: Artists help to make change in institutions and then it stops being the flavor of the month, the program ends, they go away and what happens after that, after you unplug the artists?

LL: At that period, one of the most important contracts we had was with the D.C. government to work at D.C. nursing homes where the poor and indigent lived. We did that program for a couple of years. It was really incredible. Then they decided that they should put it out for bid because they were so intrigued. And of course, at that point we would have had to come in and underbid, and already we were doing it for nothing. We just threw up our hands.

LB: Let's talk about your economic situation. You know, this Rand study came out and said all the mid-sized arts organizations are in danger.

LL: We could have closed our doors yesterday. I know that from the outside we are so much most stable than most dance companies. We have salaries and benefits, and I have to say that has been my goal to do that for the dancers. We are still under so much pressure to stop doing that — to stay in the institutions and not pay people this way and put our resources into production and not into people. Our fragility is huge. Yes, we could all take pay cuts and we could survive. But I would lose my dancers. I don't think anybody is overpaid at the Dance Exchange.

LB: Do you think the fragility is because of the decisions that you've made or is it because of the decline of arts funding?

LB: One of the things people are talking about lately is the phenomenon of communities knowing that they need artists to help them do something, and hiring the artists to come in a collaborate with them. I was wondering about the original contacts for "Hallelujah": Was it an individual acting out of his own need or as a representative of a group, or a collaboration, or an active spirit in the community?

LL: The bulk of the "Hallelujahs" fell into a conventional partnership with a presenter. There were some where that wasn't the case, and it would take a different structure on our part to help make those come to be, but we're very interested in trying to figure out how to do that. For example, the newspaper publisher in North Dakota where all the floods were. We got there, the publisher introduced us to people in town, we even had a funder who was interested, but we couldn't find anybody in town who could really take it on. To find that local person was a real problem. But most of our contacts came through presenters. In some cases, they were personally attracted to the theme. In some cases, they viewed us as someone who can be a vehicle for them to succeed at something they're trying to succeed at in their community. In one or two cases, they were encouraged to bring us by their community: "We want them again, please bring them back."

One of the big stretches in "Hallelujah" was this seesaw between "You're the artist, you're the visionary, what to you want to do?" and listening, waiting. Truly feeling like I don't have to have a vision in this moment. I'm perfectly content to wait here till I hear what it is. Knowing we probably won't hear it if it doesn't interest us. See what I mean?

LL: I'm not sure what we dropped along the way because there was no buzz. It's almost like it takes two to connect for a contact.

LB: What kinds of people are attracted to this particular project automatically?

LL: We've been struck by the extent to which middle-aged white women with some dance background are at the core of the all-come group, and the generosity that they display to be chorus to other people's stories. Pretty amazing.

LL: They're the backbone of most worlds. They're the audience, they're the crossover people, they're the staff. The issue for us potentially with that group is training. Sometimes they come with just enough dance training to make it difficult. because they don't have that awkward honesty of the beginner and they don't have the real technique necessary to come back to being a beginner. And what you see when you watch them move is the amateur, and it's hard to bring the person out when that's what you see.

That's just one type of person. I'm extremely intrigued by our ability on this project to lead to more groups that come out of particular traditions: the Hmong, the folklorico, the Buddhists. I feel like we've had more of them on this project than we've had on any of our previous projects, and I think that's really interesting.

LB: For one thing, it appears that the majority are people of color. Do you think so?

LB: I haven't seen everybody in one place, but so far it looks like that. Did you expect this kind of diversity for "Hallelujah"?

LL: We didn't know that, but we wanted them to. I feel that basing this inside a combination of — praise, yes — but basing it inside ritual or ceremony seems to ease that. And of course, the other thing that eases it is the old people. It always makes a difference that we have old people around.

LL: I don't know, it's like when we brought in Native Americans, the few times we've been able to, it's always the fact that we have elders in our group that makes it seem like we're onto something, that makes it feel more like home to them.

LB: As the project wore on, I noticed the elders in the company really getting a lot of opportunities to shine. Thomas (Dwyer) doing that astonishing solo that just stops the show, and lots of Martha, (Wittman) and Sharon (Chaikin). Really seeing a strong interest on your part in using them. Did that change or grow as it went along?

LL: I have a subset of questions about that part of our work and, of course, a huge desire to get back to it in a big way — partly because I feel like the world has changed around me and I want to understand, partly because of my own age. I'm there now. I'm the age Thomas was when he joined the company. He's the longest member, 14 years. I rely on Martha a lot. She's like my combination muse/mother/teacher. I feel like on a non-dance level I can talk to her about anything. I feel like on a dance level, there isn't anything she can't solve.

LL: It's over the top amazing. I am so thrilled. If ever a foundation did it right, it was Surdna giving us that money. We would never have been able to get those teens here. Never. I can't wait to tell them that. They really did a good thing. And the kids, it's just unbelievable to watch them. We've never done a national Teen Institute one, but we've been talking about it for a while. Actually, years ago, Claudine Brown suggested it to me. This year, it seemed like we had the means, we had the reason.

LB: The opportunity for them to work so closely with people of all those ages is important. The age diversity is unbelievable. If you got everybody together in one room and you named off the ages from 13 on up, somebody would stand up for every single age.

LL: Here's my question, will the audience, just being in the room with everybody, will they take that in? Because there's a part of me that feels like we should all just sit there and breathe the same air for two hours.

LB: In what I've seen far, there are devices that weave everybody together, like the spiral at the end. It strikes me every time I look at the stage, I'm so used to seeing it mobbed with white people, and once in a while it is, but mostly it is not, and anybody who looks at dance, they're just going to know that that's what's going on. The Asians, the American Indians, the Latinos.

LL: I think this is gong to be an interesting thing for the dance world in the next couple of decades. I don't know exactly how this is going to work. In the African-American dance community — and this is an oversimplification, as you had African dancers moving here and keeping African dance alive, and you had African-American dancers breaking the color line and beginning to study postmodern forms, and you had women begin to lead companies — this is a huge thing.

LL: Oh yeah. It's huge. For example, I have a friend Ferne Caulker in Milwaukee who's been running an African dance company for 30 years — unheard of. We have a young woman here in town named Sylvia Soumah; she is the future. This kid studied modern dance, she's running an African company named Koyaba and she's infusing it with not just modern ideas, but with feminist ideas, which is overwhelming to the form, totally changing the form. I predict that if you look at all the traditionally based dance companies right now, in the next decade as they become run by women, how we change those traditions is going to be something to watch. Particularly in the Latino community, there were very few modern/postmodern Latino choreographers. That's changing now. Merian Soto is probably the major one, she's been on her own, but I'm sure that's changing

LB: The key changes in the arts over the last 15 years have been through multicultural diversity. I've been talking to white people here who have organizations all around the country, and the story that keeps coming up is: The hardest thing, the biggest challenge, the most painful thing we ever did was diversify the organization, but it was the most important change. And everybody says it happened in about four years, 1988-1992. We all went through it at the same time, and there was a paradigm shift in the arts. And this is the next one that's going to happen, inside these ethnically specific communities, where their exposure to all this is going to diversify them in another way.

LL: For me personally, my work in the Jewish community gives me a real-life base in which to understand what some of these issues are. When I go home to the Jewish community, it means I'm working in primarily upper-middle-class synagogues, although the one I go to is a relatively poor one, I'm confronted regularly by questions of tradition: Am I ruining it? I am confronted in that world more than any other: What gives you the right to do this, and who are you, and you don't have any knowledge so how can you do this?

LB: I'm interested in the themes and threads that you can pull from throughout "Hallelujah." The obvious ones are art and faith, animals, highways disrupting communities of color —

LL: Also, I would say that there was something else important, too. It happened all over, like when we went from Deer Isle (Maine) to L.A., Here are the people in Deer Isle, so afraid of losing their land, but in L.A. they are afraid of losing their block! And you just have this feeling like we are not going to control the land in which we live. The forces that are moving this are so big and so fast and so mysterious.

Another thread we heard articulated somewhat, but I think you see it being lived out here, is people saying, "I'd like to spend time with people who are not like me." What I chose to get from that is that people are feeling strong enough about who they are — all that identity work paid off — I'm am who I am so I don't have to talk about who I am all the time and I can come to you and meet you for who you are.

LL: This isn't a thread, it's a structural device: I think when we figured out that some of them could do beauty and disorder, constancy and change, that we were onto something by exhibiting this spectrum, and the more you crash the more you can also find the connections.

I was surprised to see the Biblical things reoccur — Biblical texts used as a basis on which to rest some of this. Think about that for a minute. In Tucson, we worked with the prophetic texts from the Bible. Originally, I thought Tucson was going to be about when spirituality and social action connect, or why aren't they more connected right now, given all this new spirituality in America. So I asked myself when were they connected and the first thought I had were the prophets, who just railed against injustice. Then we went to Jacob's Pillow and did the whole Jacob story. Then we went to Vermont, where we did the Song of Songs. Then Kazu (Nakamura) started giving us the Buddha stories, which were amazing. And then the rabbi in Los Angeles gave me the story about the dancing rabbis and their shoes. There was no Biblical stuff in Minneapolis. On this program, Adam and Eve come up in two different pieces. It begins "Fertile Fields," and then of course the whole thing that goes on in the Michigan segment.

LB: Do you think civic dialogue occurred around the issues that arose? Did people really get to talking among themselves around the issues and did people who weren't in Hallelujah get involved in that?

LL: I think on the participants' side, yes. I don't think we did enough, and one of the things I'm interested in doing after this is an interactive evening, where people participate, talk, dance and watch dance, because I think that the work generates that in people. But I know our participants have been talking up a storm, and the Buddhists said it was better than most of their dialogues. But what I don't know is whether there is some vulnerability, because for a lot of people movement is new, and whether that extra edge of vulnerability makes it feels deeper, or whether it truly always would be deeper if you used a combination of movement and talking. You know, when you're in dance rehearsal and you have to figure out, I'm going to have to touch you here and touch you here in order to move over to here, how are you going to do that, and I just keep thinking about Congress. If it were a natural thing that the Congress people had to problem-solve with their bodies some of the time, we would be in a whole different place.

LL: We did do a thing when the Older Americans Act was up, we went in and sort of testified, and we danced all over the place and the old people were improvising all over the room, but I don't think we got them dancing. Status is the biggest obstacle to participation.

LL: I'm a little bit aware of the downside from this kind of work. There's just never enough time. For instance, there's that section where we tell the story of the guy carrying the cross. And I think that's going to be such a brilliant structure and I can see how that can work. But we need a week to make it really good. So, what I get to put out on Friday is a sketch. In some cases we can never go past the sketch, and when we do it's really wonderful.

LB: The last thing I want you to articulate is the changes you have seen in the company and the dancers as individuals.

LL: They are amazing. They don't even know what they know. Look at Elizabeth (Johnson). I think she's completely the future. But I can go on and on about each one of them. It feels to me it's a combination of their natural skills coming out more. Margot's interest in detail and the kind of rigor that's organized, that comes out more. Marvin (Webb) and his natural inclination to be generous and to bring people to a place of joy: That has increased.

LB: They've gotten so much response from the participants over the last two years.

LL: They've just gotten so good at all the things that matter to me: Their ability to teach, perform, choreograph, manage. It's really very interesting to watch somebody like Ted (Johnson) come along and try to figure out if this is right for him and where the anxiety is.

LL: The whole way that we're on the edge all the time. These are incredible risks everybody's taking every second. And to watch people decide, am I going to go in that direction or, I can't. And how that brings out the best in people.

LB: Sarah Wolf (dance critic) said to me that dancers are perfectionists and they're detail people, and being in dance satisfies all of that so much. And you've just thrown that into a cocked hat. You're challenging them to be those people and yet take on all this uncertainty all the time. Constant growth and stretching and risk.

LL: All the time. But that's why you love having pieces like "Uneasy Dances' and "Fertile Fields." There have to be these moments when you just pull into rehearsal and you go: Is it this or is it this?

LL: That's very interesting, the changing part. Some of it is addictive. I think I'm changing something for the better, but I might not be.

LL: No I don't, I like making things better, more than I like change. I can't stand to watch things that aren't right. That's the perfectionist. Why would I do that when it could be so much better? But it's also my own performing. I hated performing in things that I thought could be better.

LB: One of the big conflicts I noticed with the dancers, and they've said this to me, is that they can't always know when it's time to stop giving you input. Is that clarifying, have you worked on that?

LL: I don't mind. They also change things themselves and they don't know I'm watching. But I just say to them: It's your job to change things and my job to pull it back. It's their job to give me suggestions and I can always say to them: I'm not open for business right now. What's a little harder here right now is that I have a vision about what this section should look like and I haven't got time to go do it. So, I'll say: Try this. And they'll come back with something that's not what I'm thinking. But when I can see that what they've done is as good or better, I'll say: Go. But if I think mine is going to be better, then they have to try again, and that's really challenging. Ooh, they got so mad at me yesterday, but we got through it.

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Changes: An Interview with Liz Lerman at the End of the "Hallelujah" Trail

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