High Mass in the Church of Art: The "Hallelujah" Finale

"In Praise of Borrowed Blessings" at "Hallelujah/USA." Photo by Stan Barouh. View a slideshow of images from Hallelujah/USA.

Hallelujah/USA
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland
August 9, 10 and 11, 2002

"Hallelujah/USA" was a homecoming like no other. One hundred twenty people from many different communities and backgrounds came together in their virtual home: the finale of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's "Hallelujah" initiative. For nearly five years they had been working in 15 communities across the U.S. on their own "Hallelujah" projects, and now they would have the chance to meet other people who had this same unique experience.

"Hallelujah/USA" was a ten-day intensive, July 29-August 11, 2002, culminating in four performance events August 9, 10 and 11. Six dance-theater pieces from the 15 "Hallelujahs" were staged in two completely different programs, each performed twice (see program). The excerpts included:

• "In Praise of Fertile Fields" from the "Hallelujah" at Jacob's Pillow in Becket, Mass.
• "In Praise of Animals and Their People" from Washington D.C.
• "Anatomies and Epidemics," the recently completely company piece
• "In Praise of Constancy in the Midst of Change" from Vermont
• "In Praise of Paradise Lost and Found" from Michigan, and
• "In Praise of Borrowed Blessings," a "collage" of new material mixed with snippets from the "Hallelujahs" in Tucson, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, North Carolina and Maine.

In addition to workshops, art making and socializing, participants engaged in a National Teen Institute, a morning of "Dances for Dogs and the People Who Walk Them," a gathering to explore art and faith in contemporary life and an "Art Scribe" circle and forum involving critics who have been following "Hallelujah."

"Hallelujah/USA" was co-presented by the Dance Exchange and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Maryland in College Park. Workshops and performances found a home in this a state-of-the-art 318,000-square-foot facility, which houses the School of Music and Departments of Theatre and Dance, as well as the center's presenting program, Maryland Presents. The Smith Center offered a whole bouquet of studios, rehearsal rooms and theaters to this event, plus a performing-arts library and a complement of production shops, classrooms and meeting spaces. Many of the participants stayed on campus in the dorms, offering a rare opportunity for interaction without the distractions of everyday life at home.

As someone who had attended eight of the 15 "Hallelujahs" across America, I was irresistibly tempted to be part of this gathering. It was bound to produce the collaborative hum I had come to know as particular to "Hallelujah" -- dozens and dozens of strangers with varying degrees of experience in performance, all conspiring to make something new about what they are in praise of -- but with an extra intensity. These were people who had been through the fire: the excitement, the uncertainty, the apprehension, the exhilaration, the disappointment, the exhaustion, the joy and the pride of this peculiar process -- and come back for more. It was a real kick to watch people gather on the first night, shrieking and tumbling into each other's arms, greeting old friends with "Hallelujah" battle stars and scars. What I wasn't ready for was the utterly breathtaking diversity.

I was used to seeing all kinds of people of all ages with all kinds of bodies, backgrounds, styles and sexual preferences working with the Dance Exchange, but I was also used to the majority of them being white women between the ages of 20 and 40. Not so this time. When everyone was gathered in one room, you could have called out ages beginning at about 6 and ending at about 70 and at least one person would have risen for each number. White people often appeared to be out-numbered, and there was a very healthy number of men.

Here is a list of some of the people who were in the dancing crowd of "Hallelujah" alumni (for a full list see the program):

• Daniel Preston, tribal and spiritual leader of the Tohono O'odham, the Native American Nation in the Tucson area
• Cid Pearlman, a Los Angeles-based choreographer and director of the Nesting Dolls dance company in Los Angeles
• Larissa Ortiz and Guillermo Monreal, members of the La Paloma Folklorico from Tucson
• Gwen Wyatt, leader of the Gwen Wyatt Chorale, an L.A. gospel group of retired adults
• Penny Godboldo, head of the dance department at Detroit's Marygrove College and director of a liturgical collective and the Pemajju Children's Workshop, along with teen and college-age dancers from all those groups
• Dan Berns and Jay Schuster, a tattooed and pierced gay couple from Vermont
• Fifteen dancers in their late teens to mid-20s from four North Carolina cities
• The All-City Men's Group from Detroit
• Six young women dancers from the Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul
• All six of the Monday Night Card Girls, Vermont women who have played cards together every Monday night for 40 years
• Rudy Hawkins and his Singers, a gospel choir from Detroit
• Dancers from the Teen Exchange program at the Dance Exchange
• The Washington Arts Society's Men and Women of the Gospel Mass Choir
• The All-American Fly Dogs

The job of weaving all this together was enormous. I thought I had seen miracles of collaboration in Los Angeles, Burlington, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Asheville, Raleigh, Boone and Greensboro, but the logistics of those feats were pale in contrast. And different, too. Burlington, for instance, took four years of intermittent visits. Minneapolis, Michigan and Los Angeles involved many square miles of travel across far-flung communities for weeks and weeks. But here, the Dance Exchangers, strung-out from two years of wrangling humans through rodeos of creativity, were now faced with creating a complex, relentless schedule of warm-ups, exercises, teaching, rehearsals, new collaborations, cool-downs and check-ins for 120 people who were in house for ten days (some with very special needs). Joy and inspiration were rampant, but I saw the Dance Exchange company members pushed to the edge of what they could endure.

I talked about this challenge with my colleague, dance critic Sara Wolf, herself a veteran dancer. She pointed out that dance attracts people who are perfectionists and very task-oriented. The particular requirements of dance satisfy those two obsessions. Liz Lerman herself can be described in this way. Yet she challenges herself and her company with elements that fly in the face of those tendencies: uncertainty, chaos, enormous changes at the last minute, uncontrollable circumstances and, above all, a limited amount of time in which to accomplish a monumental, multiphase task.

"We're on the edge all the time," Lerman told me in an August interview. "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 that brings out the best in people."

Lerman warned everybody at the top of the two-week session that it might be the hardest thing they had ever done.

Documenting "Hallelujah/USA"

In documenting this final portion of "Hallelujah," I was able to interview people from far and wide, and find some interesting writing by the artists themselves, so this package adds to "Everybody Say Hallelujah" new interviews with Liz Lerman, Celeste Miller, Penny Godboldo, some of the teen dancers and Joy Gill, the new executive director of the Dance Exchange. It also includes essays by Celeste Miller, Peter DiMuro, John Borstel and Elizabeth Johnson. See the Table of Contents for these extra views on "Hallelujah" and community performance.

It has been my purpose with "Everybody Say Hallelujah" to write about this initiative as community art. I have paid more attention to the community than the art, though I have tried to let the reader in on what the performances looked, felt and sounded like, and whether I thought they were successful as works of art. But the process events surrounding the performances rarely get written about, and for Liz Lerman, they are part of the art, too, so I took the opportunity to focus on them, to talk to the participants about their experience and to the artists and administrators about how this work gets done. It is my hope that other artists and communities will be able to use it as a kind of guide to creating such projects.

I have gone into detail in other sections of this writing project about individual processes that went into making "Hallelujah." The processes for this ten-day intensive were very similar, so I will only lift the curtain here and there to offer some unique peeks into how things went. The final performances were enormous collages of the works I have already written about, so I will not go into detail about them, either. I will pay some attention to events that were unique to this finale, the art-and-faith gathering and the Art Scribe Circle.

Joining the Circus

July 29, 2002, was hot in College Park, Maryland, and I may have been too optimistic about my ability to go back to school and live in a dormitory. When I arrived on campus, everything was chaotic and difficult: Parking was available but far away from the dorm, the dorm was hot and stuffy and grim, one of my dorm-mates was in a wheelchair and couldn't even get into the building, our food vouchers were to be honored in campus facilities that were closed or really hard to find, the dorm was miles away from the performing-arts center on the other side of campus. and it was as sweltering as summer in the American South can be. In short, I was grinding my teeth with anxiety as I entered Studio 2 at the Smith Center for the first morning gathering of participants, wondering if I should surrender and go home.

Of course, Liz Lerman had a remedy for that. Facing about 100 new arrivals, she asked in a sympathetic tone, "How are you all handling this?" There were some groans. "This is a time of meeting new people," she said, "and you are in a dance studio, so all the dance-studio feelings come up, as well as things about your body." There were nods and sighs, and then a shout-out from the crowd: "This is the most optimistic I've ever felt about the first day of school!" And the laughter and applause let me know we were in "Hallelujah" mode and it would eventually be all right.

"There are so many extraordinary people here, so go investigate," said Lerman. "You can notice what you usually do and do the opposite. There are some exciting movers in the room, so watch them. People highly trained in one dimension may struggle to learn another. Watch how we're putting things together."

Each day was structured to start with warm-ups, and you could choose from "quiet" (perhaps yoga or stretching with Celeste Miller) or "sweaty" (show tunes and athletics with Peter DiMuro).

There was at least one point in each day where everyone gathered for a check-in and to try something or look at something together. That first day, for instance, at 11:30 a.m., we watched a small group perform a short dance phrase taken from the "Hallelujah" in Deer Isle, Maine. Then we formed small groups, each led by a company member, with whom we would meet every day at 4:30 for show and tell. This morning, we were given an assignment to work on together.

Lerman told a now familiar story from the genesis of "Hallelujah": how a woman in a 1997 Dance Exchange post-performance discussion had said, "I'm tired of waiting for history to work itself out. I want to breathe now; I'm ready for a celebration."

"What are you holding your breath for?" Lerman asked us. "What do you want to celebrate?"

Our small group of a half-dozen, under the comical tutelage of Marvin Webb, talked about holding our breath, meeting each other, beginning new life. We decided we would begin our phrase scattered across the room, take three steps toward each other, "breathe funny," three steps, breathe funny, come together in a circle, breathe easier making eye contact, take hands and walk together in a formed circle, let go and start again three times, exit. We got some applause and part of this phrase ended up in the performance.

For the next exercise, the Dance Exchange company members each announced a movement theme (working with props, physical bravery, running slowly, slapping, fast feet) and we were directed to go to the idea that most attracted us. All over the room there were little groups of people simultaneously carrying objects, saving each other from disaster, running around the periphery, slapping their body parts and madly tiptoeing.

These are only two examples of many strategies used throughout that first week to generate possible new material, along with reworking and rehearsals of already formed material from the other "Hallelujahs" and scheming about how to stitch the whole thing together.

Listening to Stories

All week, while people worked like demons on their pieces of the art, I was stopping people in the halls or making lunch appointments or sitting on the grass and listening to their stories about "Hallelujah." Remember, these were people who had come from miles away to enjoy this process all over again, so there weren't many complainers. Instead, there were expressions of awe and faces streaming with tears as they recalled what they had experienced.

Sally Withers, a Montessori teacher from Tucson, told of being included in "Hallelujah" at the last possible minute:

I saw a performance that the Dance Exchange did in Tucson two or three years before and it was so incredible, and I talked with Liz afterwards. She was so lovely and wonderful, and told me to write to her. I got chicken, I never wrote. When I heard "Hallelujah" was coming, I thought I was way too late to get involved. I thought: If they only knew how much I was longing to just be able to be a fly on the wall or be able to sit in the back and see the process of how they pull that together. Then there was a call for people to come for the community choir, so I went and did that to get a taste of it that way. And Andy Teirstein's music was so beautiful, I loved it. Then the third rehearsal I was at, a week before the performance, Liz walked in. The company had come and they were rehearsing the dance in the other room, and I was dying, I wanted to go over so badly. So, I went over and I talked with her and she was again just so wonderful, and I said, "Could you possibly put me in?" And she said yes. I went in and Peter said, "Go on over there with Martha," and I got to sing and dance. It was like realizing my most wonderful dream. I was so lucky. I got to do a lot more than I ever expected. It was transformational. I know that sounds trite, but anybody that's been in it will know. For me it was a transformational thing. All these things have happened.

It made me feel like if I could give this to Liz as my personal gift to her, I am glad to be able to do it. My whole life I've loved dance and I always thought that that I was no dancer, that my body was not that kind of body. [She begins to weep.] I told her about that because her company includes everybody and it made me feel so wonderful to see it. And then to take part in "Hallelujah" -- for the first time, really, truly I felt like a dancer. And that meant so much to me because dance had been so big a part of my life, but I always felt like I wasn't really a dancer [weeping openly]. And this man that was the storyteller even came up and told me that I looked beautiful and he wanted to give me a hug. And that meant so much to me.

So, after that, all these things opened up. This man I wanted to study Tai Chi with, this master from China, right then he started a new session, so I got to study with him for the last two years that he was here in the United States. And now he's dying back in China. Then we got to go to Cuba in October of that year and I danced for the first time with people in Cuba, and now I'm taking salsa classes. And I've done more things at school. A Cuban group came to Tucson and they came out to my school and I was the only person that took all their classes, doing Afro-Cuban dance that I thought I would never be able to get through. And I got through it, and I'm 52 and I've got two grandbabies and I don't take regular class ever. The fact that I can keep up at all! I got brave today and I thought I'm going to take the sweaty class, and I was able to keep up. It's just been the greatest gift of my life, so if I can give that back to her to let her know how much it's meant to me. I'm sure my story is multiplied many, many times over.

Bridget Rawls assisted with the residency in Raleigh, N.C. While she was serving as contact person for the local all-come group and shepherding a contingent of high-schoolers, she was also researching the philosophy of community dance for her senior honors thesis at Meredith College. She had met the Dance Exchange during the summer after her freshman year.

Michelle [Pearson] taught a three-week course at Meredith on community dance where she explained the philosophy, and we actually went in the community, taught workshops, worked with several groups and did a final performance in the chapel at Meredith. That was my first real exposure to community dance and I was hooked.

We had a community group, a local dancer group and a group from an adult day-care facility, so we had elderly adults who were mentally and/or physically handicapped and our oldest woman was 105 years old. It was amazing to work with these people, 60-105. We were all college students working with them. I still look back on these pictures and just-- Some of them had strokes and lost mobility. The woman who was 105, she might have had a little bit of Alzheimer's. She would hop out of her chair and start singing little songs in German. They were all in the piece. We had wheelchairs, etc. It was wonderful. For me to be a 19-year-old and experiencing all this was really great. It opened up a whole new world of dance for me.

Karen Masaki is a program officer from the Hawaii Community Foundation who experienced the "Hallelujah" process at a Grantmakers in the Arts conference in upstate New York not long after the disaster of 9/11/01. Masaki has a long history as a dancer and choreographer, but said she was attracted to the Lerman method "because it was a really different way of working."

It's this kind of dance that I love, which has real meaning in people's lives, in felt experience. I was so inspired to see somebody working this way, loving to work with people who aren't dancers, all kinds of body shapes, all ages, all ethnicities. She is able to take these different kinds of bodies with different kinds of training and nontraining and find the real beauty in what each person has to say and the expressiveness of the human body, no matter what it looks like. She's taking dance from the confines of "You have to have a certain kind of technique, you have to look a certain way, you have to be this thin, you have to get your leg up this high in order to call yourself a dancer," and really making dance about people expressing their lives. That's what I found very exciting and inspiring and so different from all the work I've done before.

It was really very touching. The conference was at the end of October, so we'd all given some thought to: "Well, shall we cancel the conference, will people feel safe flying?" But we went ahead and held the conference anyway, and obviously September 11th was at the forefront of everybody's mind. So, Liz came in and we had a group of about six that stayed through the whole two-and-a-half days and actually ended up in the performance. She asked us, "How have you been feeling?" And everybody had various ways they'd been holding themselves together, giving themselves the kind of attention and care that they needed through this process. One woman said she was reading those obituaries they had in the N.Y. Times about the people who died, and she did this wonderful gesture about taking the time and care to read each story, and that became one of the gestures. So, we all felt that what she brought to this was something that was so immediate and we were all feeling so desperately and this allowed us to express it, talk about it and then to physicalize it.

Detroit choreographer Penny Godboldo talked about how "Hallelujah" and the Dance Exchange had integrated with her work in dance classes at Marygrove College and in the field of liturgical dance. (See full interview.) She met Lerman at a luncheon for grants recipients and felt their projects might mesh. Among the results: Dance Exchange company member Margot Greenlee taught at Godboldo's liturgical dance conference, bringing the Dance Exchange Tool Box as a resource to a mostly African-American group of liturgical choreographers who were working vigorously in their communities, but without any formal dance training. "People really loved it," said Godboldo."Not only was it good for doing choreography, but it was good for teaching others choreography."

Godboldo reported other "spin-offs" from the collaboration. A class in "Dance Politics" was taught by Godboldo at Marygrove and by a professor involved with "Hallelujah" at the University of Michigan. Their classes came together three times.

It was in true Liz Lerman style that we came together, made some plans, went away, brought it back together and did a performance in an inner-city area. Some of those U of M students had also been at that site in Detroit teaching, and they learned a lot from the young people that they were servicing. Then we had a small production where the family and friends in that community came out and we shared what we had been doing. So, that was a nice little spin-off. Liz wasn't even there when we went through the course.

Processing the Process

Once in while during this whirlwind, I was able to snag a Dance Exchange company member and ask a few questions about what was going on. I heard Celeste Miller referring to "pink-slip buddies," and I smelled a new technique, so I pulled her aside for some details. (See full interview.)"As the company began four weeks ago, we got together in that first company meeting and we made a buddy system," said Miller.

Liz decided that for her to be able to do her best possible editing work, she needed to not have to be taking care of people's individual feelings in a given moment. She just really needed to make the best possible work. Now, of course she does take care, that's who she is, but to relieve herself from the pressure of -- "Omigod if I cut X dance moment from X person, is she going to fall apart? I can't keep it in just because I'm afraid emotionally that she can't handle it. For the sake of the dance, it needs to be cut." And, Liz aside, we all knew that this was going to be an extremely high-pressure period for everybody, where we'd all have the ability to fray each other's nerves. So (laughs), I pulled out this bright pink paper and we put everybody's names on a piece of paper and the names in a basket and everybody took one, and that became your buddy. Because we're all artists, it became everybody's "pink slip" so everybody has their pink-slip buddy. What we do is, if you feel for some reason something's not going right or you were cut or you were edited or you got a comment that you feel was inappropriate, you go to your pink-slip buddy and you talk to them. And you let them know, "I'm going to you as my pink-slip buddy," so you both know how to handle the conversation. So, if somebody comes to me as their pink-slip buddy, my job is to do really good listening and then help my pink-slip buddy figure out what their action is going to be. The action could be, "I just needed to vent. I'm over it." Or it could be, "I need to talk to Liz and tell her that she needs to keep this in because it's the most brilliant piece of choreography ever."

People were also talking about their toes, said Miller.

If you trust the people you're working with and have invested them with that trust, then the problems are easy. And we can't be tiptoeing around afraid to step on someone's toes. So, we agreed to have "short toes" these two weeks. "My toes are really short" means I'm really open. "How short are your toes today?" means "How open are you to change?" As we entered this intense period of time, so much has to be made and edited at the same time. You'll hear those little code words.

Sara Lowing Scott was on hand for "Teach Your Dog To Dance," a.k.a. "Dances for Dogs and the People Who Walk Them" on Saturday morning, August 3. Scott pioneered this idea a few years ago with Alison Orr when they were Dance Exchange interns. About 20 people and dogs of every description showed up for this event in a patio at the Smith Center. With their dogs on leashes, the people were given choreographic phrases by Scott, which they practiced, then performed together to show tunes (Ethel Merman: "Wherever we go, whatever we do, we're gonna go through it together…"). The day was very hot, with about 70% humidity. There was a child's inflatable swimming pool available so dogs could jump in and cool down.

This is a very comical and jubilant event. I participated in a dog dance at the Raleigh, N.C., "Hallelujah" (see that story), and my dog Woody was delighted with the whole thing. It was more fun than art, but that's part of the Dance Exchange idea, too.

Scott, very pregnant, talked with me about the original concept. "When we did the actual performances with Alison Orr before she moved away," she said, "we had rehearsals in Malcolm X Park in Washington, D.C. Then it was very serious. We had practice and counts. Then it was possible for it to be a little more formed. This one today is definitely for the people and the dogs."

Teen Dance Spirit

While "Hallelujah/USA" formed around me, I couldn't resist dropping in on the Teen Dance Institute. Director Elizabeth Johnson was in charge of about 20 teens from various parts of the country; she had the assistance of Marvin Webb and Michelle Pearson. Her accompanying essay here talks about how the young dancers got to know each other, shared information and feelings about their differences, and finally incorporated that into the piece they created for their performance Friday night, August 1. They chose the theme of "borrowing."

On the first day of the National Teen Institute, teens were asked what they would borrow from a political leader, from a pop star, from a teacher and from Elvis Presley. They were asked to make a movement for each word of their response, creating an equivalent visual expression of the sentence in dance.

When we encountered the word "borrow" in the sentence, teens realized that the movement needed to begin and end in the same place. They said, "The thing about borrowing is you have to give it back." Each student shared the same movement vocabulary for shared words, and created their own movements for their personal responses. They taught each other their movement responses to the question, and learned each other's movements. By the end of the day, each student had phrases of shared and borrowed material. And they knew something about the people they were dancing with.

While I was watching them work one afternoon, a Chinese tour group mysteriously appeared in the studio seats. Johnson immediately incorporated them in the process, using a mode the artists sometimes use to warm up an audience before the performance. (Peter DiMuro talks about this idea in an accompanying essay.) Johnson asked them for examples of something you would borrow, but wouldn't let others borrow. This was translated, with some confusion, by their guide and they gamely complied. They offered U.S. dollars, chopsticks, eyeglasses. Johnson collected gestures from them as they tried to convey these words to her: hand to eye, other hand up (nearsighted glasses), point (guy over there), hands down ($$), chopsticks (two fingers up), cross arms (no borrow). She turned and taught the phrase to the teens, then to the tourists, and we all performed it successfully several times. Johnson cheerfully told the tourists she might borrow it for the piece, and, once they understood what that meant, they seemed astonished and delighted.

As I watched the young dancers collaborate, I managed to get a moment with Michelle Pearson, and I asked her to tell me about their day with the teens.

Yesterday, Sunday, they were very low energy, they were very quiet, they were sleepy. And instead of trying to pep them up, we did some work and they were frustrated, we were frustrated. Finally, I sat them down in a circle and said, "You guys, look around this circle and think about one week ago and what you knew about these people and what you thought about them. Now look around you." And I said, "Think about your friends at home. How many of them have had the opportunity to be in a circle like this and what you have been able to take from each other? How am I different when I go home and I look at my community again, because of what I know, because I learned somebody else's dance? There's something that has shifted in me. How am I going to re-enter my house?" And they started crying and hugging each other. And it was one of these fabulous moments. I heard them talking about it later to other people, saying, "Think about everyone at home who didn't get to come here," and I think they're starting to really see how unique this opportunity is to hear and see each other.

Call and Response: The Art and Faith Convening

On Monday night, August 5, the Dance Exchange hosted a public civic dialogue about something that had become a hallmark of "Hallelujah" over the previous two years; the relationship between contemporary art making, personal faith and organized religion

The Dance Exchange's Celeste Miller, resident artist with the company, and John Borstel, their humanities director, designed the event, offering hands-on experience, reflection and conversation. This is an example of the enrichment the Dance Exchange is capable of offering their participants. It is extremely rare for a company of artists to employ a humanities director. It is Borstel's job to think about the issues surrounding the work and to write about them or bring them into public conversation. He handed out a piece of writing (see Table of Contents) that framed a few complex questions about art and faith, based in the company's recent work. He asked about "Hallelujah's" central idea of "giving praise," and whether that is purely a religious concept. He asked for comparisons between "Hallelujah" and ritual or structured liturgical experiences. He inquired about the secularization of Biblical passages and about art as a spiritual practice or link to the divine. He asked about the difference between creating and praying, and whether active participation (moving, doing), compared to talking, makes a different kind of spiritual connection between people.

Miller took charge immediately, knowing the inclusion of organized religion might be stressful for some. First she implored everyone to breathe, then reminded us we are in charge of our own bodies. If we were uncomfortable being here, she said, then "turn discomfort into inquiry." If we felt ourselves resisting participation, she suggested we interview ourselves to find out more about why. And "If you don't want to participate, keep a pleasant countenance on your face." To get the juices flowing, Miller treated this crowd differently from no other: She made us move. First we were asked to move to a different seat in the room and introduce ourselves to somebody we didn't know. We did this several times and the temperature of the room rose a few degrees.

Liz Lerman appeared and told a few "Hallelujah" stories about the origins of the project and went over the questions Borstel had posed for this group, then asked us to introduce ourselves briefly and, if we chose, state our religious affiliation. About half the attendees opted to state the latter; by my count, there were five Presbyterians, two Jews, four Catholics, one Episcopalian, one Seventh Day Adventist, one atheist, one "Protestant," two Methodists, one Pagan, four Unitarians, two Universalists, two Buddhists and one "none."

Borstel and Miller then opened the Dance Exchange Tool Box and put us through Blind Lead, usually the first exercise they do when they gather people. We led each other around the room in pairs, one blind and one seeing. Then we talked about it. A hospice worker said she enjoyed being led after a very bad day. One person said she was nervous no one would choose to lead her. Another said she was nervous about being touched by people she didn't know. One said she had been praying for guidance lately. Another said that in her prayer life, she sits in silence a lot; she waited and a person came up behind her and touched her lightly and it "reminded me of a sense of God coming." One said the person who had led him was shy and gentle and "maybe that's the way God is, waiting shyly and quietly." Another said Blind Lead was a metaphor for blind faith: "Unless you open yourself, you can't receive."

I was marveling at the spiritual flavor of this conversation, compared to usual Dance Exchange feedback session, when John Borstel offered his observations on the different meanings that can be ascribed to the exercise, depending on who is performing it. "What business people call leadership," he said, "teachers call learning and dancers call partnership."

When we broke into small groups, we were asked to answer: What does it mean to give praise? Is it unique to religion or not? Can it be done with and without reference to God? Our discussion opened with one participant's eager opinion that we are hungry for this conversation and we aren't ever afforded the chance to have it. Among the interesting observations: When religion fails, it's because it didn't connect to passion. For an artist, failure is feeling your art is self-created and not connected to something larger. The act of praising opens you up to expand and receive; if you are not open, you can't receive God's blessings. Having an opportunity to praise with others opens a moment for sharing a clear vision.

In the larger group we were asked: Does the creative act bring us closer to the divine? Several people answered in the affirmative, noting that when they were open to a high power, they did not feel creatively blocked, and vice versa, when open they felt connected. Others said that their acts of creation felt almost disconnected from their personal selves, as if inspired or channeled from some other source. Shaman Daniel Preston talked about practical uses of dance in a Native American religious context, how certain sequences of group movement are believed to have true spiritual power, and then actual physical power. This led me to muse over the comparatively abstract nature of modern dance and how pointless it must seem to practitioners of dance as true religious ritual. I offered the opinion that modern dancers seem to be dancing in the dark in comparison.

This was a deep-thinking but sanguine gathering. They appeared to be people of a progressive nature, enormously grateful for the opportunity to make room for each other's "spirituality" and orthodoxy. If there were fundamentalists and atheists in the room, they did not hold forth. I was astounded that we didn't talk about jihads or suicide bombers or child-molesting priests. Instead we veered in a New Age direction that seemed to leave everyone, artist and faithful alike, in a comfort zone, "coming together across barriers." Meanwhile, I, an ex-Catholic with a bitter resentment toward organized religion and the evils it has wrought, struggled to keep my mouth shut and wrote the following notes in my journal:

We invented God and religion because we know we are going to die, but we don't know what happens next. We can't stand the suspense. We are afraid. So, we make up a God who makes up a religion with rules to follow. People have used our fear to make us kill each other, oppress each other, torture each other and ignore each other, all in the name of God. In our desperate search for meaning, we turn our backs on each other and cower in fear of an undeniably bloodthirsty God. Imagine what it would be like on earth if everyone who is 'dedicated to God' were instead dedicated to human beings. What if our loyalty, sacrifice, belief, trust, praise and surrender went to our loved ones, our neighbors, our acquaintances, our co-workers, our leaders, even our enemies?

As I observed after the Michigan "Hallelujah," it is apparent that the praise theme attracts religious people. They tell their stories, then Lerman fractures them all into a postmodern collage of ambiguity and paradox that shatters absolute truth. Why didn't I say these things in this, the most progressive conversation I will ever be privy to about religion? I guess, in an era when the most deeply religious people on the planet are so disgracefully at each others' throats, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to "keep a pleasant countenance" on my face.

The Art Scribe Circle

One of the things that makes the Dance Exchange unique is its attention to dialogue, commentary, writing and critical thinking about the issues that arise in and around the work they do with communities. The Dance Exchange employs a full-time humanities director, John Borstel, to pay special attention to this aspect of the work. One of the things produced under his guidance was a booklet called "Hallelujah: The Extraordinary Essence in Ordinary Life," including writing about the work by critics, but mostly by the artists themselves. It is extremely rare to find any writing at all by dancers and choreographers. (Two articles from the book, by Celeste Miller and Peter DiMuro, accompany this project. See the Table of Contents.)

A special treat for us writers who are following "Hallelujah" was Borstel's Art Scribe Circle on August 10, 2002, during "Hallelujah/USA." Seven writers convened in the Smith Center's marvelous Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland to talk about writing about this kind of work. Included were writers who have done many different kinds of work in the arts, from presenting to teaching to directing nonprofit organizations. They were: Caron Atlas (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Carol Burbank (College Park, Md.), Jan Cohen-Cruz (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Lisa Traiger (Rockville, Md.), Sara Wolf (Los Angeles, Calif.), Byron Woods (Durham, N.C.) and myself (Saxapahaw, N.C.), We were joined by John Borstel; Jane Hirshberg, producing director of the Dance Exchange; Susie Farr, executive director of the Smith Center; and Bonnie Jo Dopp, from Special Collections in the Performing Arts at the Smith Library.

Gatherings like this are few and far between for community-arts writers. Our ranks are small because there is so little funding, so few publishing opportunities and so little professional reward for our effort. We are far-flung because we are not limited to observing and writing about the cultural capitals, but are interested in and rooted in communities throughout the U.S. Having this opportunity to talk with colleagues meant a great deal to us, taught us some things, confirmed others and, I believe, strengthened us in our resolve to continue in the work in spite of obstacles.

Much of the talk was about writing about dance. I will present a few morsels from this long discussion that pertain to art writing in general or to community arts in particular: the ones I found intriguing enough to write down. Because these statements are from my notes and not verbatim, I have not identified the speakers.

Borstel posed a few provocative questions to oil the works, but we're all word people, so the works needed little oil.

Q: What was a time for you when writing or reading about art led to a personal breakthrough or made a difference or brought about a new insight?

• Every time it's a breakthrough, because it's the everyday practice of having to formulate complete sentences about my opinion and lead the reader to form an opinion.
• When I discovered it's like performing the art ó as an interpreter.
• When I started interviewing for multiple perspectives. You hear really different stories on the same incident.
• 1982, the Strand Bookstore. I discovered "Theatre of the Oppressed" by Augusto Boal.
• When I saw that art makes people available to me in a deeper way than everyday interaction.
• Meeting Peter Schumann [Bread and Puppet Theater] changed my conventional ideas about journalism. In conversations with artists about critiques with them, and in telling stories about political performance actions, I realized there was a life beyond doing, and writing about doing. There was a longtime conversation, a legend, a love, a community myth.
• I had one breakthrough when I took my dad to the Kennedy Center in Washington to see an Israeli dancer. Dad is who I write for, the consumer type of reader. He was beyond mystified by the performance, till I wrote about it. Then he said, "I know what you do now."

Q: Did you bring a question or an observation about writing about this kind of work? What would you like to get?

• More space to publish. Editorial space for art writing is shrinking, especially for dance writing.
• I want to get the feeling when I'm writing that this is one of "those stories." Like the story of Ladies Against Women confronting Phyllis Schlafly. Whatever they're saying about it 100 years from now will be bigger than the action itself.
• I feel like I'm a witness to art. I'm actually working as a dramaturge with a few companies. It helps them unfold or unwrap their ideas.
• There are some funders now funding editors to work with choreographers in Los Angeles.
• I need to be as good an artist as the ones on stage. My happiest moments are interviewing artists.
• Community art projects are a new form of citizenship in a country that strictly regulates how we relate to each other. They're creating a space for freedom and documenting it. If voting is a right, then creating art and being in the audience is, too. "Hallelujah" models and brings people together in a different kind of citizenship, different kind of relationships and different kind of audience.
• Performance space enlarges the public space.
• How can we build a field that includes writers as thinkers? These artists and their partners need thinkers who can help them explain what they do — explain it to people who see them and fund them.

Q: Let's talk some more about art participation as a form of citizenship. And what are our priorities as writers in a journalism being driven by consumerism?

• It's hard to commodify this work because it doesn't fit the model of consumption.
• The role of the writer is both critical and descriptive.
• What about the notion of civic journalism? Local newspapers define themselves as a player in the civic process, for example, around environmental issues.
• It's important for all of us to ask the who, what, when, where, why questions about all art we see.
• It's important that Liz's work is looked at as dance because people participate or not according to their relationship to dance/body/interchange/physical play. She's codifying emotion in terms of gesture, so that's dance. Her work wouldn't be possible if it wasn't dance.
• Liz's work is asking people to do something they might think they can't do. Once you get involved in something you think you can't do, you begin to ask yourself what else you can do.

Later that evening, some of us appeared in an "Art Scribe Forum," a panel discussion for interested audience members. We reflected on "Hallelujah" and answered questions. This event was meant not only to enlighten the audience about "Hallelujah" and community-based art, it also gave the audience a chance to experience the thinking and writing community we believe should exist around the arts.

The Performances

Attending the four performances that summed up "Hallelujah" was like going to High Mass in the Church of Art on the holiest day of the year. The theater was packed with true believers who want more than anything for a miracle to happen that reinforces their belief in the existence of meaning in life and our ability to manifest it in the physical body. There were times when that belief flew up out of our souls like a flock of birds.

Taken together, the two programs were so tall, broad and thick that it was surprising the stage didn't collapse under them. They carried the weight of American history and racial strife and sexual desire and national terror and the family bond and human rights and more.

Knowing the map of so many of the journeys that ended up on that stage, my memory swam with stories and my mind boggled at the panoply of choices displayed in the final product. In its ability to reach across all those miles and years and select the exact ideas and images that comprised this artwork, the Dance Exchange company has become an artist who can grasp eternity in a grain of sand.

I was a child when Disneyland opened, and one of my benchmark childhood memories is standing in a circular theater experiencing a 360-degree movie in the round that swept me across the face of America, from sea to shining sea. If it's not too grand a reference, that is what "Hallelujah/USA" felt like to me. From Maine to California it rolled, carrying with it the memories of farmers and war widows and gay-rights activists and men dancers and grandparents and African-American singers and Hmong teenagers and Japanese immigrants. It brought forth decades of images and musics and dances and poetry, woven with nuances that took my breath away. It rocked the house with a symphony of emotion, from the tenderness of fathers dancing with their daughters to express their grief over the loss of a family pet to the startling generosity of strangers reaching out to each other while the World Trade Center fell around them in a thundering shower of glass. It tossed Frisbees to real dogs, dug in the garden, danced the boogie-woogie and played 40 years worth of card games. It climbed mountains, mapped Israel and searched for Paradise. It incorporated entire artistic companies who brought along worlds of gospel music, liturgical dance, traditional ritual and jazz.

In making one new work to close the book on "Hallelujah," the artists chose an intimate approach. "In Praise of Borrowed Blessings" took as its text the journal entries of the company during the long, strange trip across the topography and life stories of America. During that nearly five-year period, Liz Lerman's father died and her daughter began and finished middle school. The company slept in 7,600 hotel beds, rented 360 cars and logged 34,950 hours of rehearsal and 34,000 Frequent Flyer miles. While the Dance Exchange was in a workshop in Detroit with a handful of older African-American women, airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and two of the company members were trapped on the tarmac at Washington's National Airport. Among the extended family of "Hallelujah," people got pregnant, were married and divorced and had heart attacks.

In this new work, dancers read their thoughts about this journey from their diaries while other dancers moved among them riffling the pages of books and bearing them on their heads. One complete story was told. It was Tucson local David Huerrera's miracle story about his annual trek with local youth to carry three crosses up Summit Peak, the mountain on Tucson's horizon. After several years of this ritual, one year it rained on both sides of the procession, but not where they were walking. After they planted their crosses, they turned back to find snow in their path. The piece closed with the entire "Hallelujah/USA" company circling the stage in a spiral holding hands. Snow descended from the sky, caught in the pages of open diaries, imaging the miracles encompassed in these thousand stories.

If you could step back far enough to see the whole thing, all five years, you might see that what bound all this together was love, and its display in the ritual of human movement. Love of every kind and color and combination. Unlike so much of contemporary art, "Hallelujah" was not afraid to love openly and deeply, because ultimately that is what the artists found in their research into the human spirit: We are in praise of love.

In Conclusion

One way to conclude this writing project about the community art of "Hallelujah" is to take a brief look at the techniques I saw the Dance Exchange use and what was reflected through them about the nine communities I observed.

• Asking of the Question ("What are you in praise of?): This made visible the fact that there are multiple viewpoints in each community. Secrets were revealed, and multiple versions of the same story were heard. New aspects of the community were identified. What's good about each place was voiced, for a change.
• The Dance Exchange Process: This created new introductions and partnerships. People spent time with people unlike them. Some voices were heard for the first time. Bodies moved, intimacy was shared.
• Dialogue and Collaboration: Participants learned these techniques by doing them. This made it clear to them what they contributed and what they got in the process.
• Aesthetics: Everything about the process included the creation of beauty and meaning, as well as new thinking about what is beautiful and why it matters.
• The Product: Performance events both included and reflected what I/we/the community looks like, who gets to dance, who gets heard and who gets seen, who is in the audience, and what friends and family saw and said about all of it.
• The Aftermath: In each community there are new and enduring partnerships and friendships. "Hallelujah's" methods can be seen spreading into other art, work, life. The Dance Exchange is returning.

I hope in these stories I have been able to provide a sense of what it was like to look at all this work with the same pair of eyes, in different places across the country. It is an odyssey I will never forget. It took me a little closer to dance, a lot closer to art that interacts with and includes community, and very close to the Dance Exchange. I hope that, at least in these stories, those hundreds of souls are dancing together still.

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

Original CAN/API publication: March 2003